Responding to: Now Jill Biden Tells Us — The Editorial Board · 2026-06-02

What the Piece Argues

The Wall Street Journal editorial board argues that Jill Biden’s recent admission—that she wishes her husband hadn’t run for a second term—reveals the Bidens’ “monumental act of selfishness.” They contend that Jill encouraged Joe to run, concealed his cognitive decline, and only dropped out when party leaders threatened a coup. This, they say, handed the nomination to Kamala Harris without a competitive primary, creating a “political debacle of historic proportions” that gave Donald Trump a second term.

Receipts

The editorial’s move is a classic deflection: blame the Democrats’ internal dysfunction for Trump’s return, while absolving the very forces—including the Journal’s own opinion page—that spent years legitimizing Trump and his attacks on democracy.

  • The framing wants you to believe the Bidens’ “selfishness” and the Democratic elite’s cover‑up are the root causes of Trump’s victory, and without their stubbornness a strong Democrat would have won.
  • The reality: The Journal’s editorial board actively shielded Trump’s authoritarian actions, editorializing that the classified‑documents indictment was “a reckless use of prosecutorial power” (“A Destructive Trump Indictment,” June 10, 2023).
  • The mechanism is a vertically integrated profit loop: right‑wing media manufacture outrage to drive subscriptions, while donor‑class lobbying converts that outrage into deregulation and judicial capture.
  • Who benefits? The WSJ’s Murdoch‑family ownership and the donor class, who reap tax cuts, deregulation, and judges while Jill Biden’s vanity takes the fall.

The DEFCON Ladder

When to use: with a persuadable moderate who reads the Journal and believes the editorial is an honest critique. You’re not accusing them of bad faith—just expanding the frame.

DEFCON 5 — Polite Reframe

The editorial makes a legitimate point: the Bidens’ decision to run again, and the party’s enabling of it, was a serious error that contributed to the Democrats’ defeat. Holding onto power past his prime was a failure of judgment, and Jill Biden’s role in it is worth scrutiny. But we need to see the whole picture. The idea that this one decision, however damaging, is what gave us a second Trump term ignores a decade of choices by the very institutions now clucking about “selfishness.” The same newspaper that editorialized against holding Trump accountable for his own monumental acts—attempting to overturn an election, hoarding classified documents, inciting an insurrection—is now blaming Jill Biden for his return. That is a selective memory, and it lets the actual enablers off the hook. Trump was elected because of a vast propaganda apparatus, a radicalized base, and structural advantages in our electoral system. The Bidens’ selfishness was real, but it was one late‑stage failure in a system the Journal’s owners have spent billions to shape. Let’s not pretend the institution that normalized the breach can credibly claim surprise at the outcome.

When to use: in a Substack reply or op‑ed length, when your audience includes mixed‑faith conservatives who want to hold power accountable but need to see the contradiction. Firm moral spine, no punches pulled.

DEFCON 4 — Firm Moral Superiority

The Journal’s sanctimony about the Bidens’ “monumental act of selfishness” would carry more weight if its own editorial page hadn’t spent the last four years actively shielding the most selfish, democracy‑smashing figure in modern American politics from any meaningful accountability. When Donald Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election, the Journal tut‑tutted about “moving on.” When he was indicted for stealing national security secrets, they called it prosecutorial overreach. When he promised to be a dictator on day one, they waxed poetic about his “pro‑growth tax policies.” Now, because Jill Biden admitted she shouldn’t have let her husband run, the Journal has discovered the moral clarity to condemn selfishness. This is not serious analysis; it is a propaganda operation designed to launder the Journal’s own complicity. The Democratic Party’s failure was real, but the entity that did the most to hand Trump the presidency is the conservative media machine—the one that pays the Journal’s bills—which systematically fed its audience a diet of election lies, white grievance, and character assassination. You want to talk about original sin? Start with the Murdoch family trust.

When to use: with a friend or colleague who still thinks the WSJ is a respectable source. The humor cracks the credibility, then the receipts hit.

DEFCON 3 — Mockery and Ridicule

Oh, look, the Wall Street Journal editorial board—that fearless collection of hedge‑fund apologists and corporate tax‑cutters—has discovered the concept of selfishness. And their target is … Jill Biden. Not the billionaire who owns their paper and whose network spent years calling Trump’s first coup attempt a “tourist visit.” Not the fossil‑fuel oligarchs who bankroll climate denial and whose policies they cheer. No, the real villain, according to the people who wrote “In Defense of Private Equity Fees,” is a 73‑year‑old woman who didn’t want to give up the White House china. The Journal’s sudden moral clarity is like hearing a tobacco executive lecture about lung health. Their editorial board has published defenses of every Trumpian excess—from family separation to tax giveaways that made their owner richer—and now they’re outraged that Democrats didn’t stage a perfect primary? It’s as if the fox, after feasting on the henhouse for four years, expressed grave concern about the farmer’s lax security. The Bidens screwed up. But the people who handed the keys to Trump are the ones who spent a decade telling their readers that liberal democracy is a scam, that elections are rigged unless Republicans win, and that any attempt to enforce the law against their guy is a “witch hunt.” That’s not selfishness? That’s a business model.

When to use: in a post aimed at the bystander—someone who won’t read the Journal but needs to see that the editorial is not just wrong, it’s a con. The mirror forces the Journal to see its own reflection.

DEFCON 2 — Aggressive Villainization

The Journal’s editorial is not a critique; it is the final stage of a long‑term operation to install an authoritarian government while pretending to merely advocate free markets. For years, the editorial page has served as the respectable mouthpiece for a project of elite impunity: attack every prosecutor who went after Trump, cheer every deregulation that poisoned communities, and smear every Democratic reform as “socialism.” Then, when Trump wins again, they turn to the camera and blame a woman’s vanity. That’s not journalism. That’s an alibi. The Journal’s editors are accessories after the fact to the destruction of American democracy, and now they want to be seen as critics of the Democrats’ poor strategy. You played the same game as the tobacco lawyers: manufacture doubt, normalize corruption, and blame the victims when it all goes wrong. Jill Biden’s mistakes were real and cost her party. But your editorial board’s mistakes—if we can call them mistakes—were to launder a would‑be dictator’s grievances into acceptable opinion, to treat his crimes as “overreach,” and to give your readership permission to view his authoritarian impulses as a reasonable policy preference. You don’t get to lament the debacle you helped create, because you are the debacle. You are the people who, in another time, would have editorialized that Dred Scott was an “interesting judicial development.” You are the mirror, and the face staring back at you is not flattering.

When to use: against the editorial board directly—a cathartic, metaphorical nuclear strike, with receipts still intact, but the language is vicious and the imagery grotesque. Not for the rank‑and‑file reader.

DEFCON 1 — Nuclear Satire

So the Wall Street Journal—the in‑flight magazine for the oligarchy crashing Flight 2025 into the mountainside—has found its villain. Not the orange‑hued insurrectionist the editorial board kept feeding grapes to like he was a debauched emperor. Not the billionaire owner who treats the First Amendment as a tax loophole and the country as a distressed asset to be stripped. No, the great moral cancer of our time is Jill Biden, who, like millions of Americans, wanted to stay in the big house. The Journal’s entire editorial history of the Trump era is a monument to moral cowardice. They printed apologias for a man who tried to end the American republic because his feelings were hurt. They called the investigations into his theft of nuclear secrets “reckless prosecutorial power”—as if he’d shoplifted a candy bar rather than hoarded state secrets at a golf resort. And now they finger‑wag about the “monumental act of selfishness” of a woman who, by their own description, is guilty of loving the perks of power? This is like a coroner who helped plan the funeral blaming the widow for crying too loud. The Journal’s editorial board is a guild of court historians to the new Caesars, always ready with the right words to make the looting sound respectable. Their piece on Jill Biden isn’t analysis; it’s the final, desperate attempt to gaslight the country into believing that Trump’s return was the Democrats’ fault—and not the result of a decades‑long propaganda campaign that the Journal’s own institution paid for and published. You want to know what a real “monumental act of selfishness” looks like? It looks like the Murdoch family fortune, built on telling millions of people that their own country is their enemy, and then acting surprised when those people vote to burn it down. Jill Biden didn’t elect Trump. The people who signed the editorial page’s checks did.

When to use: for the reader who needs the full prophetic register—scriptural wrath, canonical indictment, and the moral authority of the tradition turned against the hypocrite. A controlled, restrained profanity allowed; the blade is sharpened, not shattered.

DEFCON 1+ — Prophetic Indictment

The prophet Jeremiah stood at the gate and named the sin of the unblushing face: “They did not know how to blush.” The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board has acquired that diagnosis perfectly. After years of laundering the lies that broke a republic—calling election subversion a “procedural dispute,” calling the prosecution of a serial criminal “political overreach,” calling the violent assault on the Capitol an “unfortunate episode”—they now assume the posture of moral custodians, lecturing the nation on selfishness. They have become the whitewashed tomb, clean on the outside and full of rot within. Their editorial is an exercise in what the apostle Paul called “holding the form of godliness but denying its power.” They claim to speak for free people, yet they have done more than almost any institution to deliver those free people into the hands of a man who openly admires tyrants. They have drunk the wine of the harlot—the golden cup full of abominations—and called it “supply‑side economics.” And now they point at Jill Biden, a woman whose sin was the ordinary, human sin of pride, and blame her for the catastrophe they helped engineer. What they did to the American experiment—the propaganda, the normalization, the deliberate demolition of the line between fact and fiction—is the worm that does not die. They will not be remembered as defenders of liberty. They are a goddamned disgrace, the scribes of Pharaoh keeping the books while the taskmasters cracked the whip. The bilge of the republic, risen to the editorial page. History will record their true legacy: they were the publicists for the machine that broke America, and they did it for a tax cut.

When to use: the cathartic apex—rage released, profanity unleashed, the Carlin‑esque, late‑night, full‑expletive torrent. Still kicking up at the entitled power, never at the ordinary reader. Gloves fully off.

DEFCON 1++ — Profane Scorched‑Earth

Oh, fuck all the way off with this pearl‑clutching horseshit. The Wall Street Journal editorial page—that fetid swamp of mendacity and boot‑licking—has the goddamn audacity to lecture anyone about selfishness? This is the same bunch of sycophants who spent four years gargling Trump’s taint while he dismantled the rule of law, called for the execution of his enemies, and tried to fucking steal an election. They whined about “due process” when he hoarded top‑secret documents like fucking souvenirs, and now they’re crying about Jill Biden? Jill Biden, for fuck’s sake? The woman whose biggest crime was wanting to keep the plane? The Journal’s editors are the worst kind of cowards: they’ve monetized the death of objectivity, they’ve turned their owner’s vendettas into the nation’s front page, and they’ve given intellectual cover to every fascist‑lite policy the GOP shat out for a goddamn decade. And now that the monster they fed has taken over again, they want us to believe the real problem was an old woman’s vanity? Are you shitting me? The “monumental act of selfishness” wasn’t the Bidens—it was the entire Murdoch empire building a disinformation death star, then blaming the victims for not ducking fast enough. Every single one of you on that editorial board should be forced to sit in a room and read the names of the people who died because of the lies you elevated to make your fucking margins. You are complicit in the American catastrophe, and your little bitch‑fit about Jill Biden is nothing but a pathetic attempt to scrub the blood off your hands with cheap perfume. You don’t get to play moral referee. You are the fucking criminals. Burn in the hell of your own legacy.

The Deeper Breakdown

The Journal’s editorial is a classic misdirection: by focusing on the Bidens’ personal failings—real as they were—it obscures the far more significant role the right‑wing media complex, of which the WSJ is a core component, played in re‑electing Donald Trump. The cui bono analysis is straightforward. Who benefits from this narrative? Not the Democratic Party, which is already facing its own reckoning. The beneficiaries are the same interests the Journal has always served: the owner class that reaped massive tax cuts under Trump, the fossil‑fuel industry that gained deregulation, and the judicial‑entitlement project that captured the Supreme Court. By turning the conversation into a morality play about the Bidens’ vanity, the editorial board insulates those structural beneficiaries from accountability and keeps its own readership focused on Democratic failures rather than on the Republican Party’s authoritarian turn.

The editorial claims that the Bidens’ selfishness “deserve[s] outsize credit for helping Donald Trump win a second term.” That’s a load‑bearing falsehood. The 2024 election was decided by the Electoral College, a structural advantage that consistently amplifies the Republican base, and by a vertically integrated profit loop: right‑wing media manufactured outrage to drive subscriptions, while donor‑class lobbying converted that outrage into deregulation and judicial capture. The Journal’s own hands are filthy in this. Its editorial page repeatedly minimized the January 6 insurrection, attacked the legitimacy of the investigations into Trump, and published defenses of his most antidemocratic actions. For example, after Trump’s indictment for mishandling classified documents—a case involving actual, physical national‑security risks—the Journal called it “a reckless use of prosecutorial power” (“A Destructive Trump Indictment,” June 10, 2023). That editorial helped convince millions of voters that the rule of law was a partisan weapon, paving the way for Trump’s comeback.

The Bidens’ decision to run again was a damaging, self‑interested blunder. But to lay “outsize credit” for Trump’s win at their feet is to ignore the elephant in the room: the conservative media apparatus that, for years, systematically delegitimized every institution that tried to stop him. The missing information is the full accounting of how much Rupert Murdoch’s properties, including the Journal, profited from the chaos they sowed. That’s a story the editorial page will never tell.