The Wall Street Journal is supposed to be an ally of American greatness. It's supposed to be our version of the New York Times, a stuffy but prestigious newspaper that finds room for the stories and issues we care about.
If only that were true.
In reality, the Wall Street Journal rarely misses an opportunity to take a swing at the Trump administration. Not only are these attacks unhelpful—they often completely, and perhaps deliberately, miss the point.
The latest example is an article about behind-the-scenes maneuverings inside Trump's Department of Justice. It focuses on a Trump-approved merger that would allow American companies to compete worldwide with China's Huawei telecom leviathan.
Huawei is probably the most dangerous company on earth. It is building the Chinese Communist Party's intelligence and military communications structures against us in almost every corner of the world.
Huawei wires the CCP's global surveillance empire. Trump fought Huawei during his first term.
No American company could compete with Huawei worldwide until last year, when Trump greenlit the merger between Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) and Juniper Networks. No American company had been able to compete with it before the merger.
Defeating the ChiComs' global espionage networks is lost on the Journal, which makes the merger sound like a pay-for-play scheme. The article barely mentions the national security angle.
The problem with the Journal story is that it isn't skeptical journalism; it's a credulous airing of grievances by former Trump officials who quit or were pushed out after losing policy battles.
Unfortunately, such anti-Trump bias is all too typical of the Wall Street Journal, especially when a lot of its China reporting has been good.
This new China spin seems like a shot at Trump. Only days before the anti-anti-Huawei article ran, the paper's editor-at-large declared on the Iran war, "Americans in wartime are in the unprecedented position of having to suspect that the enemy's version of events is more likely to be true than our own," adding, "We have become Baghdad Bob."
Baghdad Bob was the infamous Iraqi minister who declared in 2003 that American forces "are going to surrender or be burned in their tanks" one day before they occupied Baghdad. That's how the Wall Street Journal editor describes the Trump administration today.
For years, the Journal has stressed that its (liberal-left) news section is independent of its right-leaning editorial page. A study by researchers at UCLA, all the way back in 2006, found that while the Wall Street Journal's opinion page leans right, its news section tilts left—even further left than the New York Times.
The Journal was the single most liberal news source in the UCLA study, also beating out the CBS Evening News and the Los Angeles Times.
That bias is still present today—and the Journal's readership has responded accordingly. According to a Pew Research Center study, "The average person who regularly gets news from The Wall Street Journal sits just to the left of the average American."
Trump, in particular, has long driven the Journal batty, and if recent hires are any clue, it's only going to get worse.
In 2024, the Journal hired Damian Paletta, a former Washington Post mainstay, to head its Washington bureau. Paletta, in 2021, coauthored a book that trashed Trump for supposedly mismanaging the COVID-19 pandemic. He let Xi Jinping off the hook and never applied comparable scrutiny to the Chinese government's role in the origins of the pandemic.
Trump himself seems to have figured out what the Journal is up to. The president has called it a "rotten newspaper," sued it for defamation, and barred it from his press pool on a trip to Scotland.
Yet the Journal still enjoys some clout among D.C. conservatives and MAGA supporters. Walk into a Republican congressional office, and you're likely to find an edition sitting on an end table. Its editorial board even hosts a show on Fox News (perhaps because Rupert Murdoch owns both outlets).
It's time conservatives woke up to what's really happening at a once-respected newspaper. The Journal might run the occasional interesting op-ed, but they represent the global business class, the New York elites, and the Chinese Communist Party, not the American right.
