Comment from Phil Boas, the director of the editorial page of the Arizona Republic, on “How a Conservative Paper Ended Up Endorsing Hillary Clinton.” Charles Bethea recounts:

Boas believes that many longtime Republicans who support Trump are in denial. “I hear it in their voices, the little qualifiers: ‘He’s not nearly as bad as she is.’ That kind of thing,” he said. “I know they know that he violates even their values. But they’re willing to make compromises because they so despise her.” The Republic, he added, was “not willing to make that compromise.” Clinton “treats the office with respect,” he said. “And Trump has no respect for the office that he seeks. And if the leaders of our country don’t respect our important institutions, no one is going to respect them. That’s why he scares us.”

Amy Davidson explains why Hillary’s statement is so powerful:

It wasn’t about her, or the wrongs she has undoubtedly endured. There is no question that those wrongs include sexism and slanders. And yet the simplest explanation for why many voters don’t trust Clinton is that they sense that she does not trust them. On Monday night, she looked at the camera and told them that she did.

USA Today Editorial Board finds Donald unfit for the presidency:

From the day he declared his candidacy 15 months ago through this week’s first presidential debate, Trump has demonstrated repeatedly that he lacks the temperament, knowledge, steadiness and honesty that America needs from its presidents.

Adam Gopnik makes an excellent point:

It slowly dawned on the listener that this was all of a piece with the rest of Trump’s racial attitudes: he believes that, as a rich white man, he had a right to stop and frisk the President of the United States and demand that the uppity black man show him his papers. Stop-and-frisk isn’t just a form of policing for Trump; it’s a whole way of life. The idea that he had a right to force a black man to go through what Obama rightly saw as the demeaning business of producing his birth certificate showed his fundamental contempt for any normal idea of racial equality. It was of a line with his equally bizarre notion that owning a country club that doesn’t actively discriminate against black people is not a minimal requirement of law but a positive achievement of the owner. This isn’t the case of someone misarticulating an otherwise plausible position; it was just a case of someone repeating, once again, not only a specific racist lie but also the toxic underlying set of assumptions that produced it.

David French:

When it came to foreign affairs, where the president’s power is at its peak, Trump is showing himself to be ignorant, unprepared, and impulsive. Indeed, it’s hard to think of three worse qualities in a potential commander-in-chief.

And unprepared:

A loud ignorant man is still ignorant. A blustering impulsive man is still impulsive. Last night an unprepared Trump proved that he’s not ready to be commander-in-chief. He’s most dangerous where he has the most power, and that should send a chill down every American spine.

The Arizona Republic Editorial Board:

Clinton has the temperament and experience to be president. Donald Trump does not.

On dignity:

Clinton retains her composure under pressure. She’s tough. She doesn’t back down.

Trump responds to criticism with the petulance of verbal spit wads.

When the president of the United States speaks, the world expects substance. Not a blistering tweet.

On recklessness:

Trump’s inability to control himself or be controlled by others represents a real threat to our national security. His recent efforts to stay on script are not reassuring. They are phony.

The president commands our nuclear arsenal. Trump can’t command his own rhetoric.

This is a historic endorsement for Hillary. The Arizona Republic endorses a Democrat for president for the first time in 126 years.

In the first presidential debate, Hillary Clinton kept her cool and attacked Donald Trump throughout the night. Just eleven minutes into the debate, she trapped his ass and made him revealed his weaknesses. From his taxes to his sexist to the thousands of workers he stiffed, it was such a joy watching her destroying Donald with ease and poised. She was tough but smart in calling out his lies and getting under his thin skin. She showed us her presidential integrity. In constrast, he showed us white privilege: interrupting and shouting down a woman and a Black man.

James Calder:

As the father of a three year old girl, I am extremely proud that our next President may be the first female president. However, this has very little to do with why I am voting for her. She has a lifelong record of working to help people, to make changes to a broken healthcare system, which I know well, and she is a tough leader.

The Washington Post Editorial Board:

In short, the challenge for Monday’s audience is to avoid the trap of thinking of this debate as yet another opportunity for “the real Trump” — or even a “new Trump” — to emerge, either stylistically or substantively. It’s way too late for that. The real Trump has been before the citizenry ever since he announced his candidacy in a rambling jeremiad that blamed Mexico for “sending” “rapists” to the United States as illegal immigrants. It has been said that the true test of an ordinary person’s character is how you behave when no one is watching. The corollary standard for a presidential candidate could be: how you behave repeatedly in public, before the one big night when everyone is watching. Even by that more forgiving standard, Mr. Trump has already flunked.

The Star:

At their first presidential debate, on Monday night in New York, Trump made 34 false claims to Clinton’s four false claims, continuing his pattern of unprecedented serial lying.

Vox:

Donald Trump lies. All the time.

He doesn’t just stretch the truth in the way most politicians do: selectively citing facts that make them look good, deliberately omitting ones that make them look bad, overstating or understating the probable impact of the campaign promises they make.

No, he just says things that aren’t true. And he knows it.

The New York Times:

The New York Times closely tracked Mr. Trump’s public statements from Sept. 15-21, and assembled a list of his 31 biggest whoppers, many of them uttered repeatedly. This total excludes dozens more: Untruths that appeared to be mere hyperbole or humor, or delivered purely for effect, or what could generously be called rounding errors.

Politico:

According to POLITICO’s five-day analysis, Trump averaged about one falsehood every three minutes and 15 seconds over nearly five hours of remarks.

In raw numbers, that’s 87 erroneous statements in five days.

The Washington Post:

An examination by The Washington Post of one week of Trump’s speeches, tweets and interviews shows a candidate who not only continues to rely heavily on thinly sourced or entirely unsubstantiated claims but also uses them to paint a strikingly bleak portrait of an impoverished America, overrun by illegal immigrants, criminals and terrorists — all designed to set up his theme that he is specially suited to “make America great again.”

The Los Angeles Times:

Never in modern presidential politics has a major candidate made false statements as routinely as Trump has. Over and over, independent researchers have examined what the Republican nominee says and concluded it was not the truth — but “pants on fire” (PolitiFact) or “four Pinocchios” (Washington Post Fact Checker).

The Star

For the past week, the Star has been compiling a list of Trump’s false claims. Between last Saturday and this Sunday, we counted 52 of them – not including a bunch he repeated.

Slate:

Donald Trump lies. A lot. He lies about big things, and small things, and things in between.

The New Yorker’s “Trump and the Truth”:

A series of reported essays that examine the untruths that have fuelled Donald Trump’s Presidential campaign.