The Washington Post’s editor-at-large Robert Kagan has resigned in protest after the newspaper, owned by Amazon magnate Jeff Bezos, decided to forego a presidential endorsement for the first time since 1988.
Kagan is the husband of Victoria Nuland, the former senior State Department official who was directly involved in the 2014 US-backed coup in Ukraine. A self-described neoconservative, Kagan went from being a foreign policy adviser to Republican presidential candidate John McCain in 2008 to joining the Democrats in 2016 and endorsing Hillary Clinton.
On Friday, he confirmed to NPR and Fox News that he'd quit the Post because the paper refused to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democrats’ presidential nominee, in her race against Republican candidate and former president Donald Trump.
According to NPR, the text of the Harris endorsement had been drafted earlier this month, but the paper’s management scrapped it after a review by Bezos, who has owned the Post since 2013. In its response, the editorial board expressed that it was “shocked” and was overwhelmingly negative, the public broadcaster claimed.
While Kagan’s has been the only resignation so far, WaPo came under a torrent of criticism for Bezos’ decision. Susan Rice, a former senior adviser to President Barack Obama, denounced the move as “the most hypocritical, chicken sh*t move from a publication that is supposed to hold people in power to account.”
“This is cowardice, a moment of darkness that will leave democracy as a casualty,” Marty Baron, the Post’s executive editor during the Trump presidency, told NPR in a statement, calling the non-endorsement of Harris “a disturbing chapter of spinelessness at an institution famed for courage.”
Under Baron, the Post won several Pulitzer prizes for stories about the ‘Russiagate’ conspiracy theory and blaming Trump for the 2021 election-related riot at the US Capitol.
Kagan has argued that Trump would be a dangerous dictator and has advised the current President Joe Biden to respect, love and learn from ‘the Blob’ of the Washington establishment. He is also known for co-authoring the 1996 manifesto ‘Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy’, advocating for the US to become a “benevolent global hegemony.” His co-author, fellow neoconservative Bill Kristol, also joined the Democrats in 2016 and became an outspoken Trump critic.
The Washington Post’s move comes just days after the Los Angeles Times likewise announced it would not endorse Harris, after 16 years of backing Democrats. The head of editorials, Mariel Garza, resigned in protest of the decision she said made the paper “look craven and hypocritical, maybe even a bit sexist and racist,” having spent eight years “railing against” Trump.