The Times seems to be more worried about Republicans than about tyranny.
The New York Times editorial board calls for responding to Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office by “build[ing] a coalition of Americans who disagree about many other subjects — who span conservative and progressive, internationalist and isolationist, religious and secular, business-friendly and labor-friendly, pro-immigration and restrictionist, laissez-faire and pro-government, pro-life and pro-choice — yet who believe that these subjects must be decided through democratic debate and constitutional processes rather than the dictates of a single man.” It’s a noble ideal and one that I could get behind if sincerely pursued. But both the messenger and the message are wrong.
The Times opens with the sort of hyperbole its readers demand: “The first 100 days of President Trump’s second term have done more damage to American democracy than anything else since the demise of Reconstruction.” I guess we have officially moved on both from the claim that January 6 nearly toppled our democracy and the contention that Georgia’s 2021 voting law (which is still in effect) represented “Jim Crow 2.0.”
The Times is, more broadly, not terribly well-placed to complain about abuses of executive power. True, unlike many of its columnists, the editorial board has at times acknowledged — at least obliquely — the dangers of Democratic presidents overreaching the constitutional limits of their office. During the Biden years, for example, the editorial board argued that broad executive student debt forgiveness would be “legally dubious, economically unsound, politically fraught and educationally problematic.” It defended the initial pandemic-era eviction moratorium, but argued in May 2021 for ending it. In both cases, Joe Biden ignored this counsel and had to be restrained by the Supreme Court. But the editorial board also contended that Biden was “right to order tighter vaccine rules, which he did for roughly two-thirds of the nation’s work force” via OSHA, another overreach that got struck down. When the Supreme Court struck down EPA rules that exceeded the agency’s statutory remit, the Times complained:
The decision amounts to a warning shot across the bow of the administrative state. The court’s current conservative majority, engaged in a counterrevolution against the norms of American society, is seeking to curtail the efforts of federal regulators to protect the public’s health and safety. The court already invoked a similar logic during the Covid pandemic to strike down workplace Covid testing requirements and a federal moratorium on evictions. And by refraining from defining a threshold for what constitutes a “major question,” the court is leaving a sword hanging over every new rule.
The Times also endorsed Kamala Harris, despite (or because of) her long record of left-wing authoritarian contempt for law, although its editorial was conspicuously short on details about Harris herself, being mainly an anti-Trump rant.
That background would be less concerning if this editorial was a serious effort to reach across the aisle. But in spite of a determined effort to acknowledge Trump’s legitimacy, nod to the legal and policy merits and popular support for some of his initiatives, and detail some of the legitimate concerns that conservatives as well as progressives have with Trump’s methods (including his brazen defiance of the congressional mandate to force ByteDance to divest from TikTok), and warnings that “liberals who conflate conservative policies with unconstitutional policies risk sending conservatives back into Mr. Trump’s camp,” the Times still can’t help itself. It insists, for example, on continuing the pretense that the Biden administration had nothing to do with prosecutions of Trump, or that ActBlue has done nothing that would justify an investigation.
Most conspicuously, in an editorial that runs for 3,000 words, the Times never once supports reducing the power of the presidency. At every turn, it argues for constraining Trump by political criticism and lawsuits, rather than by fencing in the imperial executive’s powers. Should presidents have the unilateral power to impose tariffs at will? Should the executive branch be able to strip nonprofits of their tax-exempt status? Should there be clearer, harder rules against federal meddling in private expressive associations and private businesses? There’s a lot of ways in which we could tyrant-proof the executive branch no matter which party is in power. That the Times can’t think of a single one of those to recommend suggests that it is still more worried about Republicans than about tyranny.