Wall Street Journal jeered after printing Trump rant about 2020 election

The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday published a letter to the editor from former President Donald Trump containing a multitude of falsehoods that have been fact-checked by the newspaper and other publications.

Trump's letter was in response to a Monday editorial about Pennsylvania's state Supreme Court. The editorial stated, factually, that President Biden won Pennsylvania in 2020 by 80,555 ballots, which set Trump off. "Well, actually, the election was rigged, which you, unfortunately, still haven't figured out," Trump wrote.

He went on to make several false claims about the vote in Pennsylvania, including that "120,000 excess voters are not yet accounted for by the Pennsylvania Department of State — far more votes than voters!" This was debunked by The Philadelphia Inquirer's Jonathan Lai in January, who wrote that state GOP lawmakers came up with this number after looking at incomplete data, calculating that nearly 7 million votes were cast but not quite 6.8 million voters participated in the election. Philadelphia, Allegheny, Butler, and Cambria counties had not uploaded all their voter history data, the Pennsylvania Department of State said in a statement, adding, "We are unclear as to exactly what data and what the legislators actually did to offer this so-called 'analysis.'"

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

There was swift pushback against Trump's letter and the Journal's decision to publish it, with Jonathan Tamari, the Inquirer's national political writer, tweeting, "This is full of absolute lies — from the first bullet point down." The Washington Post's Glenn Kessler asked, "Why would they publish, without analysis, a bunch of stuff that['s] already been fact-checked as false?"

Amanda Carpenter, director of Republicans for Voting Rights and a columnist at The Bulwark, called Trump's missive "garbage." By allowing Trump to spew "election lies" as a letter to the editor, the Journal was able to "avoid taking responsibility," Carpenter said, adding, "Trump couldn't post this to Facebook but the editors at the WSJ collectively decided to put it on their platform. Think about that."