The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board member used the I word

Posted on April 13, 2025

In an article by Tom Boggioni of Raw Story, he writes about an interesting editorial from the conservative Wall Street Journal called “’It’s already in the cards’: Trump impeachment urged by WSJ editorial board member.” Here are some key paragraphs from his piece.

“In a column published late Friday, a member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board claimed it would be ‘desirable’ to subject Donald Trump to a third impeachment to make up for the damage he has done to the U.S. economy with his ‘ill-founded’ trade war.

According to longtime columnist Holman W. Jenkins Jr., Trump’s on-again, off-again tariff threats almost makes it appear he wants to be impeached, with Jenkins writing, ‘A future Trump impeachment seemed all but guaranteed by last Wednesday morning. It seems only slightly less likely now. It may even be desirable to restore America’s standing with creditors and trade partners.’

As he sees it, the president’s last great achievement was being re-elected in 2024, and the damage he has been creating since then belies his promise of a ‘golden age,’ so an impeachment is ‘already ion the cards.’

‘No consensus or even significant coalition exists for trying to force into existence a new American ‘golden age’ with tariffs, which anyway is like asking a chicken to give birth to a lioness. He invented this mission out of his own confused intuition,’ he accused.

Noting that conservative historian Niall Ferguson labeled Trump’s trade policy going ‘full retard,’ he contributed, ‘I go with ‘neurotic’ for the word’s wider applicability to any leader who, lacking a clear bead on his times, fabricates a gratuitously ambitious mission to meet his misguided sense of importance.’

‘Nobody in Mr. Trump’s orbit actually shares his belief in the magical efficacy of tariffs because it makes sense only in a world that doesn’t exist, where other countries don’t retaliate,’ he pointed out before concluding, ‘The founders never anticipated today’s instantly responsive trillion-dollar financial markets. And yet these markets neatly adumbrate the founders’ scheme of checks and balances, also known as feedback. Mr. Trump, still sane enough to appreciate what’s good for Mr. Trump, listened this week to their feedback.’”

Former Treasury Secretary and Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellin added her criticism in The Hill:

“Former Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen weighed in on the Trump administration’s trade war Friday evening, blasting President Trump’s latest roll-out of import taxes on nearly all trading partners.

‘This is the worst self-inflicted policy wound I’ve ever seen in my career inflicted on our economy,’ she told CNN’s Anderson Cooper in an interview. ‘The Trump tariff plans are doing immense damage to our economy.’”

One of the concerns I have long had is Trump has been corrected about twenty times by economists before his reelection regarding how tariffs work. He often implied that China paid for the tariffs, masking that American consumers paid the tariffs after importers passed along the cost. As late as October of last year at an economics conference, he had a hard time articulating how tariffs work. To be brutally frank, the only surprise to me is how quickly the Trump tariffs have harmed our financial reputation. –Keith is at musingsofanoldfart.wordpress.com

Keith on April 13, 2025 at 10:18 pm :Note to Readers: In a Bloomberg interview on October 15, 2024 with Editor in Chief John Micklethwait, the portion on tariffs is noted in a Rolling Stone article: “Trump gets schooled on tariffs. The central pillar of Trump’s economic plan is widespread tariffs on all imported goods, with penalties appearing to increase depending on how much he dislikes the country. Economists have warned that such a policy could have devastating effects on American consumers, who would be saddled with increased costs for all imported goods. When questioned about the specifics of his plan, and if he was aware of its pitfalls, Trump seemed ignorant of basic economic principles, insisting that other countries, not American consumers, would pay for the tariffs…