We might live in a world defined by images, but for its Sunday editorial about what a second term might look like under former President Donald Trump, the New York Times editorial board showed how powerful simple text can be.
“Donald Trump says he will prosecute his enemies, order mass deportations, use soldiers against citizens, abandon allies, play politics with disasters,” the Times Sunday Opinion page read in big letters. “Believe him.”
The stark all-caps message was set in the paper’s custom font, NYT Cheltenham Condensed Display. “Donald Trump says he will” and “Believe him” are in black, and the list of things Trump says he’ll do if he returns to office are in grey, giving the wall of stacked text an easy visual hierarchy.
The wall of text lets Trump’s message speak for itself: there are no commas, which makes it more overwhelming to read. The only punctuation is a period at the end of “Believe him,” underscoring the editorial’s argument.
Times Opinion design director Frank Augugliaro tells Fast Company they chose to use type instead of an illustration or photography because they “wanted to portray this headline construct in the most direct and impactful way possible.”
“We often look for illustration and photography to convey a powerful mood, feeling, or idea but here we were more interested in immediacy,” he says. The lack of commas was more aesthetically pleasing and it emphasized immediacy, he says, adding, “we did not want the reader to hesitate.”
The single page served as an impactful introduction to a longer editorial in which the Times‘s editorial board made its case. “Donald Trump has described at length the dangerous and disturbing actions he says he will take if he wins the presidency,” the editorial reads. “His rallies offer a steady stream of such promises and threats—things like prosecuting political opponents and using the military against U.S. citizens. These statements are so outrageous and outlandish, so openly in conflict with the norms and values of American democracy that many find them hard to regard as anything but empty bluster. We have two words for American voters: Believe him. The record shows that Mr. Trump often pursues his stated goals, regardless of how plainly they lack legal or moral grounding.”
The Times editorial was published following a decision by the Washington Post to not publish its own editorial board’s endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris. It’s the Post‘s first time skipping endorsing a presidential candidate since 1988, and the decision was reportedly made by Post owner Jeff Bezos. It’s led to at least two staff members quitting and calls to cancel subscriptions. Former Post executive editor Marty Baron, who retired in 2021, called the decision “cowardice.”
As the Times notes in its own editorial, endorsements are written by publisher’s opinion section, separate from the newsroom, but some believe news outlets should get out of the endorsement game entirely, and many have. The situation at the Post is a matter of timing, Baron told CNN, and would be different had the paper made a decision to not make an endorsement years ago. But to “declare a moment of high principle only 11 days before the election is highly suspect,” Baron said.
Print newspaper designers don’t have the glossy paper or longer lead times that magazine designers have in laying out their pages, but in recent years, major newspapers have found creative ways to visually convey stories (like the Times listing the names of the nearly 100,000 Americans who at that time had died from COVID-19 in 2020, and a two-page follow-up that showed dots on a map to mark 1 million deaths from COVID-19 two years later. To draw attention earlier this year to Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal reporter who was held in Russia until his release in August, the Journal left a blank space on its A1 on the anniversary of his detainment. “His story should be here,” the headline read.
The simple text of the Times‘s editorial page speaks clearly at a time when the editorial board at another leading national newspaper cannot, and it sums up the editorial board’s 2,808 word-editorial in just 23 words. Here’s what Trump says he’ll do: Believe him.
Update: this story has been updated with comment from the New York Times.