President Trump on Sunday knocked U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper, who has overseen the case over the Kennedy Center and the president's attempts to refurbish and rename the institution, as "highly conflicted." "Kennedy Center is an…
Page A9From§Eachthe coffee break edition — 31 August 2026
FCC commissioner calls Trump's threat against journalist Kristen Welker 'dangerous'; Trump also brands a judge 'highly conflicted.'
As it ran on the front
You want to know how a guy figures out who still has power over him? He tests it. He goes after the people whose job is literally to check him — the press and the bench — in the same stretch of days, and he watches who flinches. This week it's a journalist, Kristen Welker, threatened hard enough that a sitting FCC commissioner felt the need to put the word 'dangerous' on the record, in public, with her name attached. That's not a routine media complaint. Commissioners don't usually go on the record calling the President's behavior dangerous unless the behavior actually got somewhere close to that word.
Then, same window, a judge — a federal judge, sitting on an actual case involving the Kennedy Center — gets knocked as 'highly conflicted' by the same guy. Now, maybe that judge is conflicted. I don't have the recusal paperwork in front of me. But notice the shape of it: the branch of government that's supposed to be able to rule against him gets the same treatment as the industry that's supposed to be able to report on him. Different targets, same instinct, same week.…
…(cont) This is the tell I keep telling you about. It's never both things happening for unrelated reasons. It's one guy running the same play on every institution that still has a door he doesn't control — the press has a door, the courts have a door — and every time he leans on one of those doors, you get to see, in real time, which one holds. This time the FCC commissioner's statement is the sound of a door holding. The 'highly conflicted' remark about the judge is him leaning on the next one.
Nobody's taken the nuclear codes away from him for calling a judge conflicted. That's the part that should bother you more than either headline on its own: he's allowed to say it, he's allowed to say it about the press too, and there is no institution left whose whole job is to just tell him no and have that be the end of it. You keep leaning on doors long enough, sooner or later one of them's just decorative.
“Same week, same guy: threatens a journalist hard enough that an FCC commissioner has to go on record calling it dangerous, then turns around and knocks a judge who's got a ruling against him. That's not two separate stories, that's one guy checking who's left that can still say no to him.”
“The commissioner is a Democrat, so naturally she's going to call it dangerous, that's just — that's just her party's talking point, and the judge in the Kennedy Center case does have documented conflicts, that's a fact, that's not me attacking the judiciary, that's — okay it is technically an attack on a specific judge, I'll allow that much.”
The receipts
Anna Gomez, a Democratic commissioner for the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), on Sunday described President Trump's threat to report NBC News's Kristen Welker as "dangerous." Trump signaled the "Meet the Press" host could face an…
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.