The Once Great Paper's Sad Decline into Satire

The WSJ editorial denouncing the search of John Bolton's home is example gazillionty of the once great paper's sad decline into satire.

"It’s hard to see the raid as anything other than vindictive," the editors claim before seeing any evidence as to the nature of the search.…

— Julie Kelly 🇺🇸 (@julie_kelly2) August 24, 2025

… While speculating the inquiry has something to do with Bolton's 2020 book, the WSJ continued to opine and misrepresent the facts:

"The President then claimed Mr. Bolton had exposed classified information, though the book had gone through an extensive pre-publication scrub at the White House for classified material." (A federal judge, and one who is no friend of Donald Trump, concluded Bolton's memoir indeed contained national security secrets but failed to block release because the books had already been published and shipped. The prepublication review also was not finished.)

Trump's DOJ subsequently opened a criminal investigation into Bolton's mishandling of classified info but that investigation "faded away under President Biden," the WSJ laughably described the closing of the case.

And this is LOL: "It’s unlikely that Mr. Bolton broke any laws on national secrets, and he certainly didn’t share any with us over our long association with him." OK THEN THAT IS ALL THE EVIDENCE WE NEED, WSJ!

WSJ editors are also outraged that the president pulled Bolton's taxpayer-paid security and "has to pay for legal counsel...his family has to endure the anxiety of being under federal government siege."

UNDER SIEGE, they say.

WSJ editors call Trump's advisors "minions" who "don’t serve as the check on his worst impulses the way grown-ups did in his first term."

"The presidential id is now unchained."

Then the closer: "The real offender here is a President who seems to think he can use the powers of his office to run vendettas. We said this was one of the risks of a second Trump term, and it’s turning out to be worse than we imagined."

What a facile editorial, petulant and largely fact-free, indistinguishable from a Rachel Maddow rant.