The editorial board of the Post-Gazette recently published an endorsement of Donald Trump for president (Nov. 1, “The Man and the Record”). In the endorsement, the editorial board chose to explicitly overlook Mr. Trump’s conduct as president and instead focus on his economic achievements.
By doing so, the PG editorial board has tacitly endorsed Mr. Trump’s crass, ignorant and openly hateful rhetoric by choosing to prioritize their pocketbooks over the values of equality and freedom upon which this country is meant to function.
The endorsement asks whether we can “separate the man from the record,” and then attempts to do so by offering acknowledgment of Mr. Trump’s unpresidential behavior, stinging of privilege as it asks readers to ignore the ways in which Mr. Trump has degraded, insulted and acted against them for the sake of a stock market that many Americans won’t even benefit from. The endorsement states that while Mr. Trump has not done enough for struggling citizens, he has “recognized their pain.”
To this, I urge readers of the Post-Gazette to ask, whose pain has he recognized? Over the course of his administration, Mr. Trump has routinely denied, dismissed and, indeed, contributed to the pain of Black, Latino, queer, trans and femme Americans; everything from his policies to his executive orders to his Supreme Court picks have worked to harm these Americans, and, like the PG’s endorsement, have asked America to sideline their protections for the sake of his administration’s political whims.
O. A. DONIA
Uptown
