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‘Constitutional Crisis’ Is an Understatement

www.theatlantic.com › newsletters › archive › 2025 › 02 › constitutional-crisis-language-effective › 681800

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Grasping the scale of President Donald Trump’s assault on American governance is no small matter. The administration is challenging laws, claiming the right to reinterpret the Constitution, questioning judges’ powers, and arrogating new powers to itself. Seeking to convey the gravity of the situation, many commentators have labeled what’s happening a “constitutional crisis.”

That’s a mistake—not because what’s happening is not serious, but because it is so serious. This week, the Trump administration came the closest it has thus far to outright refusing to follow a judge’s order, after days of comments from Vice President J. D. Vance, Bureaucrat in Chief Elon Musk, and others questioning whether a president must follow court rulings. That’s a threat to the very basic question of whether a president is subject to the law or not—especially when so many things that Trump has done appear plainly illegal.

But the abstraction of constitutional crisis obscures the immediate danger, making what’s happening seem like an issue more for legal experts and policy wonks than for the everyday Americans who stand to lose not only essential government services but also fundamental rights. “A president refusing to abide by the law or the Constitution and ignoring court orders to stop his illegitimate actions would be a constitutional crisis like a bank robbery is a cash flow crisis,” Joseph Ura, a political scientist at Clemson University, told me via email.

A recent New York Times article reported that many legal scholars believe that the country is in a constitutional crisis, but it began by acknowledging, “There is no universally accepted definition of a constitutional crisis.” The law, for all its careful parsing of language, has a weakness for this sort of I-know-it-when-I-see-it formulation, but if even the professors can’t define it, how can the general public? Senator Elizabeth Warren, a former Harvard Law professor, warns that “we've got our toes right on the edge of a constitutional crisis,” which also raises interesting questions about the topography of a crisis.

At one time, appeals to the sanctity of the Constitution might have swayed more people, but one reason Trump has been able to dominate U.S. politics for so long is that voters are not feeling protective of their institutions. About six in 10 people in a 2022 New York Times poll said the constitutional order needs major reforms. In 2023, Pew found that just 4 percent of Americans think the political system is working very well. And in 2024, voters selected a guy who’d tried to overturn the previous election. Regardless of what law professors think, the populace has already decided that the Constitution is in crisis.

Perhaps I’m a cockeyed optimist, but I don’t think that means they want an unaccountable leader who is not beholden to laws, courts, or Congress. Already, Trump’s approval rating is down, and his disapproval rating is up. I noted last week that some of his supporters are regretting their choice. Many of the effects of sloppy cost cutting are going to be even more unpopular once voters feel them. But appeals to a system they’ve come to distrust are not the way to rally them.

A “constitutional crisis” certainly sounds bad, even if you can’t say what it is. But whatever fresh shock the term might have provided has been dulled by years of use. Google Trends tells a story of desensitization. Going back to 2004, there are sporadic spikes of interest in the term, such as during the 2008 financial crisis and around government shutdowns during the Barack Obama presidency. Then the line starts bouncing around like a flea when Trump takes office the first time. It calms again during the Biden administration but takes off on a dizzy, vertical ascent when Trump returns to office in 2025.

Commentators who labeled previous moments “constitutional crises” may not have been crying wolf, exactly, though in retrospect perhaps the term could have been reserved for the worst moments—January 6, for example—for maximum clarity. Regardless, you can’t hear about a problem on and off for years without it becoming less urgent. Trump isn’t just destroying norms; he’s established a state of crisis as the new norm.

And insofar as people do think of this as a “crisis,” that might only further empower Trump—who’s responsible for it in the first place. That’s because, in times of crisis, Americans usually look to the president to act quickly and decisively. That can be good in a bona fide external crisis, like an attack by a foreign country or a pandemic, but that’s not what’s happening now. “To the extent we’re in a crisis, it’s a crisis of too much executive energy,” Ura told me.

The better alternative is to describe exactly what’s happening: The president is taking actions he doesn’t have the power to take, disrespecting the rule of law, and attempting to revoke long-established rights. He is portraying himself as a king. Soon, he may openly defy an order from a duly appointed and confirmed federal judge. That would be a step closer to the end of American democracy than anything since January 6. Call that a catastrophe, call it lawlessness, call it a threat—just don’t call it a constitutional crisis.

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Elon Musk can’t stop talking about penises. Donald Trump says, “We are the federal law.” Why is everyone talking about getting “oneshotted”? Germany’s anti-extremist firewall is collapsing.

Today’s News

Federal Judge Dale E. Ho delayed a ruling on the Justice Department’s request to drop charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams, and appointed an external lawyer to present arguments challenging the department’s request.

Caleb Vitello, ICE’S acting director, was reassigned to another role in the agency. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass removed Fire Chief Kristin Crowley for her handling of last month’s wildfires.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: Haley Mlotek’s new memoir and history of divorce finds a fresh way to talk about the dissolution of a marriage, Boris Kachka writes. Atlantic Intelligence: “No matter DOGE’s goal, putting so much information in one place and under the control of a small group of people with little government experience has raised substantial security concerns,” Matteo Wong writes.

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MAGA Has Found a New Model

found 12:03 The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › ideas › archive › 2025 › 02 › german-election-right-party › 681797

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LAST MONTH, upwards of 1 million people flooded the streets of Germany to express their opposition to the right-wing political party Alternative für Deutschland, or Alternative for Germany. In Berlin, more than 100,000 people gathered on the Bundestag lawn under a banner reading Defend democracy: Together against the right.

The message Germans were sending was clear, Paul Hockenos, a Berlin-based journalist, wrote in Foreign Policy: “The AfD’s stripe of right-wing radicalism is out of place in democratic Germany.” But not, apparently, in democratic America.

In January, Elon Musk, one of President Donald Trump’s closest advisers, appeared via video at a campaign event in Halle on behalf of the AfD, urging those in attendance not to be ashamed of its nation’s history.

[Graeme Wood: Germany’s anti-extremist firewall is collapsing]

“It’s good to be proud of German culture and German values, and not to lose that in some sort of multiculturalism that dilutes everything,” Musk said. Then, in an obvious reference to the Nazi era, Musk said there is “frankly too much of a focus on past guilt, and we need to move beyond that.”

“I think you really are the best hope for Germany,” Musk told the 4,000 AfD supporters. Musk also published an op-ed in Welt am Sonntag, urging Germans to vote for the AfD. The paper’s Opinion editor resigned in protest.

But that was just the start of the Trump administration’s embrace of the AfD. Last week, Vice President J. D. Vance gave a speech at the Munich Security Conference that the German media called a “campaign gift” to the AfD prior to the German elections tomorrow.

In an extraordinary act of intervention into the internal affairs of an ally, Vance essentially urged the next German government to include the AfD, which has so far been treated as a pariah party, in the governing coalition. The Trump administration wants to destroy the firewall that has been built around the AfD. It’s worth understanding why it was erected in the first place.

GERMANY’S DOMESTIC INTELLIGENCE AGENCY has classified part of the AfD, founded in 2013, as extremist, warning that it is a “danger to democracy.” (In 2017, the AfD became the first far-right party to enter the German Parliament since World War II.)

Much of the attention has focused on Björn Höcke, a history teacher who heads a faction of the AfD, known as “The Wing” (Der Flügel ), in the state of Thuringia. Höcke has “used metaphors reminiscent of Goebbels, Hitler’s chief propagandist,” The New York Times reported, “saying that Germans need to be wolves rather than sheep.” He has talked about racial suicide and “cultural Bolshevism.” At a 2017 rally in Dresden, Höcke called on Germans to make a “180 degree” turn in the way they viewed their history. He has said that Germans were “the only people in the world to plant a monument of shame in the heart of their capital,” referring to the Holocaust memorial in Berlin. Höcke wants to revive the word Lebensraum—a term used by the Nazis that means “living space.” And he seems offended that Adolf Hitler has been described as “absolutely evil.” (“The world has—man has—shades of gray,” Höcke said when asked about Hitler. “Even the worst severe criminal perhaps has something good, something worth loving, but he is still a severe criminal.”)

[Read: Elon has appointed himself king of the world]

Matthias Quent, a sociologist and the founding director of the Institute for Democracy and Civil Society in Jena, whose work focuses on the analysis of the far right and radicalization, has called Höcke’s ideology “pre-fascist.” “His book reads like a 21st-century Mein Kampf,” Quent told the Times. And Höcke is hardly alone. Alexander Gauland, an AfD leader in Parliament, described the Nazi era as “a speck of bird poop in more than 1,000 years of successful German history.”

The AfD, which has most of its support in the formerly Communist eastern part of Germany, was defined at its outset by opposition to the common European currency; within a couple of years, it has become pro-Russian and embraced xenophobia, and it now defines itself as committed to preserving German identity and nationalism. It has ties to neo-Nazi activists and the extremist Identitarian Movement, including discussing a “re-migration” plan which, according to Hockenos, would “forcibly repatriate millions of people.”

The AfD is headed by Alice Weidel, whom Vance met with last week and who is ideologically close to Höcke (Weidel has said she would put Höcke in her cabinet if she were to become chancellor). Many people judge the AfD to be the most right-wing party in Europe. And now, in advance of tomorrow’s parliamentary elections, the AfD is polling second, with one in five voters still undecided.

THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION’S embrace of the AfD is the latest example of it casting its lot with right-wing European movements. It not only wants to destroy the transatlantic alliance; it is supporting parties that are extreme and enemies of classical liberalism. But there’s an additional twist in what we’re witnessing.

[Read: The end of the postwar world]

For Vance and Musk to go so far out of their way to support not just any rising radical movement, but this particular party, in this particular country, with its deep historical experiences with fascism, is quite telling. They are not just “trolling the libs”; they are giving their public backing to a movement that represents the core convictions of MAGA world. They see in the AfD an undiluted version of MAGA. What we’re witnessing from Trump & Company, as alarming as it is now, is only a way station.

And before you know it, virtually everyone in the Republican Party will be on board. Trump always changes them; they never change him. The AfD’s approach to politics—nihilism with a touch of Nazi sympathizing—is the model.

However the AfD does in the German elections tomorrow, it has already won the hearts and minds of the most powerful men in America.

The Loneliness of the Conservative Pronatalist

found 12:02 The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › ideas › archive › 2025 › 02 › conservative-pronatalist-politics › 681802

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A vocal group of conservative intellectuals really, really wants Americans to have more babies. The movement is small, but it doesn’t lack for high-profile adherents. Vice President J. D. Vance, a father of three, recently proclaimed, “Very simply, I want more babies in the United States of America.” Elon Musk, a father of at least 12, posted in 2022, “Doing my best to help the underpopulation crisis. A collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilization faces by far.” A recent Department of Transportation memo even instructed the agency to prioritize projects that “give preference to communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average.” It was signed by Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, a father of nine.

If messages like these somehow do not get you in the mood to procreate, well, that’s precisely the problem.

It’s a problem, specifically, for the pronatalists: a group whose members are overwhelmingly conservative, usually religious, and almost always the parents of three or more children. They espouse the view that America’s declining birth rate is an alarming trend we ought to try to reverse. Seventeen years ago, the national birth rate was at the minimum level for a society to perpetuate itself from one generation to the next. Since then, it has fallen well below that, with no signs of bottoming out. In response, a loose cohort of intellectuals, writers, thinkers, and policy makers are doing their best to make friends in high places, get a policy agenda together, and make Americans make families again.

This won’t be easy. The pronatalists combine conservative social nudges (get married, start a family) with liberal policy objectives (give parents more money, upzone the suburbs), which makes for tricky politics. At a time of increased abortion restrictions, many liberals find them creepy—busybodies at best and eugenicists at worst. And many conservatives think they’re Trojan horses for socialism, cloaking their desire to spend taxpayer money in family-values rhetoric. Like parenting itself, giving birth to a broadly popular pronatal movement will take a lot of hard work.

Until recently, the idea that humanity might be growing too slowly would have seemed absurd. During the second half of the 20th century, experts—many swayed by the book The Population Bomb—were far more worried about the opposite problem. They feared that overpopulation would lead to widespread famine and potentially even societal collapse.

Something strange happened next: None of those predictions came true. The population continued to grow, but famine was not widespread, and collapse did not come. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, fertility rates steeply declined, most dramatically in rich countries. Rather than exploding, the global population-growth curve began to level off. At first, few noticed. After all, the birth-rate decline came on gradually. A decade ago, the U.S. total fertility rate was only slightly below the replacement rate of 2.1.

Now, however, that number is 1.6 and falling fast, even as polls show Americans believe that the ideal number of children is two to three. This poses a dire economic problem. Social Security, Medicare, and other old-age programs can’t survive at their current generosity if the number of tax-paying workers continues to decline. Even economic growth itself becomes challenging once a low enough fertility rate is reached; fewer workers means a smaller economy. In East Asia, where the worldwide birth-rate drop has been most pronounced, every country faces serious economic challenges resulting from low fertility; all are now furiously trying to encourage birth. In South Korea, where the total fertility rate is the lowest in the world at 0.68, every 200 fertile-age adults can expect to give life to 68 children; those children will produce 23 grandchildren, who will result in only eight great-grandchildren. That’s a 96 percent population decline over the course of three generations, and that’s if fertility stops decreasing and finally holds steady.

The negative effects of low fertility at home can be mitigated to some degree with immigration, but birth rates are plummeting all over the world—Mexico’s is 1.8—and the amount of immigration sufficient to outweigh the local birth dearth would be a political nonstarter, a kind of Great Replacement theory come to life. To avoid becoming South Korea someday, America needs more babies.

Making that happen is the task the pronatalists have taken on. The effort is new, but beginning to get organized. As of 2023, there’s an annual Natal Conference, and last week, there was a panel at the U.S. Capitol featuring Representative Blake Moore of Utah, a member of the Republican leadership. Every conservative think tank seems to suddenly have an “expert” on birth rates. (Liberal and centrist pronatalists exist, too, but they’re less numerous and less vocal.)

The intellectual force behind the movement lies mainly in a cluster of culturally conservative writers. These include Bethany Mandel, a writer and homeschooling mother of six; Tim Carney, a father of six who wrote Family Unfriendly, a recent book about society’s hostility toward big families; Patrick T. Brown, a father of four and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a socially conservative think tank; and Daniel Hess, a writer more commonly known by his X username, MoreBirths. The informal ringleader is Lyman Stone, a 33-year-old father of three who directs the Pronatalism Initiative at the right-leaning Institute for Family Studies.

[Lyman Stone: Would you have a baby if you won the lottery?]

They generally advocate for a three-pronged approach to lifting the birth rate. First are cultural nudges, which mostly entail spreading the word that kids are more blessing than burden. Second are supply-side housing-reform policies, intended to make it easier for would-be parents to afford a place to raise a family. (“Want fecundity in the sheets? Give us walkability in the streets,” Carney writes in Family Unfriendly.) Finally, there are economic incentives, which resemble the types of family-friendly welfare-state policies familiar to Northern Europeans: child allowances, baby bonuses, long parental leaves.

Stone argues that implementing such policies in the U.S. would have a significant effect. He estimates that pronatal economic policies in France, including maternity leave, child allowances, pregnancy protections at work, and higher Social Security payments for parents, have boosted the French population by 5 to 10 million people. Policy matters, he argues, not just culture.

You might expect such a progressive-sounding agenda to have attracted an enthusiastic liberal following. Not so much. In fact, left-of-center Americans are more likely to be anti-natalists. According to a recent YouGov poll, twice as many people who identify as liberal, and four times as many people who identify as very liberal, think too many children are being born than think not enough are.

To the extent that they’re even familiar with the pronatalist argument, liberals seem to find it creepy and off-putting. The main cause of the global birth-rate decline was women’s growing autonomy and access to contraception. Liberals understandably fear that trying to reverse the decline might involve undoing the progress that triggered it. (This is more or less the plot of The Handmaid’s Tale, the Margaret Atwood novel in which right-wing theocrats revolt over low fertility, and institute sex slavery and totalitarian patriarchal rule.)

Some liberals also pay attention to the context in which pronatalist messages are transmitted and who is embracing them. Vance’s “I want more babies” quote, for example, came at the March for Life, an annual anti-abortion rally in Washington, D.C. Liberals might even know that the birth rate is still far above replacement in much of sub-Saharan Africa and wonder whether pronatalists are worried specifically about a lack of white babies. “For many progressives and liberals, this conversation is tainted by a sense of it being reactionary, conservative, even sort of fascist,” Rachel Wiseman, an “anti-anti-natalist” leftist writer told me.

Then, as one former senior policy aide to a Republican lawmaker told me, “there’s the Elon of it all.” (He spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of backlash for criticizing fellow Republicans.) Musk, the most well-known pronatalist in the world, is also perhaps the most disliked person in liberal America after Donald Trump. Musk is known to have had 12 children with three partners. (Last week, a conservative influencer claimed to be the mother of his 13th child, born five months ago, though Musk has neither confirmed nor denied that he is the father of her child.) He had twins via IVF with an executive at one of his companies while a surrogate was pregnant with the child he was having with his longtime partner Grimes, who was reportedly furious when she found out. Having a dozen kids is good for the birth rate, but making big families look messy and dysfunctional is probably not.

The conservative pronatalist intellectuals, who seem to crave the ideological embrace of liberals, are self-conscious about their creepiness problem. Moore, who last month introduced a bill that would dramatically increase the child tax credit, told me, “Any effort to make this a right or left issue is nonsense and counterproductive.” He and his allies go to great lengths to clarify that they aren’t into eugenics or patriarchy and that they want more babies of all skin colors. “The people who give pronatalism a bad name care for it for reasons that I think are rather unseemly,” Brown told me. “And so it becomes icky because, well, those bad people are very concerned about it.”

Women of childbearing age skew liberal, so liberals’ distaste for pronatalism is a long-term problem. But, at a moment when Republicans have a trifecta in Washington, pronatalists face a more immediate issue on their own flank: Most Republicans still want to slash government spending, not increase it.

[Read: The coming Democratic baby bust]

“There’s a lot of headwinds to a pronatal conservative policy because Republicans have long distrusted urbanist talk, or talk of government supporting people in need,” Carney told me. Many traditional Republicans look at the pronatalist policy agenda (give money to parents, loosen suburban zoning rules) and wonder what happened to the party of fiscal restraint, anti-welfare politics, and the strictly zoned Suburban Lifestyle Dream.

Stone told me that many old-guard Republicans are worried about incentivizing single motherhood. “On some level, we have to be able to say, ‘Look: Supporting people having families is worth it,’” even if that means money flows to unwed parents, he said.

Anti-welfare Republicans aren’t the only intra-coalitional enemy. Pronatalists also face resistance from the so-called Barstool Right, the class of epicurean, anti-woke young men, usually thin in ideology but thick in leftward-pointing resentment. “This is fucking idiotic,” Dave Portnoy, the Barstool Sports founder, wrote on X above a video of Vance clumsily arguing for lower tax rates on parents. “If you can’t afford a big family don’t have a ton of kids.” (Neither Vance nor Portnoy signaled any awareness of the fact that, thanks to the child tax credit, the tax code already favors parents.)

Still, the pronatalists think they are winning, if slowly. Stone told me he understands there to be “a few” Vance staffers tasked with getting Congress to raise the child tax credit in this year’s reconciliation bill. Whether or not that happens, the pronatalists feel they are operating on a longer time horizon.

“Short term: maybe; long term: yes,” Brown told me when I asked if he was optimistic. But they had better not move too slowly. If convincing people takes too long, there might not be enough people left to convince.