Crisis? What Crisis?

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Over the weekend, a friend messaged me to say: “It’s honestly so cool we’re having a constitutional crisis over Eric Adams.” (“He really is a man of destiny,” the friend added, like Alexander the Great.) Earlier last week, President Trump’s Justice Department had ordered prosecutors in New York to drop corruption charges against Adams, the city’s mayor; in response, Danielle Sassoon, an acting US attorney, resigned, and was followed out the door by six other officials. At particular issue was the apparently overt political nature of the DOJ order, which made no judgment as to the merits of the charges but did suggest they were interfering with Adams’s reelection bid and cooperation with the new administration on immigration enforcement; what’s more, the order left room for the charges to be revived, sparking concerns that the administration would have the leverage to essentially control Adams going forward. “Our laws and traditions do not allow using the prosecutorial power to influence other citizens, much less elected officials, in this way,” the lead prosecutor in the case wrote in a blistering resignation letter. “I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion. But it was never going to be me.” (In the end, an official did indeed sign off, sending the order to a judge for review.)

Adams has denied any suggestion of a quid pro quo—but on Friday, he appeared for a joint interview on Fox News with Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar (and spinner of the famed Trump-Fox Revolving Door), who warned that if Adams “doesn’t come through” on immigration matters, “I’ll be back in New York City, and we won’t be sitting on the couch; I’ll be in his office, up his butt, saying, ‘Where the hell is the agreement we came to?’” The two men were laughing; speaking on CNN yesterday, Homan described the exchange as “a conversation between two cops having a good time.” A Politico reporter observed, however, that Adams’s face “fell mid-laugh as he appeared to process a barely veiled threat.” And various liberal pundits were flabbergasted, by both the Fox segment and the wider story; MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, for instance, described it as “one of the most corrupt dealings I’ve ever seen,” at least “in the history of the modern Justice Department.” Hayes and numerous other observers also likened the story to Watergate, with some arguing that this is worse. One law professor described it as the Saturday Night Massacre “on steroids.”

That the Adams imbroglio wasn’t even the undisputed top story in the news cycle over the weekend is a sign of the times. But the story did both channel and reflect a dominant media narrative of the moment: the idea, as my friend put it, that the US is having a constitutional crisis. At least one left-leaning magazine declared that the country had entered such a state of affairs almost as soon as Trump took office last month, with reference to his baldly unconstitutional order to end birthright citizenship; other columnists and pundits had joined in by early February, pointing to the new administration’s attempts to freeze swaths of federal funding and arrogate Congress’s spending powers more broadly. But such claims seem to have grown louder in the past week or so, in response not only to the Adams story, but to suggestions from senior administration figures that they might simply defy court orders and a first court ruling, a week ago today, that officials were not properly complying with an order. Major outlets spoke with legal experts who endorsed the crisis conclusion. (Such experts were media fixtures of the first Trump term and have swiftly “been called back into 24/7 service” this time, as Puck’s John Heilemann noted.) There have been invocations, if not of Alexander the Great, then of Roman tyrants and Napoleon, at least as played on film by Rod Steiger. Indeed, that reference was provoked by Trump himself, who appeared, intentionally or not, to quote from the film—“He who saves his Country does not violate any Law”—in social media posts over the weekend, drawing widespread rebukes.  

Not that the claims of a constitutional crisis are yet a matter of consensus within the media. Straight-news journalists have not adopted the phrasing wholesale in their own, voice-of-God copy, preferring to attribute the idea to experts and Trump critics; some have suggested that the crisis is not yet with us, but is brewing or looming. Many in right-wing media, meanwhile, have given the notion short shrift. The Wall Street Journal editorial board—which has been the subject of much recent comment (in my view overheatedly) for its readiness to criticize various Trump policies since he returned to office—dismissed the argument that the US is in a constitutional crisis as “overwrought,” arguing that Trump is, at worst, deliberately stretching his authority in an attempt to get the Supreme Court to weigh in, and that this doesn’t meet the definitional threshold; a true crisis could yet come, the board wrote, but for now “readers can relax.” Talking heads on Fox have characterized such claims as outright liberal-media fearmongering. Reince Priebus, a former Trump chief of staff turned analyst on ABC News, said on air yesterday that his old boss’s Napoleon/Steiger quote was merely “catnip for the media,” adding that, “in good times and bad times, the president enjoys taking a grenade out on a Saturday afternoon, throwing it on the floor, and watching everybody react.”

So far, so predictable. But the crisis/no crisis dividing lines have not always been drawn so cleanly. Briefing reporters last week, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, echoed the media-fearmongering line but then suggested that there is a constitutional crisis: one provoked by judicial blocking of Trump’s agenda; “Yes, We’re in a Constitutional Crisis,” the right-wing Federalist wrote, blaming Democrats’ supposed century-old effort to subvert the “real Constitution” by creating an unaccountable administrative state. (No Napoleon here; only Wilson, FDR, and LBJ.) Speaking to the news site NOTUS recently, the Republican senator Thom Tillis said that the new administration is, strictly speaking, violating the Constitution, but that it isn’t a crisis. (“Nobody should bellyache about that,” he said, in remarks that were widely disseminated throughout the political media.) Even liberal commentators who think that there is a constitutional crisis brewing might not be united on wanting to hear bellyaching about it. Asked on Meet the Press yesterday whether the term goes “too far,” Jen Psaki, a Biden-era predecessor of Leavitt turned host on MSNBC, said that while the country may be “on that road,” her view “is that is not the phrase that Democrats should be screaming from the rooftops every day.”

The recent media debate around the term invites obvious questions. What actually is a constitutional crisis? And what’s the threshold for being in one? Experts have offered definitions that reference unresolvable (at least within the system) clashes between different branches of government, or the executive branch clearly exceeding its legal authority without Congress or the courts being able to hem it in. The most obvious manifestation of this, liberal and center-right pundits seem to agree, would be if the Trump administration were to outright flout a clear court order. So far, while the administration has been chided for lack of compliance, many observers seem to think that the threshold for such a breach hasn’t been reached. But this, of course, could change. In such a scenario, Vox’s Ian Millhiser wrote last week, Congress could impeach and remove Trump, but, if past form is any guide, it likely wouldn’t do so—and we would, then, be in “a full-blown constitutional crisis.”

Others, however, have noted that the answers might not be clear-cut: as the New York Times’ Adam Liptak reported last week, there is “no universally accepted definition of a constitutional crisis,” and the term is “not binary: It is a slope, not a switch.” It doesn’t necessarily require a clash with the courts—Millhiser argued that an “even worse” crisis than Trump defying a court order would be the Supreme Court deciding to rubber-stamp his behavior—or, indeed, even need to involve the courts, at least not primarily; Millhiser’s colleague Eric Levitz recently sketched out a scenario in which Trump might use the impending deadline for hiking the debt ceiling to justify usurping Congress’s spending authority. Speaking on Slate’s Amicus podcast, Dahlia Lithwick and her guest Sam Bagenstos, a former federal legal official, noted that not all orders that appear to violate the Constitution even make it to court. At some point, “words can take on a talismanic significance that’s greater than their actual significance, and I think we might have hit that point with ‘constitutional crisis,’” Bagenstos said. He expects the administration to comply with the letter of court orders, he added, but this doesn’t mean “that our constitutional system is safe or we are in a healthy constitutional moment.”

I wrote last week about an emerging debate as to whether media coverage of Trump’s second term has so far been undercooked or overblown; typically, this sort of media debate is about proportionality, but on this occasion, observers who agree that Trump is a clear and present danger to the US system of government can take different sides, with some arguing that his power grabs must be communicated in blaring headlines and urgent updates, while others suggest that he is trying to conjure power by playing a king on TV, and that overselling what he can actually do (or, in some cases, might be prepared to do) increases the likelihood that people will accept such moves as a fait accompli. I agreed with those who argue that we should refrain from covering Trump as a king by rhetorically ceding to him powers that he doesn’t have, but also that he has proved throughout his political career that he can get away with behavior—inciting an insurrection at the Capitol, say—that normally wouldn’t fly either legally or politically, and that this complicates the task.

Observers on both sides of this media debate, of course, might frame Trump’s current behavior as a constitutional crisis; even if the term is fluid, there are a great many indications that applying it is currently justified. And yet I ultimately agree with Bagenstos and others who say that the semantic debate around the term is a limiting prism through which to view this moment. As he and Lithwick suggested, the term can appear narrow and legalistic. It also at least implies that the US wasn’t already in a crisis—even though, to borrow from Bagenstos, it clearly hasn’t been in a healthy constitutional moment for some time. Trace time backward and any number of major news stories could, as I see it, plausibly have been presented as a constitutional crisis: the Supreme Court granting the president (and thus, arguably, itself) extraordinary legal latitude; the court overturning Roe v. Wade; the insurrection and Republican lawmakers’ attendant push to overturn Biden’s election win; any number of now-forgotten things that Trump did the first time he was president; the leveraging of the debt ceiling as a perennial tool of political brinkmanship; presidents of both parties seeking more and more executive power. This list is not comprehensive, nor is everything on it of equal import or severity. But it does show, to Liptak’s point, that we’re talking more about continuity and escalation than a switch being flicked. This isn’t to say that the press should downplay this moment—almost the opposite, in fact. But we should be careful not to present it as a crossing of the Rubicon when it might not be.

You can go back further still, of course. It may be new for moments of constitutional crisis to play out in broad daylight on cable news (albeit with a laugh and a grin), but there have been such moments before, and the media has always played a key role in how they are perceived. After Sassoon and the other prosecutors in the Adams case resigned last week, MSNBC’s Katy Tur rolled footage of the NBC anchor John Chancellor describing the Saturday Night Massacre as perhaps “the most serious constitutional crisis” in US history as it unfolded in 1973; Tur added that the Adams resignations made that look “quaint.” But even back then, Chancellor may have been glossing over historical precedent. In a compelling column last week, the Journal’s Peggy Noonan invoked the presidency of Andrew Jackson, which, she wrote, “can be seen as a nonstop constitutional crisis.” Among other things, Jackson outright rejected a Supreme Court ruling on Cherokee sovereignty, supposedly issuing a famous line—“John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it”—that has echoed through some recent news coverage. It’s not clear that Jackson actually said this—the wording may actually have originated with Horace Greeley, the famed New York newspaper publisher. In any case, the action mattered more than the characterization.

Other notable stories:

• On Friday, the White House intensified its campaign against the Associated Press over the agency’s failure to fully go along with Trump’s order renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, banning the outlet from a trip with Trump aboard Air Force One and suggesting that it will be barred indefinitely from flights and from Trump availabilities in the Oval Office. In other news, the Journal reports that executives at Paramount, the owner of CBS News, are conflicted about settling a far-fetched lawsuit brought by Trump over the network’s editing of an interview with Kamala Harris last year, fearing that doing so could expose them to bribery allegations if the administration were to then approve a corporate merger that they are seeking. And the Journal profiled Leavitt, whom Trump sees as “a star”—for now.

• In Friday’s newsletter, we noted a new report in the Times, drawing on hitherto secret records from a recent legal fight pitting Rupert Murdoch against four of his children, that its authors described as offering an unprecedented glimpse into the family’s dynamics. (Murdoch wanted to change the terms of their inheritance to guarantee the ongoing conservative bent of his media empire under the stewardship of his son Lachlan.) Later on Friday, The Atlantic published an extraordinary piece of its own on the Murdochs: a profile, by McKay Coppins, of James Murdoch, a more liberal son who has fallen out with Rupert. The legal fight, Coppins writes, was “the culmination of a decades-long story—one that James decided he was finally ready to tell.”

• Late last week, the Times sent a memo to staff outlining a planned expanded use of AI tools for internal editorial and product-related purposes, seeking “to bolster our journalistic capabilities,” albeit with some defined limits; Semafor’s Max Tani has more. In other news about journalism and AI, publishers including The Atlantic, Politico, and Vox sued Cohere, a Canadian AI startup, alleging that it infringed on their copyright in the training and operation of its model. And, ICYMI last week, Thomson Reuters prevailed in a similar AI copyright case against a different, now defunct firm—the first victory in such a case in the US, per Wired’s Kate Knibbs.

• The New Yorker’s Jay Caspian Kang explored whether Stephen A. Smith, the sports TV star, should run for president. “The new-media prerequisites for the ideal 2028 Democratic candidate are as follows: They must attack the Party establishment in attention-grabbing ways. They must produce content around the clock. And they must feel ‘authentic,’” Kang writes. Smith “is a living meme whose rise to the first ranks of sports media came through his willingness to always be onscreen, his theatrical fights, and a profound understanding of how the Internet was changing traditional media.”

• And Saturday Night Live celebrated its fiftieth anniversary over the weekend, including with a star-studded special episode. “If all you expected was a diverting, nostalgia-filled evening where former cast members and celebrity friends of the show bounced in and out of sketches based on some of the program’s more notable features, then you likely enjoyed the special,” NPR’s Eric Deggans wrote afterward. “But if you were looking for a collection of performances that might somehow place the history of this comedy institution in perspective—or if you wanted the show to take some of those old, venerated sketches and use them to comment on modern times—you were likely disappointed by what the SNL crew rolled out.”

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Jon Allsop is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, among other outlets. He writes CJR’s newsletter The Media Today. Find him on Twitter @Jon_Allsop.