A Wall Street Journal columnist placed his bets on a future Trump impeachment after the president’s chaotic tariff rollout sent markets spiraling last week.
Holman W. Jenkins Jr., a columnist and editorial board member at The Journal, wrote in a blistering opinion piece Friday that President Donald Trump appears to be asking for impeachment with his “ill-founded trade war.”
“A future Trump impeachment seemed all but guaranteed by last Wednesday morning,” Jenkins said, referring to the day that Trump hit pause on his devastating tariffs following a historic stock market crash. “It seems only slightly less likely now. It may even be desirable to restore America’s standing with creditors and trade partners.”
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Jenkins flamed the tariffs—which ranged from 17 percent to as high as 50 percent for about 60 countries—as the product of Trump’s “own confused intuition.”
“Mr. Trump’s politics aren’t poll-based or policy-based. They aren’t strategic. They are ratings-based,” he wrote. “From the moment he appeared in 2015, he was a democratic accident waiting to happen for exactly this reason.”
Trump’s unveiling of his reciprocal tariffs on “Liberation Day” sent the stock market plummeting to its worst day since March 2020, but the president shrugged off the reaction as a necessary part of treating “a patient”—in this case, the economy—that he said was “very sick.”
“The founders never anticipated today’s instantly responsive trillion-dollar financial markets. And yet these markets neatly adumbrate the founders’ scheme of checks and balances, also known as feedback,” Jenkins said.
“Mr. Trump, still sane enough to appreciate what’s good for Mr. Trump, listened this week to their feedback. May he continue to do so,” he added.
The editorial board of the Journal, owned by conservative media mogul Rupert Murdoch, earlier scored Trump’s “Liberation Day” as “Buy Another Yacht Day for the swamp.”
“Remaking the world economy has large consequences, and they may not all add up to what Mr. Trump advertises as a new ‘golden age,‘” the editorial board said.
