The Atlantic Goes There in Biden Endorsement: Trump’s ‘Countless Sins and Defects Are Rooted in Mental Instability’

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The Atlantic declared President Donald Trump mentally unhinged while announcing their endorsement for Joe Biden in the 2020 election.

The magazine’s editorial, written by Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg, begins by musing on the mechanisms constraining the president’s powers, but it also raises the question of how much damage a mentally unstable president can do through their various powers. Reflecting on The Atlantic’s endorsement of Hillary Clinton in 2016, the piece says the magazine based their decision on Trump’s “long and terrible record as a human being” at the time, yet their argument, in retrospect, was “understated.”

After presenting a long list of Trump’s negative effects on the country — especially his “titanic incompetence” with the coronavirus — the editorial asks readers “let us lay all of this aside for the moment.”

From the editorial:

Let us even lay aside the extraordinary fact that Donald Trump has been credibly accused of rape. Compelling evidence suggests that his countless sins and defects are rooted in mental instability, pathological narcissism, and profound moral and cognitive impairment.

The piece goes on to say The Atlantic has only endorsed a handful of presidential candidates in its entire history, but between Biden and Trump, the choice is “spectacularly obvious” in terms of which man “poses less of a threat to our collective existence.”

Biden is a man of experience, maturity, and obvious humanity, but had the Republican Party put forward a credible candidate for president, we would have felt no compulsion to state a preference. Donald Trump, however, is a clear and continuing danger to the United States, and it does not seem likely that our country would be able to emerge whole from four more years of his misrule. Two men are running for president. One is a terrible man; the other is a decent man. Vote for the decent man.