Republicans Against Trump: Exponential Growth

WSJ as common ground for dialogue?

Republicans Against Trump on X, formerly Twitter, has exploded from 30,000 a week ago to nearly 803,000.

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For friends I tend to disagree with politically, I like to first see if we can agree on a common source of news, analysis, and opinion. The Wall Street Journal offers what passes for intelligent, sometimes persuasive opinion pieces on the right these days. I generally respect WSJ opinions because they can be principled and intellectually honest, not simply trying to score hyper-partisan points with sloganeering or shallow social media posts designed to foment knee-jerk tribalism.

The Journal, owned by Rupert Murdoch, who also owns Fox News, even dares to go where Fox dares not, to criticize Trump. In 2020, it was a bellwether, criticizing Trump so harshly that you knew that when he lost the WSJ in September 2020 with withering criticism, he lost the election. So I’m watching the WSJ editorial board closely to see how it frames the 2024 election, and particularly Trump's performance.

Murdoch realizes that WSJ readers are part of the American intelligentsia, the investor class, not so easily manipulated by Fox News propaganda. They like their news straight rather than slanted and their opinion pages informative, well-written, and well-reasoned. They tend to be critical thinkers who aren’t likely to be persuaded by social media memes that harden hyper-partisanship.

Yes, the WSJ editorializes strongly for limited government, lower regulations, and tax cuts for the wealthy to invest in a market economy. It strongly supports Ukraine and Israel and favors a hard line on Russian expansionism. It also tends to favor liberal immigration as essential to a healthy American economy, has opposed Trump’s fear-mongering on the issue, and opposes tariffs. It calls him temperamental, opportunistic, a candidate who prefers personal attacks to substantive discussion of issues. He’s small-minded and divisive, his behavior around Jan. 6, 2021 was disgraceful, and he seems to have no coherent political philosophy, according to the WSJ editorial board.

The WSJ repeatedly calls Trump “his own worst enemy.” It suggested that immigration hard-liners — nearly all Republicans — were engaging in self-sabotage by following Trump’s order to kill a tough immigration bill that could have passed Congress this year. The Journal says a harder-line bill is unlikely to pass Congress next year even if Trump wins and brings both houses of Congress with him. Click.

That said, the WSJ editorial board is no fan of Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, or Tim Walz. But what’s most striking is how critical, at best lukewarm, they’ve been about Donald Trump. This lack of strong support for Trump has to filter down to conservatives and independents whose views are strongly influenced by the WSJ. The negative framing of Trump might persuade a substantial number of readers to vote for change, turn the page from the uncivil, toxic, and exhausting Trump or sit out the presidential election.

Here are capsule summaries of the WSJ’s nuanced editorials that acknowledge Trump’s shortcomings:

Will Trump Blow Another Election? At age 59, Kamala Harris “presents a youthful contrast to 78-year-old Mr. Trump…(who) is reminding voters why they didn't vote to re-elect him in 2020…He calls her "low IQ" and "dumb," as if the schoolyard insult will persuade anyone…He's also picking gratuitous fights…with GA GOP Governor Brian Kemp and even Mr. Kemp's wife because he says they're not loyal enough…You almost wonder if Mr. Trump is setting up an excuse for his defeat as he sees the polls tightening in Georgia. His rally speeches are a bundle of personal grievances and impulsive floundering that drown out any consistent message against Vice President Harris. He is also helping her by saying little about what he'd do in a second term, beyond replaying the promises of his first term.”

The WSJ has repeatedly criticized Republican primary voters for refusing to nominate one of Trump’s younger competitors “who would have been fresher voices and could have served two terms.” They chose to believe the 2020 COVID election was stolen because Trump told them it was (Aug. 8, 2024).

Trump Loses the Tax-Cut Plot. Ending taxes on Social Security benefits would kill the chance of renewing his 2017 reform (Aug. 4, 2024).

Anti-Growth Policies: “Donald Trump wants to cut taxes and regulation. But he also vows a 10% across-the-board tariff reminiscent of the Smoot-Hawley tariffs that contributed to the Great Depression, plus a mass deportation of migrant workers who have been a source of growth” (Aug 2).

Trump Meeting With Black Journalists: He dove right into the identity politics trap, and stepped on his own best campaign message. Mr. Trump has a good case that his economic policies helped black voters in his first term,…but he said, oddly, that Kamala Harris was “always of Indian heritage” and he “didn’t know she was black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn black and now she wants to be known as black.” The editorial goes on to note that Harris has, at least since college, identified as multi-racial (July 31).

Trump Buries Project 2025: In spurning the project, the temperamental former president demonstrates that “he governs on feral instinct, tactical opportunism, and what seems popular at a given moment” (July 30).

J.D. Vance’s Basket of Deplorables: Trump’s running mate is on the defensive over his views about the childless. His comments were “sort of smart-aleck crack that gets laughs in certain right-wing male precincts. But it doesn’t play well with the millions of female voters, many of them Republican, who will decide the presidential race. It is being portrayed on social media as an example of chauvinist views. It’s bad policy to use the tax code for social policy because it creates complications that add distortions. Pro-natalist tax policies haven’t worked where they’ve been tried.

It’s also bad politics. Conservatives used to believe in a neutral tax code that didn’t play favorites, but Mr. Vance is suggesting the code should be used as a political and cultural weapon against people who don’t share his values. “Raise taxes on the childless” isn’t a winning campaign slogan. (July 26)

Kamala Harris Confounds the Republicans: The U.S. now has a presidential race that Donald Trump and the GOP could lose. Ms. Harris is shrewdly now pitching the campaign as the future versus the past, a new generation versus the old, contrasting her relative youth at age 59 with the 78-year-old Mr. Trump. That has often worked for Democrats—recall JFK, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama. Nikki Haley warned Republicans that the first party to select a nominee from the next generation would have a political advantage this year, and here we are. The puzzle is why all of this seems to have confounded Republicans.

They’re grasping for attack lines that aren’t likely to work or are counterproductive. One bad argument is that Ms. Harris is “a DEI candidate.” That may literally have been true in 2020 when Mr. Biden promised to appoint a woman as his running mate. But diminishing her in this way now, after she’s been VP for four years, will alienate women and the minority voters the GOP is trying to attract.

Another misfire is