WSJ Editorial Board’s Work to Undermine Donald Trump Has Persisted for a Decade

The Wall Street Journal editorial board is continuing its attempts to undermine President Donald Trump and his administration, often through thinly-veiled “advice” and “suggestions” to the president to obscure their contempt for his America First agenda.

The paper’s decade-long crusade against Trump reveals a view of geopolitics through the clouded lens of a bygone era, when the Journal possessed more influence and its globalist worldview was shared by the elites who dominated Republican Party politics.

In fighting imagined threats from foes long receded from the global stage, the paper also has advocated for the Republican Party to embrace its former smaller, more manageable coalition that disintegrated even before Trump revitalized the party.

The Journal’s longstanding editorial position in support of open borders and maximalist free trade policies has made it the vanguard of opposition to Trump’s populist economic and immigration policies that prioritize Main Street over Wall Street. And the paper’s hawkish neoconservative foreign policy stances are at odds with Trump’s noninterventionist America First beliefs.

The paper’s open hostility to Trump began less than a month after he announced his candidacy in the summer of 2015, when the Journal’s editorial board urged conservative media to condemn Trump, comparing conservative’s treatment of the headline-grabbing mogul to 20th century liberals’ embrace of communism.

“They pretend that he deserves respect because he’s giving voice to some deep disquiet or anger in the American electorate,” the paper’s Opinion Page editors opined that July.

The Journal, perhaps shortsightedly, reveled in Trump’s counterattacks on the paper, writing in November 2015 “[b]eing attacked by Donald Trump is one of journalism’s more exhilarating experiences… We haven’t had this much fun since Eliot Spitzer left office.”

The fun wouldn’t last.

The paper’s anti-Trump drumbeat continued after Trump won the primary, with the Journal’s editorial board suggesting in August 2016 that the “GOP will have no choice but to write off the nominee as hopeless” if Trump didn’t become a more conventional Republican candidate. After the October 2016 release of the Access Hollywood tape, the editorial Board wrote that they would prefer Mike Pence as president and that Trump should start asking “himself what he’ll accomplish if he stays in the race.” The paper’s editors asserted that Republicans “can’t be blamed for dropping Trump.”

The October surprise was surpassed by the Election Day surprise.

Even after their efforts to block Trump’s election failed, the deflated Journal editors continued their assault. Two days after Trump’s inauguration, the board smugly wrote “Mr. President, the election is over,” while just weeks later warning that Trump risked the American public concluding that he is a “fake President.”

During his first administration, the Journal repeatedly attacked Trump as “unpresidential,” lobbing personal attacks, belittling his standing at home and abroad, and sowing discontent inside the White House. More importantly, the paper’s editorial board worked assiduously to fight Trump’s key policy initiatives on trade, immigration, and anti-foreign intervention — all of which ran counter to the Journal’s preferred brand of globalism.

For example, in April 2017, the editorial board cautioned that Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs against China were more political than practical and would “cost more jobs than they’ll save.” It warned in August against playing hardball with China despite the Chinese Communist Party’s “rampant theft of intellectual property from U.S. firms.” And in March 2018, the paper called Trump’s decision to impose tariffs on steel and aluminum “the biggest policy blunder of his presidency.”

The Journal got all of that wrong. As Breitbart News’s Rebecca Mansour wrote in 2019:

Despite one bogus sky-is-falling Wall Street Journal headline after another, Trump stood his ground and threw down those [2017 steel and aluminum] tariffs. The “free trade” fundamentalists were wrong. Trump’s tariffs worked, and a lot of Americans were able to get back to work.

The tariffs paid dividends for American workers that lasted beyond Trump’s first term. A 2024 study on the effects of Trump’s tariffs in his first administration found that they “strengthened the U.S. economy” and “led to significant reshoring” in industries like manufacturing and steel production.

Trump’s immigration policies were also a consistent source of attacks from the Journal’s editorial board due to the paper’s longstanding stance in favor of importing cheap foreign labor at the expense of American workers.  In April 2019, for example, the Journal’s editors contended that Trump was being “self-destructive” for wanting to shut down crossings at the southern border and insisted that Mexico couldn’t be blamed for allowing migrant caravans to travel across its countryside en route to the United States.

The editorial board even ridiculed Trump’s call to investigate the perpetrators of the now-debunked Russian collusion conspiracy.

After the pandemic-plagued 2020 presidential election was called for Joe Biden, the Journal did what it could to dance on Trump’s political grave, ultimately urging Trump to resign from office on January 7, 2021, weeks before Biden’s inauguration.

In February 2021, after the Senate failed to convict Trump on an article of impeachment, the jubilant Journal editorial board wrote that Trump “may run again, but he won’t win another national election.” Weeks later, as then citizen Trump made clear he would not disappear from the political scene, the Journal’s editors wrote that the Republican Party has a “Donald Trump problem.”

The Journal’s attempts to smother Trump’s ambitions were unsuccessful. In late 2022, Biden indicated he feared Trump’s run – and so did the Wall Street Journal.

November 9, 2022, just one day after the midterm election and as Washington pivoted toward the 2024 election, the board declared “Trump Is the Republican Party’s Biggest Loser” (despite Trump not appearing on the midterm ballot) and cheered on Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ candidacy.

The date of that piece coincided with a rare press conference from Biden, in which he responded to a question about Trump’s potential candidacy by promising to stop him even if it took efforts beyond the ballot box.

“We just have to demonstrate that [Trump] will not take power, if he does run, making sure he, under legitimate efforts of our Constitution, does not become the next president again [sic],” Biden said.

As Breitbart News first reported, Biden’s pledge preceded an eruption of extraordinary legal assaults on Trump, with the pivotal date of November 18 emerging as the catalyst.

On that date, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Special Counsel Jack Smith, and the former third-highest ranking official at Biden’s Department of Justice resigned to take a position in Manhattan prosecutor Alvin Bragg’s office, and Fulton County top prosecutor Nathan Wade spent eight hours in the White House counsel’s office.

As Democrats and prosecutors escalated their assaults on Trump after he declared his candidacy to return to the White House, so did the Wall Street Journal editorial board.

The day before Trump officially announced his 2024 candidacy in November 2022, the editorial board wrote that Trump “remains more unpopular than Mr. Biden” and is the candidate Democrats “know they can beat.” The paper’s editors wrote weeks later in December that if Republicans picked Trump as their nominee, he would “terminate” the GOP.

In June 2023, as Trump gained in the polls, the Journal’s editorial board responded to Jack Smith’s indictment of Trump by taking another opportunity to warn Republicans against nominating him.

Like Jack Smith, the Journal failed.

But the paper continued its onslaught. Always eager to side with the intelligence/military industrial complex, the editorial board blasted Trump in April 2024 for his role in stopping the reauthorization of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that did not include adequate protections against the federal government spying on Americans without a warrant.

After failing to blunt Trump’s polling momentum against Biden, the Journal’s editorial board rejoiced in July 2024 when Vice President Kamala Harris unceremoniously replaced Biden atop the Democratic ticket.

In August, after a modest sugar-high polling bump for the new Democrat candidate, the Journal’s editors proclaimed that Trump might “blow another election” against Harris. And in the weeks that followed, the Journal’s editors continuing their increasingly transparent attacks against him – even comparing Trump to socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT).

In October, after Harris’s failure to sustain momentum, the nervous board asked “How Risky Is a Trump Second Term?” And just days before the election, it desperately professed that Trump has a “soft spot” for “dictators.”

The Journal’s anxiety proved justified.

After Trump’s decisive and historic election, the dejected editorial board repeatedly blasted Trump’s nominees for high-level administration posts, even making the accusation Trump “sold out” the blue collar workers the Journal historically has rarely defended.

It did not let up after Inauguration Day, as the editorial board continued to rebuke Trump on his popular actions on trade and the economy, immigration, and national security. The paper has attacked his use of strategic tariffs repeatedly (even taking to not-so-creatively calling his use of strategic tariffs the “Dumbest Trade War in History”), tried to drive a wedge between Trump and senior administration officials such as Vice President JD Vance, and lambasted his efforts to bring peace to Ukraine.

The paper’s attacks on Trump’s Ukraine policy mirror its prior diatribes against Trump for seeking to dial back overseas adventurism that is lucrative for defense contractors trading on Wall Street despite a poor record of geopolitical success or return on taxpayer investment in treasure and blood.

Earlier in March, the paper denigrated “Trump’s Old World Order,” characterizing his realpolitik assessment of what the U.S. can reasonably accomplish through foreign intervention and pursuit of diplomatic means other than war as “moving toward that [strategy] of Tucker Carlson and JD Vance, who view America as in decline and no longer able to lead or defend the West.”

The paper is so reflexively against Trump that its editorial board called it “troubling” that Trump deported Venezuelan and MS-13 gang members. And after the revocation of terrorist sympathizer Mahmoud Khalil’s green card, the paper benignly referred to his anti-Israel protests sympathizing with terrorists as “unpopular speech.”

Over the decade, the paper has ridiculed Trump’s personality, politics, policies, and even his character, often betraying an aversion to the class of voters he represents – most who do not read the Journal.

Australian-born Rupert Murdoch purchased the Journal’s parent company in 2007 after becoming a naturalized American citizen in 1985 to satisfy a legal requirement for owning U.S. television stations. He previously built a media empire in Great Britain beginning in the 1960s.

Trump has often punched back at Murdoch-owned enterprises, which include Fox News. On March 13, Trump hammered the Journal for “having no idea what they are doing or saying.”

“They are owned by the polluted thinking of the European Union, which was formed for the primary purpose of ‘screwing’ the United States of America,” Trump wrote.

Just days later, it was revealed that the Journal hosted staff members for prominent House Democrats in February – paid for by a prominent Democrat-aligned organization – to offer strategic communications advice.

Bradley Jaye is Deputy Political Editor for Breitbart News. Follow him on X/Twitter and Instagram @BradleyAJaye.