President Donald Trump is headed “for what could be an historic repudiation that would take the Republican Senate down with him,” the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal warned in a column Thursday.
The conservative newspaper’s board said Trump had “reverted to his worst form” just four months before the 2020 election, and that he had “no second-term agenda, or even a message beyond four more years of himself” with “little time to recover.”
Trump had “all but given up even talking about” the coronavirus pandemic that has now killed more than 125,000 people nationwide, the board said. His “default now is defensive self-congratulation.”
The board did claim that the president’s “record fighting the coronavirus is better than his critics claim after a bad start in late February and March.” It also took a swipe at Trump’s likely election rival, saying that presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s “only real message is that he’s not Donald Trump.”
But “millions of Americans are close to deciding that four more years are more risk than they can stand,” said the board, which in recent weeks has attacked Trump over his haphazard coronavirus task force briefings and his attempted smearing of MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough.
The editorial also suggested that Trump “lacks the self-awareness and discipline” to campaign on an agenda of resurrecting the economy following the pandemic.
“He may be so thrown off by his falling polls that he simply can’t do it,” the board concluded. “If that’s true he should understand that he is headed for a defeat that will reward all of those who schemed against him in 2016. Worse, he will have let down the 63 million Americans who sent him to the White House by losing, of all people, to ‘Sleepy Joe.’”