'Canary in the coal mine': Expert reveals most alarming moment of Trump's second term

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U.S. President Donald Trump gestures during a cabinet meeting at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., August 26, 2025. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

More than nine months into President Donald Trump's second term, he's continuing to make headlines for constant scandals, including recent scandals like his call for a personal $230 million payout from U.S. taxpayers, his entertaining of an unconstitutional third term in office and his sudden demolition of the entire East Wing of the White House. But one expert says one moment from early on in his second term stands apart.

In a Thursday essay, the New Yorker's Susan Glasser remarked on the fast pace of the Trump administration since his second inauguration on January 20. She observed that with Trump remarking after being given a replica crown by South Korean leaders that he'd "like to wear it right now" (less than two weeks after the nationwide "No Kings" protests), his latest strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea and him promising to resume nuclear weapons testing, it was easy to forget about older scandals.

"Remember when Trump imposed punitive new tariffs on Canada because he got mad about a television ad? ... When he circulated an A.I.-generated video of himself dumping poop on Americans protesting him? That was so last week," Glasser wrote. "And last week, in the Trump era, might as well have been an eternity ago. The black hole in which our previous outrage resides is vast."

However, Glasser argued that perspective was important in acknowledging what she characterized as numerous and blatant abuses of power over the last nine months, and sought opinions from various experts on what they viewed as the most significant scandal of the second Trump administration. Princeton world politics professor Gary Bass, for example, pointed to "pardoning the Jan. 6 insurrectionists," and "working to rig elections so that this nightmare never ends." Harvard University law professor Jill Lepore said she was "genuinely surprised when, asked if it was his duty to uphold the Constitution, he said, ‘I don’t know.’"

"Just a surprising thing to say, given that the oath he’d taken, twice, is to ‘preserve, protect and defend the Constitution,'" Lepore continued. "It seems a small thing, in a way, but I was struck by the glimmer of honesty here, a sort of shrug that seemed to say, ‘Eh, nah, who knows.’"

Conservative judge J. Michael Luttig (appointed to the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals by former President George H.W. Bush in 1991) remarked on a more recent event as one of the most significant Trump scandals.

"When addressing the generals from around the world he summoned to Quantico, he politicized the U.S. military in a single hour of American history," Luttig told Glasser, characterizing Trump's speech as "trashing our former Presidents and the ‘radical-left lunatics’ of the Democratic Party and announcing that, on his orders as Commander-in-Chief, the United States military will henceforth use America’s liberal cities as ‘training grounds’ for fighting the war against his political opposition, whom he called the ‘enemy from within.’"

Jake Sullivan — who served as National Security Advisor under former President Joe Biden — said the moment that set off "alarm bells" for him was the major law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison (Paul Weiss) agreeing to provide $40 million in pro bono legal services to the Trump administration. Paul Weiss struck the deal in order to get Trump to cancel an executive order that would have ended all of the firm's federal contracts, withdrawn their attorneys' security clearances and banned them from federal buildings. Sullivan called that moment the "canary in the coal mine," as it led to further capitulation from other law firms as well as universities and media companies.

Click here to read Glasser's full essay in the New Yorker (subscription required).

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