Dear Journalists: You Are Dismantling Democracy and You Should Be Ashamed

A Crisis Dispatch

Photo by AbsolutVision on Unsplash

There is a law.

Not a norm. Not a tradition. Not a gentlemen’s agreement between branches of government that polite people honor and impolite people ignore. A law. Passed by Congress. Signed by the President of the United States. Entered into the United States Code.

Section 1250A of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2024, codified at 22 U.S.C. § 1928f. Signed into law December 22, 2023. The exact statutory language: the President shall not “suspend, terminate, denounce, or withdraw the United States from the North Atlantic Treaty… except by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, provided that two-thirds of the Senators present concur, or pursuant to an Act of Congress.”

He cannot do it. It is illegal. The law says so.

The law was co-authored by Tim Kaine and Marco Rubio. That Marco Rubio. The one who is now Secretary of State, serving the president who wants to violate the law Rubio wrote. I will leave that detail to sit without further comment, because it requires none.

Now, the administration has a prepared escape route. The Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel issued an opinion in 2020 arguing that presidential treaty withdrawal is an exclusive executive power — that Congress is constitutionally prohibited from constraining it at all. That opinion is binding on executive branch agencies. It will be invoked. It will be presented to the press as a legitimate legal argument, and the press will report it as such, and the headlines will say “legal dispute over NATO withdrawal” rather than “president attempts to violate federal law while citing internal memo.”

But an OLC opinion is not a court ruling. It is not a statute. It is the executive branch’s lawyers telling the executive branch what it wants to hear. The law exists. The OLC opinion is the administration’s argument for why the law should not apply to them. Those are different things. And the press treats them as equivalent — as two sides of a legal question — when one of them is the law and the other is a memo.

For those keeping score on the constitutional law: the only relevant Supreme Court precedent, Goldwater v. Carter (1979), was dismissed without reaching the merits. And under the Youngstown framework — Justice Jackson’s concurrence, the most cited framework in separation of powers law — presidential power is “at its lowest ebb” when the president acts contrary to the expressed will of Congress. Section 1250A is the expressed will of Congress, passed by an 87-13 bipartisan Senate vote. The administration is not operating in a legal gray zone. It is operating at the precise point the Constitution identifies as maximum congressional authority and minimum executive power.

Now tell me what the headlines say.

Here they are. Today. April 8, 2026. Real headlines from major outlets covering this story:

The Wall Street Journal: “White House Confirms Trump Has Weighed U.S. Exit From NATO.” The law appears in paragraph six. One sentence. Buried.

Bloomberg: “Trump to Discuss Leaving NATO When He Meets Alliance Chief.” No mention of legality.

Le Monde: “White House says Trump will discuss possibility of leaving NATO.” Possibility. Not “illegal possibility.”

Al Jazeera: “Trump administration signals it is mulling NATO withdrawal after Iran war.” Mulling. As if it is a legitimate policy option under consideration.

The Washington Post: “Trump to discuss leaving NATO in meeting with alliance’s leader, White House says.” Straight stenography of the White House position.

Newsweek: “White House addresses NATO withdrawal, says allies ‘turned their backs.’” The administration’s framing as the headline. The law appears deep in the article.

Fox News: “Economist editor says European leaders now fear a true NATO ‘divorce’ after Trump pullout threat.” A divorce. A relationship decision. Not a legal violation.

NPR: “Trump’s criticism of NATO raises questions of whether — or how — the U.S. could leave.” The answer to that question is “he can’t, it’s illegal,” but the headline treats it as open.

And PBS — the best of the lot — “Trump is expected to meet with Rutte as he muses about pulling out of NATO.” Muses. The president of the United States is musing about committing a federal crime, and PBS chose the word muses. To their credit, they mention the 2023 law in paragraph four. Four. Not one, not two — four.

Not one headline leads with the law. Not one. Four hundred and seventy articles on Ground News covering this story. One aggregator’s AI summary mentions the statute. The actual reporting treats it as a policy debate.

I want you to sit with that for a moment — and then I want to say something directly to the people producing those headlines.

You know about the law. It was covered when it passed. You have researchers. You have editors. You have access to the United States Code. The NATO Withdrawal Act is not obscure. It is not buried. It is a bipartisan piece of legislation that passed specifically because Congress anticipated this exact scenario and decided to do something about it.

And you chose not to put it in the headline. You chose not to put it in the lede. You buried it, if you mentioned it at all, in a subordinate clause in paragraph nine, beneath four paragraphs of palace intrigue about who in the West Wing is pushing the idea.

That is a choice. It is not a neutral choice. It is not an objective choice. It is a choice that serves the interests of an administration engaged in a systematic assault on constitutional governance, and you are making it every single day, and I am done pretending it is anything other than what it is: complicity.

Not the complicity of enthusiasm. The complicity of cowardice — of people who have so thoroughly internalized the frame that the executive’s stated intentions constitute reality that they can no longer see the law as a binding constraint rather than a political variable. The complicity of a professional class that has decided, whether consciously or not, that their access, their relationships, their place in the conversation, matters more than the simple act of telling people what the law says.

You are not reporting on a democracy. You are normalizing its dismemberment. And you are doing it one sanewashed headline at a time.

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The doctrine has a name. In Trump v. CASA (2025), Justice Amy Coney Barrett, writing for a 6-3 Supreme Court majority, held that even when a court finds the executive branch has acted unlawfully, relief extends only to the specific plaintiffs before that court — not to everyone affected by the illegal policy. Her own words: “When a court concludes that the Executive Branch has acted unlawfully, the answer is not for the court to exceed its power, too.” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissent named what this actually means: “The Court’s decision to permit the Executive to violate the Constitution with respect to anyone who has not yet sued is an existential threat to the rule of law.”

Jackson was right. But Barrett’s ruling is now the law. And its practical meaning is this: the president may enforce an illegal policy against everyone in America except the named plaintiffs in a lawsuit, for as long as it takes the legal challenges to work their way through the courts. The executive acts. The burden falls entirely on the people harmed to sue, to achieve standing, to win, and to do it fast enough to matter.

The law has been functionally repealed. Not by Congress. Not by the courts. By a journalistic norm so internalized that the people practicing it cannot see it anymore.

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Let me be precise about what this norm produces, because I think people do not fully understand the mechanism.

When the press reports “Trump considers NATO withdrawal” rather than “Trump considers illegal NATO withdrawal,” it does several things simultaneously.

It trains the public to understand executive action as the default reality and the law as a speed bump. It shifts the burden of proof from the president — who is violating a statute — to Congress and the courts — who must now mobilize to stop him. It produces the political conditions in which the violation becomes normalized before it is ever adjudicated, so that by the time the courts rule, the practical landscape has already shifted. It tells every foreign government, every NATO ally, every adversary watching from Moscow and Beijing, that American treaty commitments are contingent on the mood of whoever currently occupies the Oval Office, regardless of what Congress has legislated.

And it tells the president, correctly, that he can do whatever he wants in the open, announce it on Truth Social, and the first question asked by the people whose job it is to hold power accountable will not be “is this legal?” but “how will this play politically?”

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I am not arguing that courts are irrelevant. I am arguing that the law exists before the courts rule on it. That is what it means for a law to be a law rather than a suggestion. Congress passed the NATO Withdrawal Act because the Constitution gives Congress the power to make law. The president signed it because the Constitution gives the president the power to sign or veto legislation. The law entered the United States Code. It is binding. It does not require Supreme Court activation to be real.

The Barrett doctrine — that presidential action is presumptively constitutional pending adjudication — is an argument about judicial deference. It is not an argument that the law does not exist until a court says it does. Those are different claims. The press has collapsed them into one.

The result is a political press that covers the executive branch as though Congress has not legislated, as though the statute books are empty, as though the only constraint on presidential power is whatever five members of the Supreme Court are willing to enforce on any given Tuesday.

This is the constitutional crisis. Not Trump contemplating NATO withdrawal. The complete disappearance of the law as a real-time constraint on executive behavior from the consciousness of the people whose job is to tell the public what is happening.

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And then I want to say one more thing, because I have heard the hand-wringing about it my entire adult life and I am tired of it.

Journalists wonder why the public doesn’t trust the press.

They commission studies about it. They write essays about it. They hold panels at journalism schools about the crisis of institutional trust and what can be done to restore the relationship between the press and the public it serves. They blame social media. They blame partisan polarization. They blame the right-wing media ecosystem that has spent decades calling them the enemy of the people.

I do not trust the press when I see this. Right here. This story. A president announces he is “strongly considering” withdrawing from NATO. There is a federal law that says he cannot. The law was passed eighteen months ago with bipartisan support, signed by the previous president, entered into the United States Code. And the headlines treat the announcement as a live policy option, a point on the spectrum of possible outcomes, a thing that reasonable people might debate.

What are we talking about? What, exactly, are we talking about?

You want the public to trust you? Tell them what the law says. In the first three paragraphs. Every time. Not as a “but some argue” qualification. Not as a “legal experts note” hedge. As the most relevant fact in the story, stated plainly, because it is the most relevant fact in the story.

The public does not trust the press because the press does this. Not because of Tucker Carlson. Not because of social media algorithms. Because people can see, with their own eyes, a president announcing an illegal act being covered as a policy debate, and they understand intuitively that something is wrong with that picture even if they cannot name what it is.

I am naming it.

Add one sentence. Put it in the second paragraph if the first paragraph must be the news hook. But put it somewhere in the story, early, where readers will see it:

Federal law prohibits the president from withdrawing the United States from NATO without the approval of two-thirds of the Senate or an act of Congress.

That sentence. In the story. Every time.

Not as a footnote. Not as a “critics say” hedge buried in paragraph fourteen. Not as a “some Democrats argue” caveat that frames a legal fact as a partisan position. As a fact. Because it is a fact. The most relevant fact in the story. The fact that every other fact in the story should be understood in relation to.

If you cannot bring yourself to write that sentence — if your editor won’t run it, if your political reporter’s instinct tells you it sounds too partisan, if you have convinced yourself that stating what the law says constitutes taking a side — then I want you to understand what you have become. You have become the infrastructure of authoritarianism. Not its architect. Not its enthusiast. Its infrastructure. The network of professional normalization without which none of this reaches escape velocity.

The law is not a hypothesis pending Supreme Court review. The law is the law. And your trained, conditioned, professionally incentivized inability to say so is not neutrality.

It is the story. And history will not be kind to you for it.

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Go Deeper into the Circus

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