‘Trump Brazenly Defies Laws’ is not an A17 story

The law-breaking is not the “new normal” -- it’s a national emergency

Donald Trump has repeatedly and flagrantly broken the law since reassuming the presidency. But the national media – whose mission is ostensibly to hold the powerful accountable – is treating it like the new normal.

I’m not saying our top journalists are ignoring the story – we know about it, after all, thanks to their reporting. They are dutifully and diligently giving us daily updates on the law-breaking, with the occasional news analysis reminding us that a lot of law-breaking is taking place.

But they’re not treating it like a national emergency – with banner headlines, non-stop coverage, and front-page editorials.

They’re not labeling it a constitutional crisis.

They’re not writing about how to stop it.

They’re not sounding the alarm.

The New York Times this week finally had a pretty strong story about the breadth and depth of Trump’s law-breaking, written by Charlie Savage. Its headline was “Trump Brazenly Defies Laws in Escalating Executive Power Grab.”

It ran on page A17 on Thursday. (And it never led the home page on Wednesday.)

I’m going to write about this problem more next week, but today I want to contrast the lack of alarm on the news side with the views of some insightful political analysts, several of whom happen to write opinion columns for the same news organizations that are being so lackadaisical on their front pages.

Here’s how New York Times opinion columnist Jamelle Bouie assessed the situation:

To describe the current situation in the executive branch as merely a constitutional crisis is to understate the significance of what we’re experiencing. “Constitutional crisis” does not even begin to capture the radicalism of what is unfolding in the federal bureaucracy and of what Congress’s decision not to act may liquidate in terms of constitutional meaning.

Together, Trump and Musk are trying to rewrite the rules of the American system. They are trying to instantiate an anti-constitutional theory of executive power that would make the president supreme over all other branches of government. They are doing so in service of a plutocratic agenda of austerity and the upward redistribution of wealth. And the longer Congress stands by, the more this is fixed in place.

Washington Post columnist Philip Bump focused on the disturbing lack of pushback from the other two branches:

Trump has worked deliberately and effectively to transform the presidency from being one-third of a governmental triumvirate into something more like what his ideological allies Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orban enjoy. He has been aided by remarkable capitulation from the purportedly equal branches.

As he and his team — most notably Elon Musk — run roughshod over legal and ethical boundaries, it’s been hard not to notice how unprepared the system is for an internal threat. One would in fact be justified in assuming that Trump’s failures to comply with the law might trigger no repercussions whatsoever, just as they didn’t during his first term in office and largely didn’t during his interregnum.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, the NYU professor who has been so good at showing how Trump’s actions are right out of the authoritarian playbook, wrote that Trump and Musk are moving so fast, they’re going even beyond it – “updating” it, and turning the country into “a laboratory of autocratic innovation.”

She explained:

The speed of its implementation makes Trump’s takeover stand out within an authoritarian framework. The more corrupt and criminal the autocrat, the more he is obsessed with punishing enemies and feeling safe. Cue the immediate execution of the revenge and retribution part of this plan, with anyone who was involved in attempts to bring Trump and his collaborators to justice for the Jan. 6 insurrection or anything else, FBI employees included, is now a target.

Only with coups –or crackdowns initiated in response to coup attempts, such as Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s post-July 2016 purges—do you see such a rush to punish and expel non-loyalists from the government.

“Of course it’s a coup,” wrote Timothy Snyder, the professor and author who has advised “don’t obey in advance.”

That coup is, in fact, happening. And if we do not recognize it for what it is, it could succeed….

The ongoing actions by Musk and his followers are a coup because the individuals seizing power have no right to it. Elon Musk was elected to no office and there is no office that would give him the authority to do what he is doing. It is all illegal. It is also a coup in its intended effects: to undo democratic practice and violate human rights.

Each hour this goes unrecognized makes the success of the coup more likely.

Michael Waldman, president of the Brennan Center for Justice, mocked the media for its understated word choice:

Ignore the media headlines reporting that these moves “raise questions” or “push the boundary.” It’s an anticonstitutional lawbreaking spree.

Then he asked the obvious follow-up question:

Will that matter? Members of Congress from both parties should be shouting objections. Trump’s fellow Republicans, so far, have utterly abdicated. Federal courts have a duty to step up. Even this highly political Supreme Court will rule against Trump on some things — but these justices have repeatedly proven highly deferential to presidential power. (The ruling conferring vast immunity from criminal prosecution for illegal acts if they can be couched as “official” is less than a year old.)

That doesn’t mean there’s no hope, however. His conclusion:

Ultimately, public opinion will matter most.

And that, of course, is why mass media still matters.

At what point – if any -- will the national media recognize that we are in state of national emergency? What action by Trump or Musk -- if any -- would send them into five-alarm mode about the U.S. becoming an authoritarian country? And what should they do then?

These are the questions I’m going to try to address next week. I’d love to hear your thoughts, either in comments or by email at froomkin@presswatchers.org.

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