New York Times Discovers Two Hundred Year-Old Man, Announces His Sudden Birth

This is what I’m arguing against, and it’s not hard.

I’ve said a couple times now that I love Donald Trump’s executive orders, but I don’t love that we’ve lost the presumption of balanced authority that was supposed to have historically structured a constitutional republic, for which I don’t blame Trump at all. As I’ve been saying and saying and saying, Americans have been talking about the imperial presidency and the decline of Congress for a long time, and for good reason. For better or worse, Trump is well within the boundaries of a broken political system that he didn’t break.

So here come the top political journalists at the New York Times to indulge themselves in a just remarkably silly round of pearl clutching, in a newsroom podcast — “Trump 2.0 Arrives in Force” — warning that Trump is doing stunning things that are completely new, busting through all the “guardrails.” It’s all Orange Hitler-unprecedented, and completely related not to structural or systemic forces, but rather to Trump’s bad personality and his personal yearning for power. Let’s tell this story with screenshots:

Shockingly, in a completely unprecedented move, the President of the United States wants people in the executive branch to not be openly disloyal to him or to directly obstruct his policy agenda. Most presidents, you see, prefer to fill up the executive branch with people who hate them, and who oppose their policy agenda. I mean, obviously. So here’s the precise structure of the alarm being sounded: The President of the United States wants executive branch employees to comply with the orders of the person who has been elected to lead the executive branch. What an absolute crisis.

Donald Trump, the warning goes, is trying to eradicate “pockets of independent decision-making authority” in the executive branch, a despot’s shocking power-grab that seeks to eradicate competition for authority within the government so ORANGE HITLER can just run the whole thing, unopposed. But the Constitution has three branches of government, and one of them is run by the President of the United States. The Constitution doesn’t describe “pockets of independent decision-making authority” in the executive branch. So the warning is that Trump is trying to eradicate something that doesn’t legitimately exist, should never exist, and has no standing in our constitutional order — precisely the functionally independent administrative state that political journalists mostly pretend not to know about. It’s quite telling that our top political journalists warn against the loss of “pockets of independent decision-making authority” in the executive branch, a warning doesn’t mean anything like the thing they think they mean.

Donald Trump and his allies are looking for ways to maximize the power of the executive branch. Again, stunning and unprecedented: Everyone who has ever become the President of the United States before Trump has just immediately started looking for ways to shed power and not actually run things¹. Trump immediately started signing a massive list of executive orders, asserting his personal authority over the nation, which no one has ever thought of before, we swear.

The next one needs two back-to-back screenshots:

Again, not new. Administrations choose to enforce some laws and choose to de-prioritize the enforcement of other laws, a choice the Obama administration made explicit in 2012 with the unilateral implementation of Deferred Action for Childhood Entry:

Congress didn’t change the law; Barack Obama just decided to stop enforcing part of it. Clear evidence that Trump’s decision not to enforce the TikTok ban represents an unprecedented transition to dictatorship and the brand new disregard of Congress and its laws, right?

Note that the New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman explains the current political crisis entirely in terms of personalities, explaining that Mitch McConnell resisted Trump is his first term but has less power now, so Trump is getting away with more stuff. I don’t have a screenshot of that one, because I started to yawn and gave up.

All of their explanations are about personalities. They’re boring, they don’t know any history, and they say that long-debated problems regarding the boundaries around executive power — some involving not-recent presidents like John Adams and Abe Lincoln — are sudden and brand-new developments. The news is just terrible. They’re talking about structural problems that should be debated, but their shallowness strangles the debate in its crib. Think of most mainstream news as something akin to liquid mercury, and try not to get any on you.

1. Sarcasm not entirely valid in the presence of Grover Cleveland.