Editorial: Our view on the presidential candidates

Once again, we approach a presidential Election Day unable to offer our readers guidance on which of the two major party candidates is best suited to spend the next four years in the White House.

This is the third consecutive cycle in which we have struggled with the decision of whether to toss a dart at the ballot in hopes of hitting the lesser of two evils. Our conscience again will not permit us to do so.

Neither former President Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, nor Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democrat, are suitable to lead the United States during these dangerous and divisive times.

So, just like in 2020, when the choice was between Trump and now-President Joe Biden, we are withholding our endorsement in the presidential race. We faced a similar dilemma in 2016, when weighing whether to support Trump or Hillary Clinton. That year, we found an acceptable alternative in Libertarian Gary Johnson, the former New Mexico governor.

This year, there is no capable third-party option, though we had hoped the No Labels movement would produce one. Unfortunately, that promising effort fizzled. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the only candidate to meet with the editorial board, bowed out. The remaining minor party candidates are unconvincing.

The 2024 nominees from the Republican and Democratic parties are even less appealing than those presented in 2016 and 2020. Selecting one would betray the standards we set in those previous elections.

We believe it is a serious matter to attach our name to political candidates and recommend them to readers who have placed their trust in us to offer sound advice based on a set of long-established principles. We cannot support either Harris or Trump, candidates whose values and aspirations for America we do not share.

Why not Donald Trump?

The Detroit News has been a conservative newspaper since its founding in 1873. But we have never viewed Trump as a conservative. He is a populist who eschews principles in the quest for power.

We were appalled by Trump’s big-spending ways as president. Under his watch, federal debt rose by $7.8 billion. While we backed his tax cuts and regulatory reforms, which helped keep the economy afloat during the COVID pandemic, they should have been matched by spending reductions. In Trump’s first three years alone, the yearly federal deficit increased 46% before more than tripling in his final COVID-plagued year in office.

As for national security, Trump offended the vital intelligence community and military leadership with a series of blunders. He repudiated legitimate concerns about Russia’s unprecedented involvement in the 2016 campaign — separate from the Russia collusion investigation — downplaying a significant threat for fears it might delegitimize his victory. His efforts to secure the border were admirable, though his characterizations of those seeking entry to the U.S., as well as those protesting excessive force by police, were misguided.

On the world stage, Trump was often clumsy, alienating our NATO allies in his well-intentioned efforts to have them contribute meaningfully to their own defense. His erraticism did tend to keep our enemies in check. Russia, China and Iran were not nearly as bold during his presidency as they have been during the Biden-Harris administration. His Abraham Accords marked the most substantive moves toward stability in the Middle East in decades.

As president, he oversaw — until the pandemic — a period of falling unemployment across all demographic groups, admirable economic growth and a return to America of companies from overseas.

In this campaign, he is, in his own crude way, raising important alarms about the head-long rush to electrify America’s vehicle fleet, and the threat it presents to Michigan’s automobile industry.

The decision to disqualify Trump from consideration is not primarily about policy. We agree with much of his platform — with the big exception of his wrong-headed obsession with trade tariffs.

As it has been from the time he first walked onto the political stage, with Trump it’s all about character, an area in which he runs a severe deficit.

The former president debased the office with his childish, bullying behavior. His incivility, insults, name-calling and mean-spirited rhetoric set an ugly tone that has impacted our national discourse. He’s driven good people out of government and the Republican Party and many well-qualified people are less likely to serve a second Trump term.

Trump is an egomaniac, given to vindictiveness and a distorted sense of destiny. Those are dangerous qualities in a commander-in-chief.

We also worry about Trump’s age. He would reenter the White House at age 78, topping Joe Biden by five months as the oldest president to begin a term. We don’t need a replay to recognize the toll declining faculties can take on someone sitting in the world’s hottest seat.

His affinity for tyrants and despots, both past and present, is unsettling.

Ultimately, though, nothing can overcome his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and the events of Jan. 6, 2021, when Trump stood before an angry mob outside the U.S. Capitol and urged it toward insurrection to preserve for himself an office he’d lost.

In his ill-advised effort to delegitimize the 2020 election, Trump strained the national fabric acting in his own self-interest. We have no confidence that he would — to use his own phrase — put America first should he return to the Oval Office.

And now, armed with the broad presidential immunity affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court, there is legitimate concern the checks and balances that limited Trump in his first term will not contain him in a second.

These concerns make him an unacceptable choice.

Why not Kamala Harris?

We can’t say this with enough emphasis: Had Democrats chosen a candidate who was not so far left of the middle of American politics, we eagerly could have supported their nominee.

Instead, they upended their own nominating process to replace President Joe Biden with Harris by acclamation of the party’s power brokers.

That Harris is not running away with a race against one of the most broadly detested men to ever serve as president speaks to the weakness of her candidacy. Should she lose, it will be because voters, as indicated by current polls, don’t trust her to manage their top concerns of inflation, immigration and crime.

And why would they? She was, by her own description, a central player in the administration that made at least two of those problems worse.

Her pitch to voters is, “I’m not Donald Trump, and I’m not Joe Biden.” So, who is she? Her campaign is crafted to shield her from scrutiny. She has adopted a set of platitudes to avoid revealing herself.

She claims not to be the Kamala Harris of her 2020 presidential bid, when she advocated for decriminalizing illegal border crossings, ending private health insurance, reconsidering spending on police, banning fracking and other far-left positions. Nor, in her telling, is she the Kamala Harris who was ranked as the second most liberal member of the U.S. Senate, behind Bernie Sanders.

She is running against her past, presenting herself now as moderate, without offering an explanation for what led to her radical transformation. Sanders reassured progressive voters that Harris is merely saying what she must to get elected. We believe him and fear she will not just extend the ruinous Biden policies but make them worse. Harris wants to have it both ways on her record as vice president. She boasts of being the “last person in the room” when key decisions were made by the Biden team. But she also wants to walk away from the consequences of those decisions, including the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Harris shares responsibility for the highest inflation rate in 40 years and appears not to understand the cause. She proposes more spending that risks even higher prices and a larger deficit.

Her plan to give first time homebuyers a $25,000 down payment from the federal Treasury will immediately make housing more expensive. Her proposal to bring down grocery costs through price-fixing disregards that such experiments have always led to price spikes and shortages.

These are the instincts of a socialist, and we fear they will guide her agenda.

Harris also must be accountable for helping cover up the physical and mental decline of President Joe Biden over the past year. She says she met with him regularly and assured the public he was just fine. Keeping Biden in the race so long benefitted Harris, who then easily secured the nomination with little public input.

This leads to our concerns about her commitment to democratic norms. While perhaps not overt as the threat posed by Trump, we find her openness to expanding and stacking the Supreme Court and past willingness to eliminate the Senate filibuster for specific legislation troubling inclinations. So, too, is the Biden-Harris administration’s disregard for the Supreme Court’s ruling that the president cannot unilaterally dismiss student loan debt.

We can’t be certain that the Republic will be safer in her hands.

Harris has in her long career in government stood for the power of the government over the rights of the individual. Her warning to gun owners in 2019 that regulators could enter their homes to enforce safe storage laws is indicative of how she views civil liberties when they clash against progressive priorities. The vice president bears considerable responsibility for allowing more than eight million undocumented immigrants into the country, an influx that will challenge America’s security, strain its social network and distort its labor markets for decades to come.

Thus far in her campaign, Harris has not laid out an agenda that would change the current trajectory of the nation. Americans can ill afford another four years that mirror the past four.

America deserves better

While we can’t recommend either Donald Trump or Kamala Harris in this election, one of them will win on Nov. 5. Our hope is the victor will finally embrace cooperative governing in Washington, put an end to hyper-partisanship and truly be a president for all Americans.

We empathize with those voters who, like us, find sitting on the sidelines unsatisfying. We can only recommend you vote your values.

We are not the first to ask: In a country of more than 300 million people, can’t we do better than these two?

Of course we can. But it will require breaking the hold Republicans and Democrats have on the American political system. Voters must be willing to support a third-party candidate, should one arise, who offers stronger qualifications than those with an R or D behind their names. That candidate is not on our ballots.

Americans are weary of voting for candidates they know don’t measure up. This is a great country. Its citizens deserve great leaders.

We can only hope the winner of this election will be touched, to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, by the better angels of their nature.