WSJ Backhands Trump By Denying Him A Byline, Puts His Drivel In Letters Section

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.

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.

1. Stephen Miller?
2. Jason Miller?
3. Steve Bannon?
4. Dan Scavino?
5. 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.