The Atlantic just made its first presidential endorsement in 50 years

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published 5 October 2016

In just the third-ever presidential endorsement in its history, The Atlantic on Wednesday declared its support for Hillary Clinton. Tellingly, the editorial is titled "Against Donald Trump," as the editors wrote that while they "are impressed by many of the qualities of the Democratic Party's nominee for president, even as we are exasperated by others ... we are mainly concerned with the Republican Party's nominee, Donald J. Trump, who might be the most ostentatiously unqualified major-party candidate in the 227-year history of the American presidency."

Not since 1964 — when the magazine endorsed Lyndon B. Johnson over Barry Goldwater — had The Atlantic weighed in on a presidential race, and its first-ever endorsement was for Abraham Lincoln in 1860. But "Trump disqualified himself from public service long before he declared his presidential candidacy," the editors wrote:

In one of the more sordid episodes in modern American politics, Trump made himself the face of the so-called birther movement, which had as its immediate goal the demonization of the country's first African American president. Trump's larger goal, it seemed, was to stoke fear among white Americans of dark-skinned foreigners. [...] If Hillary Clinton were facing Mitt Romney, or John McCain, or George W. Bush, or, for that matter, any of the leading candidates Trump vanquished in the Republican primaries, we would not have contemplated making this endorsement. [...] But Trump is not a man of ideas. He is a demagogue, a xenophobe, a sexist, a know-nothing, and a liar. [The Atlantic]