Ballsy WSJ

 No shit.

WTF, WSJ

Dearborn [Michigan] Mayor Abdullah Hammoud on Friday tweeted that city police increased security at places of worship and major infrastructure points as a “direct result” of a Wall Street Journal opinion piece titled, “Welcome to Dearborn, America’s Jihad Capital.”

[...]

Steven Stalinsky, executive director of the Middle East Media Research Institute, who authored the opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal, said in an interview with The Associated Press that he wanted to draw attention to protests in Michigan and elsewhere across the U.S. in which people have expressed support for Hamas since the start of the war with Israel.

  Politico

Well, it IS a Murdoch publication.

...and hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Oh no! The Wall Street Journal

The Wall Street Journal editorial board this week put the blame for Republican losses in the midterms at the feet of former President Trump, calling him the GOP’s “biggest loser.”

  The Hill

That had to smart.

The board said in an editorial published Wednesday that Trump-style Republican candidates lost in races that were “clearly” winnable, but the defeats might be what the Republican Party needs to see before the 2024 presidential election.

“What will Democrats do when Donald Trump isn’t around to lose elections? We have to wonder because on Tuesday Democrats succeeded again in making the former President a central campaign issue, and Mr. Trump helped them do it,” the board said.

[...]

The board also criticized Trump for attacking other Republicans at a rally ahead of the midterms in an editorial published this past weekend.

The board pointed to several Senate races where Trump-backed candidates underperformed.

Frankly, I think people are putting too much weight on Trump's part in the midterms. His influence in the primaries may well have given the GOP horrible candidates, but at this juncture in our country's hard division, I think the majority of the emphasis can be laid onto the GOP's increasingly obvious intrusion into people's personal lives.

“Since his unlikely victory in 2016 against the widely disliked Hillary Clinton, Mr. Trump has a perfect record of electoral defeat,” the board said.

It said Republicans faced heavy losses in the 2018 midterms, then Trump lost reelection in 2020, then sabotaged two key Senate runoffs in Georgia in 2021 and has botched the 2022 midterms. It said he had successes as president, but he has sent the party into one “political fiasco” after another.

And they're right about this at least: Trump is a big loser.

Correcting the record

Trump's Wall Street Journal interview

Unfortunately, I can't read the transcript because I don't have a WSJ subscription, but...

“I did something good. I made it famous. I made Juneteenth very famous. It’s actually an important event, it’s an important time,” he told the Journal. “But nobody had heard of it. Very few people have heard of it. Actually, a young African American Secret Service agent knew what it was. I had political people who had no idea.”

  WaPo

I don't have command of the words to express how stunningly ignorant and arrogant that is.  Besides, the people who scheduled it knew.

(And when he says nobody ever heard of something, we know from experience that HE never heard of it.)

When he asked an aide during Wednesday’s Oval Office interview if she had [heard of Juneteenth], he was surprised to learn his administration had released statements commemorating the holiday every year he’s been in office.

“Oh really? We put out a statement? The Trump White House put out a statement?” he asked, according to the paper, before declaring that “good.”

  The Wrap

Here are some of the highlights from the president’s latest interview.

1.) Trump says China may have deliberately allowed the novel coronavirus to spread to the United States in retaliation for his tariffs.

[...]

“They’re saying, man, we’re in a mess,” Trump said of the Chinese government. “The United States is killing us. Don’t forget, my economy during the last year and a half was blowing them away. And the reason is the tariffs.”

The president admitted that he had no evidence to back up his claim and said it was based only on an “internal sense.”

  Raw Story

The man has no sense, internal or otherwise.

2.) Trump says he hired John Bolton to make foreign leaders fearful that he’d go to war with them unless they gave him what he wanted.

The president spent a good deal of time trashing the man whom he’d appointed as his national security adviser, and divulged his true rationale for bringing him into his administration in the first place.

“The only thing I liked about Bolton was that everybody thought he was crazy,” Trump explained.

[...]

3.) Trump says that he actually was threatening to have looters shot in his now-infamous tweet.

Trump earlier this month issued a warning to anti-police brutality protesters against rioting and looting during demonstrations by tweeting, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.”

Even though Trump then denied that he’d meant it as a direct threat to looters, he has now admitted to WSJ that he did mean it at least partially as a threat.

“The president said the tweet could be read as either a threat or a fact,” WSJ reports. “Asked how he intended it, Mr. Trump said ‘a combination of both.'”

4.) Trump calls COVID-19 testing “overrated” then brags about how many tests the United States has done.

“I personally think testing is overrated, even though I created the greatest testing machine in history,” Trump said of his administration’s response to the pandemic.

[...]

5.) Trump brags that he made more people aware of Juneteenth by holding a rally on that date in a city known as the site of the worst anti-black pogrom in American history.

[...]

6.) Trump suggests some people are wearing face masks to damage him politically.

According to WSJ, the president “allowed for the possibility that some Americans wore facial coverings not as a preventative measure but as a way to signal disapproval of him.”

Yes, EVERYTHING is about HIM.

UPDATE:

UPDATE:

Of course, it's not likely he even knew about that statement.  Some staffer put it out.

UPDATE:

And there it is...

Remember this early morning Twitter Screed?

Well, the Wall Street Journal did indeed have audio...

The Journal stands by what it reported. The Journal and White House agreed before the interview that audiotape taken by White House officials and reporters would be used for transcription purposes only. After the White House challenged the Journal’s transcription and accuracy of the quote in a story, The Journal decided to release the relevant portion of the audio. The White House then released its audio version of the contested segment.

[...]

In a message posted to Twitter earlier on Saturday evening, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said that “Fake News is at it again!” and said the Journal was “falsely quoting” the president. “President Trump said, I’D probably have a very good relationship with Kim Jong Un of North Korea. I’D — I’D — I’D — NOT I!” the message said.

[...]

The White House declined to comment on the Journal’s release of the audiotape.

  Wall Street Journal

The Journal published their audio here. The article seems to be saying that the White House also published audio, but I'm not finding that.

He was obviously counting on the Journal to not publish the audio because of the agreement, in order for him to tweet his own lies about it.  And the Journal just gave a big fuck you to the asshole in chief and his asshole sidekick. Kudos.

UPDATE:

They're crazier than I give them credit for.  Here's Sarah's post:



Is she out of her evil mind??   It does nothing of the sort.  Who are you going to believe?  Her or your lying ears?

What the fuck is wrong with these people?

The WSJ is vying for State propaganda honors

In a short period of time, five staffers have departed The Wall Street Journal editorial page.

[...]

Sam Tanenhaus, deep into his excellent story on the dwindling band of anti-Trump conservative intellectuals, reports more specifically on the circumstances surrounding their departure. As Trump’s chances of winning the nomination grew, the paper buried an editorial highlighting his underworld connections.

[James] Freeman wrote a strong attack on Trump’s Mob dealings, and had a second ready to go. But as Trump got closer to clinching the nomination, Paul Gigot kept delaying publication, saying “it needed work.” Once Trump became the likely Republican nominee, Freeman executed a neat volte-face. “The facts suggest that Mrs. Clinton is more likely to abuse liberties than Mr. Trump,” he wrote. “America managed to survive Mr. Clinton’s two terms, so it can stand the far less vulgar Mr. Trump.”

[...]

On the subject of the president’s authoritarianism and contempt for governing norms, the Journal now runs interference with the same gusto as Fox News.

  NY Magazine

On the other hand, where were the other mainstream news outlets on this story?  They can share the blame.  And on the third hand, would it have made any difference?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:

Is the Fox Turning?

Rupert Murdoch speaks regularly by phone with President Trump. But Murdoch also makes his views known to Trump through his newspapers and television networks. Lately the messages in those outlets have not been altogether positive for the president.

The conservative media mogul's papers have run a series of critical editorials and stories, spurring speculation among observers that Murdoch is trying to get through to the president.

  CNN

What's Rupert's beef with Trump? Not building that wall fast enough? Not bombing enough shit out of ISIS?

Murdoch's most prestigious outlet, the Wall Street Journal, ran an eye-popping editorial in its conservative-leaning opinion pages on Tuesday.

Titled "The Trumps and the Truth," the editorial scolded the president's family for withholding information about Russia-related meetings and discussions.

[...]

It was the latest in a series of eyebrow-raising editorials. Last week Murdoch's New York tabloid, the New York Post, labeled Donald Trump Jr. an "idiot" and "criminally stupid."

Ouch!

President Trump grew up reading the Post and still has it delivered at the White House, so the editorial may have caught his eye.

I would have expected a tweet calling the Post "Fake News" if it had. The staff probably told him the dog ate it.

It came on the heels of another blunt assessment by the Post's editorial board last month.

A three-word editorial about Trump's Twitter habits at the end of June said, simply, "Stop. Just stop."

Ate that edition, too.

Murdoch's Fox News Channel is a reliable source of pro-Trump boosterism from morning until night. But some critical voices have gained attention on Fox, too, including Charles Krauthammer, who recently said "bungled collusion is still collusion."

Krauthammer, too? Damn.

I can't get to the Wall Street Journal article without a subscription, but this isn't the first time the editors have criticized Trump.  Here's the NYT on a WSJ op-ed dated March 21, titled "A President's Credibility."

The editorial was an extraordinarily harsh rebuke of President Trump, calling him “his own worst political enemy” and asserting that he was damaging his presidency “with his seemingly endless stream of exaggerations, evidence-free accusations, implausible denials and other falsehoods.”

[...]

“Two months into his Presidency, Gallup has Mr. Trump’s approval rating at 39 percent. No doubt Mr. Trump considers that fake news, but if he doesn’t show more respect for the truth, most Americans may conclude he’s a fake President.”

[...]

In particular, the editorial board pointed to Mr. Trump’s unsubstantiated claims that former President Barack Obama had tapped his phones. “The President clings to his assertion like a drunk to an empty gin bottle,” the editorial said.

  NYT

Double damn!

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.