Sentinel newspaper spoils Trump’s Orlando party

Orlando Sentinel, the leading newspaper in Orlando, Florida, where Donald Trump will Tuesday night kick-off of his 2020 campaign, has virtually soured the mood of the party, by denouncing Trump’s bid.

“Some readers will wonder how we could possibly eliminate a candidate so far before an election, and before knowing the identity of his opponent,” the paper said in a scathing editorial on Tuesday.

“Because there’s no point pretending we would ever recommend that readers vote for Trump.”

According to Yahoo News, The Sentinel has mostly endorsed Republicans since 1960, but in recent years it has been more independent, backing Democrats in 2004 (John Kerry over George W. Bush), 2008 (Barack Obama over John McCain) and 2016 (Hillary Clinton over Trump). It endorsed Republican Mitt Romney over Obama in 2012.

But Trump’s erratic behaviour and petulant, dishonest statements in office pushed the Sentinel to its non-endorsement.

“After 2 1/2 years we’ve seen enough,” the editorial board said. “Enough of the chaos, the division, the schoolyard insults, the self-aggrandizement, the corruption, and especially the lies.”

10,000 lies of Trump

The Sentinel pointed to the Washington Post’s “Fact Checker,” a database that has documented more than 10,000 false or misleading claims made by Trump since he took office.

“There was a time when even a single lie — a phoney college degree, a bogus work history — would doom a politician’s career,” the Sentinel said. “Not so for Trump, who claimed in 2017 that he lost the popular vote because millions of people voted illegally (they didn’t). In 2018 he said North Korea was no longer a nuclear threat (it is). And in 2019 he said windmills cause cancer (they don’t). Just last week he claimed the media fabricated unfavourable results from his campaign’s internal polling (it didn’t).”

The editorial was published to coincide with Trump’s Tuesday night rally at Orlando’s Amway Center.

On Monday night, hundreds of people began lining up outside the arena, which has a capacity of about 20,000.