The formerly fawning Wall Street Journal scorched ex-President Donald Trump in a flaming editorial Friday for his “dereliction of duty” by failing to take expedient action to quell the violence that threatened the U.S. government early last year.
The House Jan. 6 committee clearly demonstrated in a hearing Thursday the “facts surrounding Mr. Trump’s recklessness” after the 2020 presidential election, stated the newspaper’s editorial board. An angry Trump continued to spur on and rile up his supporters with furious, but spurious, complaints about a rigged election, leading a crowd to riot at the U.S. Capitol in January 2021.
He did this even though the “Justice Department and Mr. Trump’s own campaign repeatedly told him that his fraud claims were without basis. Whether it was willful blindness or an intentional strategy, he kept repeating them,” the Journal noted.
Trump publicly insisted that he had won the election, even though he told at least one witness that he had “lost to this effing guy,” referring to Democrat Joe Biden.
Yet Trump nevertheless continued to pressure then-Vice President Mike Pence to toss out the Electoral College count, “while calling for a Jan. 6 rally that he tweeted ‘will be wild!’” the editorial recounted.
As the violence at the Capitol unfurled on a television screen in the White House and police officers were savagely beaten by his supporters, Trump took no action for hours.
Though the House committee voted unanimously Thursday to subpoena Trump to testify, he’s unlikely to cooperate, the Journal noted. “But the evidence of his bad behavior is now so convincing that political accountability hardly requires it,” the newspaper declared.
Despite the blast at Trump, all is hardly forgiven when it comes to right-wing publisher Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal and its former staunch support of the man it now criticizes. Early this month, MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace slammed the newspaper for its longtime defense of Trump following another jab at him.
The Journal was “seven years too late to the parade,” Wallace complained at the time. The paper did “more laundering and legitimizing of Donald Trump’s presidency than perhaps any other outlet,” added Wallace, who was the White House communications director for former President George W. Bush.
“They’re as culpable as any news organization in this country for his presidency and his ongoing viability as a political figure,” she said.