The White House touted the rollback of tariffs on China as a “historic trade win” for the U.S., but The Wall Street Journal thinks it looked more like a surrender.
In a piece titled “The Great Trump Tariff Rollback,” The Journal‘s editorial board labeled Trump’s latest move less of a victory and more a “major retreat.”
Markets soared on Monday after the Trump administration announced a 90-day pause in its heated trade war with China. The White House lowered its tariff on Chinese imports from 145 percent to 30 percent, while China dropped its levies from 125 percent to 10 percent.
“Rarely has an economic policy been repudiated as soundly, and as quickly, as President Trump’s Liberation Day tariffs—and by Mr. Trump’s own hand,” the board wrote in the scathing Monday piece.
“The China deal is more surrender than Trump victory,” it added. “Apart from the tariff rollback, neither side announced any broader concessions on the substantive trade issues that weigh on the U.S.-China relationship.”
It’s the latest salvo in long-running tensions between President Donald Trump and the newspaper owned by his friend and media mogul Rupert Murdoch.
Last week, Trump told a Journal reporter who asked him a question that the “China-oriented” publication has “gone to hell.” The Trump administration claimed Trump “nuked” The Journal at the time.
.@POTUS NUKES the @WSJ: “The Wall Street Journal has truly gone to hell … It’s a rotten newspaper … The Wall Street Journal is China-oriented, and they’re really bad for this country.” pic.twitter.com/wVrqJv6cT8
— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) May 5, 2025
The Journal has long rejected Trump’s tariffs, which it branded “the biggest economic policy mistake in decades” in an April editorial.
The editorial board doubled down on those sentiments on Monday.
“One tragedy of Mr. Trump’s shoot-America-in-the-foot-first approach is that he’s hurt his chances of rallying a united front of countries against Beijing’s mercantilism,” it wrote. “By targeting allies with tariffs, Mr. Trump has eroded trust in America’s economic and political reliability.”
The Journal said the silver lining to the tariff chaos was that markets forced Trump to back down from his “fever dream” that the punitive levies would usher in a new golden age.
“The age didn’t last two months, and it was more leaden than golden,” the paper said.
The post Murdoch Paper Torches Trump Over ‘Surrender’ to China in Trade War appeared first on The Daily Beast.
