Hours after Republican front-runner Donald Trump excoriated the Wall Street Journal for criticizing his recent remarks on trade, the paper’s editorial board hit back, laughing off the real estate mogul’s attacks as “exhilarating.”
“Being attacked by Donald Trump is one of journalism’s more exhilarating experiences,” the board wrote this week. “We got the treatment on Thursday when he took to various TV shows and Twitter with his usual soft sell and demanded corrections, apologies and resignations after our editorial reference to his trade policy. We haven’t had this much fun since Eliot Spitzer left office.”
Spitzer, the former governor of New York, was forced to resign after the press learned about his many dalliances with prostitutes.
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Following the fourth televised GOP debate Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal accused Trump of being the Republican Party’s “most protectionist nominee since Hoover.” The newspaper also suggested that Trump doesn’t know what’s included in the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade agreement among 12 Pacific Rim countries that the United States recently signed onto this summer.
Trump was not at all pleased with the paper’s assertions, and he made his opinion known, saying on social media that the Wall Street Journal was “WRONG.” He also demanded an apology from the paper, and referred to its reporters as “dummies.”
“I wake up this morning, I read the Wall Street Journal and TPP, I know it intimately although it is 6,000 pages, it’s a really bad trade deal, but they said that I said China was included in the deal at the debate — I didn’t say that,” Trump said later during an interview on Fox News. “I said China’s going to come in through the back door. So the Wall Street Journal, without calling or anything, wrote an incorrect editorial. All they had to do was call me.”
“There’s so much misinformation but you would think that a paper like the Wall Street Journal would call for clarification, but they don’t do that they just write,” Trump added. “That’s why they’re not a respected paper too much anymore.”
During the debate Tuesday evening, Trump was asked by the Fox Business moderators for his opinion on the trade deal. The real estate mogul responded with comments about China, currency manipulation and how China is beating America because America doesn’t win anymore. No sooner had he answered, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., interjected to note that China is not included in the trade deal. Trump had no response.
For this and similar debate moments, the Wall Street Journal criticized Trump Wednesday, questioning whether he is up on the issues. But the paper never accused him of knowing whether China is included in the deal.
“So when he is asked about TPP, Mr. Trump’s first reference is to China, which isn’t in TPP, and he now says the world should have known that he knows China isn’t part of it because amid his word salad he said that the deal ‘was designed for China to come in, as they always do, through the back door,'” the editorial board said late Thursday evening.
“Our editorial point was what everyone who understands East Asian security knows, which is that China would be delighted to see TPP fail,” they added. “China is putting together its own Asian trade bloc, and those rules will be written to its advantage. TPP sets a standard for trade under freer Western rules. China could seek to join TPP in the future, but it would have to do so on TPP’s terms, not vice versa.”
The paper then turned its attention to Trump’s oft-repeated claim that China is manipulating its currency and that he’d put a stop to it.
“As for currency manipulation, we gave Mr. Trump a forum for his views in our pages on Tuesday. He doesn’t understand currencies any better than he does TPP. Currency values are largely determined by central banks and capital flows,” they wrote. “If China made the yuan convertible and let it float, the initial result would probably be a falling yuan as capital left the country. A trade deal with a binding currency provision could also subject the U.S. Federal Reserve to sanctions as a ‘manipulator’ every time it eased money in a recession.”
“All of this bears on Mr. Trump’s candidacy because he is running as a shrewd deal-maker who can get the economy moving again. Starting a global currency and trade war ‘on day one’ would get America moving toward recession—or worse,” they added.
(h/t Mediaite)
