A Reluctant Yet Deeply Considered Endorsement From Your Local Paper

In times of great unrest and division, this newspaper gave strong consideration to not endorsing a presidential candidate at all this year. Our mission is mostly about providing hyper-local coverage to our readers. It’s fair to wonder if a newspaper endorsement is even relevant in 2020.

But then we looked more closely at the candidates for president, and concluded we had an obligation to our shareholders to act. More than anyone else, we owe them some reassurance.

Because of that, the editorial board endorses President Donald J. Trump for a second term. We know that sounds bad, but it would sound way less bad if you knew just how heavily we sighed while we typed that last sentence. Well, we didn’t type it; we made a junior cops reporter come up to the top floor and ghostwrite this. But both of us were definitely sighing as we thought about how much we love representative democracy.

It’s true that President Trump speaks at length about his wish to imprison journalists. For that and other reasons, we harbor very serious doubts about if he has ever read the First Amendment in full. At best, someone has briefly explained it to him during a Fox and Friends commercial break.

But after consulting with our stocks guy, we have concluded that Trump is the only viable option. A Joe Biden administration would increase our ownership group’s tax burden, and if you think about it for a bit, that’s pretty much identical to a fascist police state.

Are we disturbed by the idea that an unrepentant and unchecked Trump could start ordering journalists to jail in his second term? We are, but then we realized that most of the judges around here are real softies, and they’d probably let our reporters out pretty quick. Worst-case scenario, they’d have to spend a night in jail, and while that’s not fun, we think our reporters could handle it. Especially Sheila, because she never forgets to bring a snack.

Our corporate lawyers would gladly defend our employees against any unjust charges, assuming local prosecutors aren’t so embarrassed by the whole commotion that they drop all charges within a few days. In the long run, a few hours in jail are nothing. It builds character.

Look, we wouldn’t want to let Trump be alone in a room with any of our staffers, especially the younger women, especially on days when they’re wearing high heels instead of running shoes. He’s a disgusting, disreputable shell of a man who should have never gotten anywhere near the White House. He is a stain on the very soul of America. The president’s relationship to the truth is about as strong as the newsroom’s relationship to advertising.

But now that he’s here, we figure he might as well stick around for another term and make our accountants happy.

But this is not just about Trump. We’re also against Biden’s plan to tax and spend his way out of a pandemic. Hundreds of thousands of Americans are dead at the hands of COVID-19. This is a tragedy that we will mourn for decades to come. We sympathize with the people looking for answers about just how this could happen in one of the richest countries in the world. Yet we cannot sympathize with anyone who concludes that the answer lies in removing the connection between full-time employment and health insurance coverage. Any socialist who believes that can go straight to hell on a Greyhound.

Note: The newspaper’s editorial board operates separately from the newsroom. It includes a wide range of diverse voices, or at least it did before the last two rounds of layoffs. It currently consists of the non-estranged children of Patterson Dennis, the founder of the media group that owns this paper. The writers speak for the community, not for themselves. Therefore, their names are unimportant.