This is too funny. The 45th president of the United States wrote a letter to the Wall Street Journal rebutting one of their editorials. Had this been any other former president doing so, I feel comfortable in saying that the piece would have been published as an editorial itself and used the former president’s byline. Respect is respect. And clearly the folks at the Wall Street Journal have none for one Donald J. Trump.
They treated his rebuttal to a recent piece by the Editorial Board the way they would treat a letter from you or me. They published it in the Letters To The Editor section. Man, if Trump is looking for any indication that he is a has been, this should do it. Wall Street Journal:
Even after being proven spectacularly and totally wrong in all their past predictions regarding my historically successful trade policies, the die-hard globalists at the editorial board still have not learned their lesson.
The Journal’s Aug. 24 editorial “Trump Courts a Global Trade War” repeats debunked talking points from corporate-funded studies about our tariffs’ alleged impact on American consumers. Price increases for consumers were virtually nonexistent and there was effectively no inflation when I was president. The trade deficit with China was down year-over-year for five straight quarters before Covid hit in 2020.
Under Joe Biden, our trade deficits, also known as losses, have hit record highs. Since 2000 the U.S. has racked up $17 trillion in cumulative trade deficits with the world. Only a fool or a fanatic would dismiss these facts as irrelevant.
These gigantic sums of exported wealth are being used to build up our enemies’ military strength and transfer permanent ownership of American companies, intellectual property, real estate, and other assets to foreign nations. Foreigners now own $16.75 trillion more of our economy than we own of theirs. Our country is being plundered.
The best way to stop this hemorrhaging of America’s lifeblood is a simple but powerful tariff on most foreign products, like the kind that was the primary source of government revenue through most of American history, and which built this country into the manufacturing powerhouse of the world.
As I demonstrated repeatedly, the tariff is also an important tool of U.S. national security and diplomacy. I am proud to be the only candidate for president who believes in true economic nationalism.
Donald J. Trump
Bedminster, N.J.
And then the Journal puts this at the end.
Mr. Trump was the 45th President of the United States.
Appeared in the August 31, 2023, print edition as ‘Trump Says His Tariff Policies Were a Success’.
So what say you, who wrote Trump’s missive? Because it’s for damn sure he didn’t.
- Stephen Miller?
- Jason Miller?
- Steve Bannon?
- Dan Scavino?
- Rudy Giuliani?
The Journal pointed out in its editorial that American consumers paid “a total of $80 billion during Mr. Trump’s term, according to a Tax Foundation analysis. That’s a lot for moo moos and flip flops. They go on to say, “This cost the U.S. 166,000 full-time-equivalent jobs, the Tax Foundation says, and the Trump trade tax wiped out roughly 12% of the economic benefit of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.” That translates as, the Trump giveth and the Trump taketh away because he is stupideth. You don’t give big corporations a massive tax break and then start neutralizing it. But then Trump was never good at knowing how the dots connect and how things actually work.
Then the Journal puts the knife in and twists it.
The last U.S. President to entertain a trade idea this radical was Herbert Hoover in 1930 with the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act. That sweeping border tax triggered global retaliation that shrank world trade and contributed to what became the Great Depression. The Republican Party’s reputation for economic management didn’t recover for 50 years.
Trump’s batting 1,000 these days. Yesterday he was compared to Andrew Jackson, who was the most hated U.S. president until Trump, and now the Wall Street Journal is comparing him to Herbert Hoover.
Here’s another dig.
By the way, Mr. Trump for years has cited the McKinley tariffs but he appears never to have read what happened after those 1890 charges came into effect. Voters rebelled at the higher prices they were forced to pay, and Republicans were wiped out by free-trading Democrats in the 1890 midterm. Democrats under President Grover Cleveland in 1894 partially reversed the tariffs to dig the U.S. out of a recession.
He’s never read anything and the Journal knows that. Another day, another Trump ally turned adversary — not that this is the first time that the Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal has gone toe to toe with Trump. I feel safe in predicting it won’t be the last time, either.
Trump “gaveth to the rich” and “tooketh from everyone else” with his tariffs. Being as his Penn/Wharton professor said “the dumbest goddam student I ever had” Trump has never understood that the countries on whom tariffs are imposed don’t pay a single dime to the U.S. Treasury for them. Instead, corporations and businesses simply pass along the price to consumers by increasing costs. It’s really simple. But still too much for Trump and MAGAs to understand!
“…The Republican Party’s reputation for economic management didn’t recover for 50 years.”
1930 + 50 = 1980. Hmm, Regan?!? Nope, they haven’t changed at all, ever. There is not a single rational, helpful financial concept that they are not against. How’s Trickle Down workin’ for ya, Average Joe? Sheez…
They are, to put it bluntly, stupid and inept when it comes to trade and finance. I bet they’d have trouble explaining compound interest to a 12th grader.
And, of course, while the GOP managed to get three presidents during that time (not counting Hoover, of course, as he was already in office in 1930): Eisenhower in 1952; Nixon in 1968; Ford in 1974 (and he wasn’t elected to the job). But, during all that time, except for 1947 and 1948, Democrats were in full control of the House and Senate.
So, where this “reputation for economic management” came from absolutely eludes me.
Trickle down economics better known as The Piss Down Our Backs and Tell Us it’s Raining economics.
I wish, no I hope, we the people can visit the harm caused to us upon those who not only instituted that policy but also upon those oligarchs and craporations that profited from it.
Too bad they printed it at all. Haven’t we all had enough of the whining and sniveling, the repetitious and false accusations, the endless excuses? I know I have. I really wish the news outlets would quit running his ‘interviews’, speeches, etc. It’s all free advertising for him, and it just spreads his BS, even when they are trying to point out the falsehoods. Just don’t play the tapes!
My money is on one of the Millets,most likely Stevie, having written this.
P.S. It is “mumu” if you mean the baggy dresses missionaries inflicted on native Hawaiians, but a million could also.be a cow! Works either way.
Did anyone mention to him he was president from 2016 to 2020 which puts him in the tariff thing.