The Wall Street Journal editorial board is warning President Trump that his strategy of blaming bad news on Joe Biden is rapidly running out of road.
“President Trump finds vindication wherever he looks,” the Rupert Murdoch-owned newspaper‘s board wrote in an editorial, adding that “blaming Joe Biden for bad economic news won’t work as an excuse for much longer.”
Earlier on Tuesday, Trump had indeed pointed the finger at his predecessor after the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced there were almost a million fewer jobs created in the 12 months to March 2025 than the agency had previously estimated.
Downward revisions to job market stats aren’t uncommon. But the latest figures indicate new jobs in the U.S. averaged about 75,000 a month, roughly half what previous surveys had shown and significantly below forecasts set by the current White House.
They also come after Trump fired BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer last month, whom he baselessly accused of having “RIGGED” agency data. Trump claimed the figures, which constituted the biggest non-COVID-related drop in jobs numbers more than four decades, “to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad.”
The Journal editorial board, which previously blasted Trump for appointing a die-hard ideological loyalist as McEntarfer’s replacement, argued that the disastrous BLS stats are hardly the only sign of “economic malaise” under Trump’s second stint in the White House. It also pointed out that many Americans elected Trump in the hope his administration would improve real-term wages through tax cuts and deregulation.
“His border taxes and deportations are doing the opposite,” the paper wrote Tuesday, adding “recent data indicate that inflation isn’t vanquished and tariffs are contributing to higher prices in some goods.”
“Mr. Trump ignores these dummy lights about the economy at his own political peril,” the editorial reads. “The President could do far more to help businesses, workers and consumers by dropping his anti-growth policies. He may have inherited a weak economy, but he’s in charge now.”
The scathing editorial also comes after Democrats on the House Oversight Committee released images from a book celebrating the 50th birthday of the sex offender financier, Jeffrey Epstein.
Trump is currently suing the Wall Street Journal for $10 billion, claiming its exposé on a 2003 birthday letter he allegedly sent to Epstein—which features a crude sketch of a nude woman along with a bizarre imagined exchange about “enigmas” and “wonderful secrets”—was a total fabrication.
A copy of the sketch was included in the House committee’s disclosure, featuring a signature bearing an uncanny resemblance to the one used by Trump around that period. The White House is continuing to insist that the matter is a “Democratic hoax” designed to smear Trump.
