California and the East Coast in the Opposition

From the series Chronicles of the new American nationalism

Donald Trump’s first 100 days in the Oval Office have been an opportunity for making an assessment. The establishment newspapers of the East Coast judge that the foreign and trade policies of the administration do not serve Washington’s interests, and that fundamental corrections are necessary.

In particular, an unexpected counter power has emerged, says the title of an editorial in Les Echos, a leading business daily in France. According to deputy editor Dominique Seux, the surprise of the first 100 days is that The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), a conservative newspaper close to the Republican Party and owned by billionaire Rupert Murdoch, has stepped up as one of the most determined opponents of Trump’s economic policy. Who would have thought it possible? Not many, to be honest. Since January 20th, the WSJ occupies a unique – and useful – place in the media landscape of the United States.

“The Wall Street Journal” report card

The WSJ concedes that Trump has had some success in cultural battles and domestic deregulation. Energy production is proceeding well and he has ended the border crisis in short order [April 29^th]. It is rather a surprise that Trump hasn’t taken more credit on the border issue. He could use the political capital gained to address illegal migration, with a reform that offers more pathways for legal immigration. For both small business and large industry, one of [the] largest problems is finding workers, from fruit and vegetable pickers to engineers who must win the lottery for visas to cross the border [April 17^th].

Regarding government cuts, the WSJ supported Elon Musk’s DOGE, but now considers it frenetic, and judges that it isn’t clear what it is achieving. Beyond the savings on easy targets, there is no fundamental change in the growth of government.

Judging fiscal and budgetary policy must wait. There are proposals for budget reform, but the White House must push them through Congress. Foreign policy is a work in progress. Europe’s stance towards Russia and Ukraine is the main cause for alarm, while tariffs imposed globally allow Beijing to benefit and to court Washington’s allies. Regarding the implications for the economy, the tariff policy could sink the presidency.

More explicitly, Mary Anastasia O’Grady appreciates the cuts, the culture war, and the deregulation, but Trump’s transactional approach has laid bare an ethics vacuum in policy towards Russia and immigration, while economic management has been an epic failure.

Checks and balances

The New York Times has launched a test of the ability of the checks and balances of US democracy to limit Trump’s actions. In an initial assessment, Charlie Savage writes that within the executive branch, federal agencies have been bent to his will, and cabinet appointments have little appreciable influence. Congress has provided no checks, while the actions of the Courts are revealing their limitations, and their rulings are being challenged by the administration.

The Supreme Court has not ruled on any of Trump’s moves, although, in matters of immigration policy, it has ordered the suspension of all deportations for emergency reasons. Some district judges have resorted to injunctions, a powerful legal tool that allows federal courts to issue nationwide rulings. However, the Supreme Court has established that such injunctions are only enforceable in the districts in which the immigrants in question are being held.

In the WSJ, James Taranto is not surprised, given the unilateralism of injunctions, that district judges cumulatively have proved the heaviest counterweight to Trump, especially because more than half of all 630 active district judges were appointed by Barack Obama and Joe Biden [February 12^th]. The WSJ considers The New York Times alarmist in suggesting an illiberal distortion in the balance of power, and is pleased that the Supreme Court has put the lower courts back in their place. The conservative newspaper also appreciates that Trump has cut back federal agencies: they regulate a large part of the American economy, but who exactly are they accountable to?. Kimberley Strassel returned to the point, attributing to Trump the intention to put an end to their summary regulation.

Regarding trade policy, the WSJ was hopeful about the influence of some of Trump’s appointments, only to later complain about their fleeting nature; however, Allysia Finley still suggests that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent could resolve the president’s blunders. The same newspaper would appreciate if Congress took back the responsibilities it delegated to the president in the form of the fast-track authority for trade negotiations.

The States and the courts

A plurality of groups have turned to the courts on every issue challenged by Trump’s agenda: tariffs, immigration, downsizing federal agencies, individual rights, cuts to federal funding for the States, and the expansion of executive powers.

California is at the head of this legal opposition, as in Trump’s first term; it boasts an economy that surpasses the United Kingdom’s and rivals Japan’s. California Governor Gavin Newsom, a nationally prominent Democrat, spoke to Asia in an interview with the Nikkei, a Japanese business publication. Our values are in contrast with those being expressed by the current president, said Newsom, offering an open hand to China and other partners, because the direct and indirect economic costs of tariffs have an outsized impact on California compared to other States.

According to the Los Angeles Times, Sacramento issued 120 legal challenges in Trump’s first term. Now, in 100 days, it has opened fifteen lawsuits, almost always followed by other States, and has joined eighteen challenges already in progress. California has been joined in its opposition to the tariffs by a dozen other States, led by Democratic governors such as those of New York, Illinois, Oregon, Colorado, New Mexico, Minnesota, Connecticut, Delaware, and Maine, or with Democratic attorneys-generals (Nevada and Vermont). From East to West, from the Midwest to the South, nearly all areas of the United States are participating in legal opposition to the tariffs.

“Mitterrand moment?”

So far, the only guardrail that has proven effective, according to Charlie Savage of The New York Times, has been the markets. The dollar, the stock exchange, and the price of Treasury bonds, through which Washington finances its debt, reacted negatively to the Liberation Day and to the president’s threats against Jerome Powell, head of the Federal Reserve. Trump was forced into a U-turn, and the WSJ wondered if he had reached his Mitterrand moment – a reference to the French president, elected under a Keynesian banner of increased spending in 1981, but who was forced into an austerity plan in 1983. We’d like nothing better, concluded the WSJ after a few days, but Mr Trump remains a long way from making such a pivot.

CHICAGO AND NEW YORK,
THE TWO SOULS OF “THE WALL STREET JOURNAL”

After World War II, The Wall Street Journal reflected the political psychologies of the Midwest conservatives that marked its history. Barney Kilgore [1908-1967], head of the Dow Jones Company from 1941, turned a New York financial paper into a national political-business daily, adding the Southeast [1948] and Midwest [1961] editorial offices to that of the Pacific [1929]. Robert Bartley [1937-2003] succeeded Vermont Royster [1914-1996] in 1972 and directed the op-ed page for 30 years.

In 1947, all the management had graduated from the same Methodist college in Indiana; there were only two Jews, and until the 1970s hiring focused on the Midwest. According to Edward E. Scharff [Worldly Power, 1986], for decades the op-ed page was impermeable to the liberal approach, which became more present in the newsroom with the entry of journalists trained in the East Coast universities during the global expansion of the newspaper, led from 1970 by Kilgore’s successor, Warren Phillips [F. Palumberi, “The Wall Street Journal” (1985), in Gli imperi dei mass media in America, Edizioni Lotta Comunista, 2011].

In times of political crises or periods of change, the tensions between the psychologies of the Midwest and of the Coast became apparent on multiple occasions. Responding to the seasons of the business cycle, economic ideas varied and eventually embraced the Chicago School and its internal divisions. When Phillips handed over the presidency to Peter Kann [1989-2007], the journal already reflected a variety of areas and sensitivities.

Paul Gigot [b. 1955, Texas] is an editorial board member and editor of the op-ed page. Raised in Wisconsin in a Franco-Belgian family, after twelve years in Catholic schools he graduated from Dartmouth (New Hampshire). He joined the WSJ in 1980 and, after two years in Chicago, moved to Hong Kong, where he became head of WSJ Asia. Since 1987 he has been a political commentator in Washington (Potomac Watch) and was also a White House fellow during the presidency of Ronald Reagan. A well-known face on TV in the 1990s, in 2001 he took over the direction of the op-ed page from Bob Bartley, who kept the post of emeritus.

James Taranto [b. 1966, California] has been a member of the editorial board since 2007, and editorial features editor since 2017. Without completing his studies at California State University, he joined the Heritage Foundation and Manhattan Institute think tanks. He joined the WSJ in 1996, being noted for his ability to cut down long articles. A Conservative and non-believer, he has covered a variety of topics with Best of the Web since 2000 and was responsible for the op-ed section first appearing on OpinionJournal.com and later in the newspaper. He is married to Sino-Canadian actress Anastasia Lin, an activist critical of Beijing.

Kimberley Strassel [b. 1972, Oregon] has been a member of the editorial board since 2005, assistant features editor, and columnist since 2007 in Potomac Watch. A graduate from Princeton, she entered WSJ Europe and from 1999 wrote from New York about real estate. Following the end of her marriage to Matthew Rose, who has recently moved to The New York Times, she has been living in Alaska. The author of books on gender disparities, in 2019 she argued, in Resistance (At All Costs), that an all-out opposition to Trump would be more damaging than his brief presidency.

Holman W. Jenkins Jr. [b. 1959, Pennsylvania] is a member of the editorial board and commentator in Business World. After studying at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, he joined the WSJ in 1992, after writing for the conservative magazines National Review and Policy Review.

Joseph C. Sternberg [b. 1982, Vermont] is a member of the editorial board and Political Economics columnist. Graduating from the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg (Virginia), he joined the WSJ in 2006 as a columnist in Hong Kong, later in WSJ Europe. He is the author of The Theft of a Decade: How the Baby Boomers Stole the Millennials’ Economic Future (2019).

Mary Anastasia O’Grady [b. 1957, Pennsylvania] has been a member of the editorial board since 2005 and The Americas columnist. After ten years at Merrill Lynch, she joined the WSJ [1995]. She is co-editor of the Index of Economic Freedom, the annual report started in 1995 by the WSJ and the Heritage Foundation; she is on the board of another libertarian think tank, Liberty Fund of Indiana.

Peggy Noonan [b. 1950, New York] writes in the Declarations column. She was a speechwriter for Ronald Reagan [1984-86], to whom she has dedicated several books; she was married until 1990 to Richard W. Rahn, the champion of supply-side economics, who was at the time an economist at the Chamber of Commerce. A practising Catholic in the Upper East Side, she dedicated a text to Pope John Paul II. Since 2016, she has been critical of Trump.

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