Before journalist Jeffrey Goldberg’s revelation that he’d been privy to a national security text thread discussing war plans by the Trump White House, the Atlantic’s editor in chief hosted another busy episode of public television’s Washington Week with The Atlantic, where Washington Post columnist David Ignatius and Atlantic writer Michael Scherer helped him hype the “constitutional crisis” (the phrase appears 16 times in the show’s transcript) of Trump supposedly defying the U.S. judicial system, perhaps eventually the Supreme Court.
Host Jeffrey Goldberg: The Trump Administration's confrontation with the judicial branch raises new fears of a possible constitutional crisis….People throw around the term constitutional crisis all the time, and I include myself in the category of people here, but what does it actually mean? Would it be a constitutional crisis if the president defies a federal judge's order on the detention of immigrants? Are we already in such a crisis?….
David Ignatius of the Washington Post said it was coming.
David Ignatius: So, my definition would be constitutional crisis is when the president defies the Supreme Court. We're heading in that direction. The president is responding to sharp pushback from the chief justice by pushing back himself. Right wing Twitter is talking about a judicial coup. This is, increasingly, I think, a dangerous moment....
Goldberg got worried about a Trump statement on judges.
Goldberg: Just to illustrate something you're talking about, I want you to all listen to the president sounding a bit ominous on the subject of judges he doesn't like.
Donald Trump, U.S. President: We have very bad judges, and these are judges that shouldn't be allowed. I think they -- I think, at a certain point, you have to start looking at what do you do when you have a rogue judge.
Yet, in contrast with Goldberg’s “ominous” phrasing now, Washington Week at the time didn’t even mention comments made on March 4, 2020 by Democratic Majority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer when he spoke at a rally in front of the Court building against abortion restrictions and made violent-sounding threats against two conservative Supreme Court justices, Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch, "I want to tell you, Gorsuch, I want to tell you, Kavanaugh, you have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price.” The show was silent on the matter the following week as well.
None of these people cried "constitutional crisis" when President Biden bragged he'd skip over SCOTUS on student-loan forgiveness. "The Supreme Court blocked it,” Biden said, “but that didn’t stop me.”
Goldberg was working up to a hypothetical Trump defiance as a "constitutional crisis," and Ignatius filled in the required anti-Trump panic in dramatic fashion.
Ignatius: That’s a moment that we dread to imagine what authority in the end would the Supreme Court have to enforce its ruling against the president. And in the end, I think we would have a constitutional crisis. We would have the people, I hope, enraged at the defiance. I mean, you know, that's a direct assault on the Constitution. Every official of the United States government swears an oath to the Constitution. They need to be reminded of that. Every member of Congress surely understands that an attack on the Supreme Court of the United States goes to the very heart of what our country is, what the founders imagine. You take a look at the Constitution, it couldn't be clearer, you know? It just enumerates the powers of each branch. Article 3, talking about the powers of the judiciary couldn't be clearer. And that's what Trump is going at….
For good measure, The Atlantic's Scherer compared Trump to ref-working, chair-hurling Indiana University college basketball coach Bobby Knight.
Scherer: There's another way of interpreting what the president's doing right now, which is he went to the Justice Department last week and told a story about Bobby Knight, the basketball coach, and how great he was at working the refs. It's clearly in his mind….And he's doing a Bobby Knight. He's throwing the chair, you know, into the middle of the basketball court.
