It's Only a 'Crisis' When Republicans Try to Restrain Government!

Tim Graham on Feb 12, 2025

The entire media-Democrat complex spent years building panic over President Donald Trump being a dire threat to democracy, only to be embarrassed by the electorate who decisively chose the Terrible Threat over Kamala Harris.

Now Trump is displaying the highest approval ratings of his political career, and voters are satisfied he's acting on his campaign promises. Pretty much all his Cabinet picks are getting confirmed. So, what can this Panic Patrol do now? Just as judges and prosecutors were arrayed to stop Trump before he was elected again, a passel of mostly Democrat-appointed judges are getting in the way of his early executive actions designed to restrain government.

The new media buzzwords are "constitutional crisis." In his "Reliable Sources" newsletter, Brian Stelter was making a crazy quilt of quotes from all the anti-Trump forces.

"Constitutional crisis looms as Trump overhauls government" was the lead story on CNN's homepage. CNN's Joan Biskupic warned that "some of Donald Trump's top advisers have cast doubt on whether rulings on those lawsuits would even constrain the president."

CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin told Anderson Cooper, "If you listen to what the president and vice president are saying, it certainly suggests that it's a real possibility that they'll simply ignore what a court says."

Then Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) told CNN host Kaitlan Collins, "This isn't hyperbole to say that we are staring the death of democracy in the eyes, right now." Crying wolf never goes out of style on their side.

Stelter did not account for the conservative rebuttal on this, starting with former President Joe Biden's shameless avoidance of any judicial or congressional power in single-handedly forgiving federal student loans. Biden boasted: "The Supreme Court tried to block me from relieving student debt. But they didn't stop me."

Try to find anyone on the left who uttered the term "constitutional crisis."

Instead, it was hailed as "historic." On Oct. 17, 2024, CNN.com posted this press release: "Biden has approved $175 billion in student loan forgiveness for nearly 5 million people." Reporter Katie Lobosco proclaimed, "The Biden-Harris administration is reminding voters how it has delivered a historic amount of student debt relief even as Republicans have challenged several of its efforts in court and balked at the costs."

It's a press release because there isn't a Biden-Harris critic quoted anywhere in the 764-word article. Only the Biden folks are quoted.

CNN and Stelter should account for Cooper's show on April 7, 2023, as they discussed judges ruling on the availability of abortion-inducing drugs. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) was the anti-judicial rebel: "I believe that the Biden administration should ignore this ruling." The judiciary was engaged, she claimed, in "an unprecedented and dramatic erosion of the legitimacy of the courts" by ruling against the abortion pushers. No one cried "constitutional crisis."

As usual, the liberals use situational ethics depending on who is in power and what is at stake. Right now, liberals don't have the power in the White House or in Congress, and it's clear they are feeling angry and powerless.

It's very early in Trump's second term, and we don't know how all these early battles will play out. But we certainly know that the "independent" media cannot be trusted to define "democracy" or "constitutional crisis." To them, these are just malleable words in party-line press releases.

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Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Tim Graham and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.