Herb Strentz was dean of the Drake School of Journalism from 1975 to 1988 and professor there until retirement in 2004. He was executive secretary of the Iowa Freedom of Information Council from its founding in 1976 to 2000.
Within a few hours on May 4, the news media offered two provocative perspectives on President Donald Trump, one from The New York Times the other from NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
Subscribers to the New York Times could consider the paper’s 24 pages of text and photos containing critiques of Trump and his cabinet. A bit later, they and the rest of us could view the second perspective on TV.
COMPETING VIEWS OF TRUMP
The Times offered a double opinion section pulling together much of the tragedy and travesty of having Trump reign as king or sovereign of the United States instead of serving us as president.
Then came “Meet the Press,” where Trump informed Kristen Welker—and all of us—that he would rely on his “brilliant lawyers” to see if he really was bound by his oath of office to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
He said it was too time-consuming to accord a constitutional right to due process in our courts to people whom he had vowed to deport.
(Around the same time, many felt that Trump mocked the late Pope Francis. A few days after Trump joked that he’d like to be Pope, the official White House account on X/Twitter posted an AI-generated photo of him in papal vestments.)
Whew!
The Times’ opinion section included twelve pages of commentaries about Trump, followed by twelve pages of mostly photos and brief comments on cabinet members: “22 people charged with dismantling the government from the inside.”
The first section began:
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 [in 1877]. Mr. Trump is attempting to create a presidency unconstrained by Congress or the courts, in which he and his appointees can override written law when they want to. It is precisely the autocratic approach that this nation’s founders sought to prevent when writing the Constitution.
In print, this section carried the headline “FIGHT LIKE OUR DEMOCRACY DEPENDS ON IT.” Online, the headline read, “There Is a Way Forward: How to Defeat Trump’s Power Grab.”
Sixteen Times columnists addressed Trump’s to-do list including “Repress dissent. Shatter precedents… Crush elite institutions. Seize executive power.”
In the second section, “No Ordinary Cabinet. No Ordinary Time,” Times columnist David French offered a 900-word commentary on Trump and his most senior appointees. French concluded:
There is overwhelming evidence that Trump committed acts of misconduct that merited both impeachment and removal and criminal prosecution.
There is also overwhelming evidence that he’s not an economic or military genius, but instead often flies by the seat of his pants. The on-again, off-again tariff regime is an ideal example. He loves tariffs, but he fears the consequences of his own policy, so we lurch wildly from statement to statement, depending on the fluctuations of the market.
Despite each mistake and each successive scandal, the cabinet members cheer. After all, if they want to be seen as strong, they have to surrender to Trump. That is their only path.
Following Trump’s appearance on “Meet the Press,” Boston College history professor Heather Cox Richardson summarized the president’s approach to constitutional law well. From the May 4 edition of her newsletter:
In an interview aired today on NBC News’s Meet the Press, reporter Kristen Welker asked President Donald J. Trump if he agreed that every person in the United States is entitled to due process.
“I don’t know. I’m not, I’m not a lawyer. I don’t know,” Trump answered.
The U.S. Constitution guarantees that “no person shall…be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” Judges across the political spectrum agree that the amendment does not limit due process to citizens. […]
When Welker pointed out that the Constitution guarantees due process, Trump suggested he could ignore it because honoring due process was too slow. “I don’t know,” he said. “It seems—it might say that, but if you’re talking about that, then we’d have to have a million or 2 million or 3 million trials,” he said. “We have thousands of people that are—some murderers and some drug dealers and some of the worst people on Earth.”
“I was elected to get them the hell out of here, and the courts are holding me from doing it,” he added.
Welker tried again. “[D]on’t you need to uphold the Constitution of the United States?”
Trump replied: “I don’t know. I have to respond by saying, again, I have brilliant lawyers that work for me, and they are going to obviously follow what the Supreme Court said.”
Conservative judge J. Michael Luttig explained to MSNBC’s Ali Velshi that far-right scholars have argued that the president does not have to follow the Supreme Court if he doesn’t agree with its decisons: he can interpret the Constitution for himself. Luttig called this “constitutional denialism.” He added that “[t]he American people deserve to know if the President does not intend to uphold the Constitution of the United States or if he intends to uphold it only when he agrees with the Supreme Court.”
While much of the above is unsettling, I also found it to be refreshing.
Refreshing? Yes! It is needed commentary these days, particularly since some journalism stalwarts for the past 50 or more years have declined in reputation for news coverage and commentary under new ownership. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos has meddled with editorial policy at The Washington Post. Meanwhile, Paramount (the parent company of CBS News) has sought to reign in coverage of Trump on the Sunday evening program “60 Minutes.”
During the 2024 campaign, many newspapers did not endorse a presidential candidate—perhaps because their owners or parent companies were wary of MAGA reprisals. Papers not endorsing included The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Minnesota Star-Tribune, Omaha World Herald, USA TODAY, Des Moines Register and other Gannett papers, Baltimore Sun, Chicago Tribune, Denver Post, Quad City Times and others.
CLOSER TO HOME
Iowa’s U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley is either complicit in or silent on Trump actions, declaring Trump has a mandate from the voters to “drain the swamp” in Washington.
Millions of Americans will suffer reduced services by the “draining” of some 260,000 real public servants, more than twelve percent of civilian federal workers. Grassley does not explain how getting less than 50 percent of the nationwide popular vote (49.8 percent to be precise) constitutes having a mandate to drain. Kamala Harris got 48.3 percent.
Likewise, in blaming former President Joe Biden for not dealing with the southern border, Iowa Republicans and others do not mention that in early 2024, then-candidate Trump derailed a bipartisan Congressional effort to address border problems, for fear passage of such a measure would make Biden look good.
An Iowa Law Review article by Carl Tobias found that as chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Grassley was President Barack Obama’s adversary for two years, and then became President Trump’s servant in the same role.
Further, as Rick Morain noted in a Bleeding Heartland post, Grassley acknowledged during a recent town hall meeting that political reasons explain why he blocked Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court in 2016, but hastened the appointment of Amy Coney Barrett a month before Americans voted Trump out of office in 2020.
Other Bleeding Heartland posts have faulted Attorney General Brenna Bird, U.S. Senator Joni Ernst, and Governor Kim Reynolds for their complicity in supporting Trump, or their silence when our leaders should have held him accountable.
If Grassley, Ernst, Bird, Reynolds and the Iowa’s four U.S. House members were to take a citizenship test that asked them to explain the purpose of separation of powers and the need for checks and balances in the federal system, they’d flunk that part of the exam.