The Art Of The Manufactured Crisis

By Rich Lowry on Feb 13, 2025

So much is new and topsy-turvy in our national politics, but one thing has endured -- the commitment of the Democrats and the media to whipping up insta-hysteria about something Donald Trump has said or done, or might say or do.

This has been a consistent thread in their reaction to Trump since 2015, and the near unanimous insistence that we are in, or about to enter, "a constitutional crisis" over the last several days is the latest instance.

From seemingly nowhere, the phrase became practically obligatory in attacks on the Trump administration and in the press coverage.

On the influential New York Times podcast, The Daily, the paper's Supreme Court reporter, Adam Liptak, said that "the consensus is that this is a constitutional crisis."

There is indeed such a consensus among scholars and commentators hostile to the administration, and soon enough, there will be another rapidly congealing consensus around some other, similarly dire contention.

These panics often say as much about the panickers -- who hope to create a political reality out of sheer passionate repetition -- as they do about Trump.

There is no doubt that the administration is determined to exercise the maximum possible power over the federal bureaucracy, and it may, if it hasn't already, overstep its bounds. Everything is being litigated as we speak, and the administration will surely win some and lose some.

It's not clear why this is a crisis, even if the pace and audacity of the Musk-driven changes to federal operations have been extraordinary.

A post on X by Vice President J.D. Vance saying that "judges aren't allowed to control the executive's legitimate power" super-charged the claims of crisis, even though the vice president's statement constituted a truism. It's a matter of Constitutional Law 101 that the judiciary can't control the "legitimate" powers of the executive branch -- otherwise, the separation of powers means nothing.

Vance's hypothetical examples of judicial lawlessness -- a judge telling a general how to conduct military operations or the attorney general how to use prosecutorial discretion -- were unassailable. Yet, the darkest possible interpretation was put on Vance's post based on what he didn't say -- namely, that Trump would defy court rulings.

When both President Trump himself and his White House press secretary subsequently said that he'd comply with judicial orders, it did little or nothing to shake the consensus that there's a constitutional crisis.

Maybe progressives and the mainstream press are just particularly sensitive about high-handed exercises of executive power and challenges to the standing of the courts. This is hard to credit given that they were supportive of, or blasé about, brazenly unconstitutional acts of unilateral governance by Barack Obama (on immigration) and Joe Biden (on student loans).

Nor was anyone outraged when the entire Democratic Party worked to undermine the legitimacy of the Supreme Court after its ruling in Dobbs. Both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris endorsed "court reform" that amounted to a call to pack the Supreme Court and to bring an effective end to its existence as an independent institution. Yet this issue was considered an afterthought in the campaign, and not nearly as threatening as J.D. Vance's post on X.

At the moment, the Trump administration is getting delayed, not defeated, in the courts. After initially halting it, a district judge just permitted the administration's "Fork in the Road" resignation offer to federal employees to proceed. If the Trump administration eventually prevails in such cases (it is on strong ground on matters related to personnel policy), the supposed crisis won't be that it's defying court decisions, but that it's winning them.

What's guaranteed is that some time soon, perhaps within days, there will be another hair-on-fire moment, with all the usual suspects using the same catchphrase to try to create a sense of urgency about a new crisis du jour. The more things change in the Trump era, the more this stays the same.

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(Rich Lowry is on Twitter @RichLowry)