President Donald Trump is “a more powerful president over a weaker presidency,” the conservative-leaning Wall Street Journal warned on Tuesday — and this is not the first recent time the venerable publication has taken on this Republican president.
Excerpting from a recent Sarah Isgur article in The Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal pointed out that Trump has suffered a series of high-profile losses with the Supreme Court “because the larger project the Roberts Court seems to have undertaken is reining in the power of the presidency and making the president more politically accountable.”
Citing both their rejection of President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness program and their rebuking of Trump’s tariffs, Isgur added that the 2024 Loper Bright decision, which held that executive-branch agencies no longer get to define the scope of their own authority, also stripped power from the executive branch.” They add that this also happened in a 2022 case challenging Biden’s vaccine mandates and a 2020 case on disclosing Trump’s tax records.
“At the same time, the Court is putting the president more fully in charge of his branch of government,” Isgur added, citing cases like Trump v. Slaughter which allow the president to “fire members of so-called independent agencies” in order to “let him have more direct control over those agencies and their personnel to execute his preferred policies,” yet after first handing that power back to Congress.
“Trump will be a more powerful president over a weaker presidency,” the piece concluded.
The Wall Street Journal has attacked Trump’s policies on many other recent occasions.
"The larger reality is that Mr. Trump is so bull-headed about tariffs that he’s going to re-impose them any way he can," the publication’s editorial board wrote earlier this week about Trump’s Supreme Court-overturned tariffs, adding that by doing so Trump will “create more uncertainty for business, at least for a while. And with the midterm elections coming soon, this timing is fraught for Republicans. Amid an 'affordability' panic, Mr. Trump says he is going to impose more border taxes on enough imports to make up for his lost emergency tariffs. Democrats must be thrilled at their dumb luck."
After Trump attacked the Supreme Court judges he appointed, Amy Comey Barrett and Neil Gorsuch, as corrupt and disloyal for ruling against him, the editorial board wrote that “Trump owes the Supreme Court an apology — to the individual Justices he smeared on Friday and the institution itself. Mr. Trump doubtless won’t offer one, but his rant in response to his tariff defeat at the Court was arguably the worst moment of his Presidency.”
Earlier this month, the Journal also blasted Trump’s proposed tax cut for billionaires. The right-leaning newspaper reported that since 1990 the top 0.1 percent of wage earners hold a much larger share of American wealth today, with their total proportion growing by 14.4 percent.
"Meanwhile, the bottom half of American households have lost ground. Their 2.5 percent cut of the country’s wealth has slipped from 3.5 percent in 1990," the report said.
