Lasts Sunday, the Wall Street Journal ran an opinion piece endorsing the Republican candidate for the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. The entire article takes and an extremely pro-Trump position, arguing that the Pennsylvania court did not “defend the law as it is written” when it allowed counting of votes that were delayed in the mail due to the pandemic. It insists that the court should never have allowed those 10,097 votes to count—even if they were kept segregated from the rest of the votes. But in the midst of this editorial, the Journal admits: “This didn’t matter because Mr. Biden won the state by 80,555.”

That admission of basic facts was far too much for the Wall Street Journal editorial board’s favorite person. On Wednesday, the WSJ published a “letter to the editor” from Donald Trump. [Link purposely omitted.] As might be expected, that letter contains a laundry list of lies that have been roundly disproven time and time again. In fact, most of them are claims that never had any basis in reality to begin with, but were simply pulled out of Trump’s … let’s say “golf hat.”  That includes not just claims that there were far more late ballots than actually existed, but that there were 120,000 “more votes than voters!” (The exclamation point there is Trump’s, obviously.)

Naturally, doing their part for spreading the Big Lie and further eroding the already fragile structure of American democracy, the WSJ ran all of Trump’s claims without any comment or context. That includes a claim that investigation into the Pennsylvania election results was nefariously halted by that most anti-Trump of figures, former attorney general Bill Barr.

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page has long been a cesspool of extreme positions and a showcase of rabid Republicanism. But in publishing Trump’s letter, they’ve now turned into an ad for insurgency.

As The Washington Post notes, if the Wall Street Journal was going to run the letter at all, they owed it to readers to provide the facts about Trump’s claims. After all, they wouldn’t run a letter that came in and made more than a dozen known-false claims about a corporation. Neither would they run a letter accusing some billionaire of a long list of unproven (or outright disproven) claims about crimes. So why is it okay for the WSJ to run a letter that repeats lies about the election, especially when those lies have already had their day in court?

The Post notes first that the Journal should never have published the letter without verifying that the claims it contained were not “wrong, misleading, or unimportant.” Which is exactly the sort of standard that likely would have applied to anyone but Trump, or in any piece discussing the future of American democracy.

In a 14-point response, the Post explains how, if the WSJ decided to publish the letter at all, they could have provided context and informed their readers about which of Trump’s claims had been found to be false, which of them had already been tested in court, and which of them would not have made any difference to the outcome even if found to be true. By lumping together claims that are real but unimportant, claims that are conjecture but unproven (or worse, proven false), and claims that are, at best, rampant speculation, Trump’s letter makes it seem that there were an overwhelming number of Pennsylvania votes in dispute. In fact, there were very few. Not enough to move the decimal point on the results, much less affect the outcome.

In a second article, The Washington Post points out the simplest fact of all—even though social media platforms like Twitter were astute enough to halt Trump’s continuous run of lies and misstatements, recognizing (belatedly) that these claims were fueling division and unrest, the Wall Street Journal still has no qualms about throwing gasoline on a burning democracy. The Post notes that while letters to the editor on their editorial page are fact-checked, as are those submitted to The New York Times, this doesn’t appear to be the case for the WSJ. 

And why should it be? Republicans have made it clear that facts are the enemy. The real wonder is that the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page doesn’t announce a very special kind of fact-checking: checking that the letters they publish contain no facts, just no facts, and only no facts.