The isentropic Euler equations form a system of conservation laws modeling compressible fluid flows with constant thermodynamical entropy. Due to the occurence of shock discontinuities, the total energy of the system is decreasing in time. We review the second order calculus on the Wasserstein space of probability measures and show how the isentropic Euler equations can be interpreted as a steepest descent equation in this framework. We introduce a variational time discretization based on a sequence of minimization problems, and show that this approximation converges to a suitably defined measure-valued solution of the conservation law. Finally, we present some preliminary results about the numerical implementation of our time discretization.