The Wall Street Journal published an editorial Friday that downplayed Democrats’ claim that Donald Trump is a danger to democracy by asserting he’s simply not focused enough to pull off a political coup.
“Trump was too undisciplined, and his attention span too short, to stay on one message much less stage a coup,” wrote the Journal’s editorial board, referencing his previous White House term.
It added of a potential second Trump term: “We don’t buy the fascism fears, and we doubt Democrats really do either.”
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The conservative-leaning paper, which hasn’t endorsed a candidate since 1928, kept with its laissez-faire tradition this election. However, it still published a pros-and-cons list of sorts for each candidate—Kamala Harris on Thursday, Trump on Friday.
The former president will likely be pleased with large swaths of the Journal’s editorial about him, like when it described his judicial nominations as “excellent” and noted U.S. “enemies stayed quiet on his watch.” The paper also praised him for economic policies in his first term and his foreign affairs wins, like renegotiating NAFTA and overseeing the Abraham Accords.
Still, Friday’s editorial was far from a glowing endorsement of Trump. The Journal’s editorial board wrote that he shouldn’t have been the Republican nominee in 2024—something it partially faulted Democrats for bringing on themselves.
“Democrats helped to revive his fortunes with their unprecedented prosecutions and other excesses,” the board wrote. “Democrats made Trump II possible as much as GOP primary voters.”
After making clear it’s not concerned about Trump side-stepping Democratic institutions, as some formerly close to him have warned, the Journal stated that a second Trump presidency wouldn’t be without other risks. Namely, it noted that Trump doesn’t have much of a political agenda and that the Republican party—which Trump has fully taken over—also doesn’t have a clear set of policy goals aside from shoring up the southern border and deporting migrants.
“Trump inherited a reform agenda from Paul Ryan in 2017, and his policy successes were traditional GOP priorities of deregulation, originalist judges, and tax cuts,” wrote the Journal. “Trump has instincts but no clear philosophy of government, and his second term will be more of a policy jump ball.”
The Journal suggested America is fed up with “progressive governance” and that next week’s election should have been a red wave akin to Ronald Reagan’s electoral landslide over Jimmy Carter in 1980, which saw the conservative Republican win 44 states.
However, the paper suggested Trump’s team is still in a dogfight of an election in part because it did not offer a unity message after Trump narrowly survived an assassination attempt in July. Instead of appealing to all Americans, the Journal wrote that Trump signaled to the country that, should he win, the U.S. may be in for “four more years of divisive partisan warfare.”
The Journal made clear that, overall, it wished the country had options better than Harris, who didn’t have to win a primary, and a 78-year-old Trump in his third stint as the Republican nominee.
“Voters can gamble on the tumult of Trump, or the continued ascendancy of the Democratic left,” the Journal wrote. “We wish it was a better choice, but that’s democracy.”
