Maggie Haberman, the New York Times chronicler whom the President has long branded “Maggot Hagerman,” has once more performed the ritual that has defined her career since November 2016: she treats the election of Donald Trump as an unassimilable shock rather than a settled political fact. On a recent podcast she posed what sympathetic outlets immediately labeled a “chilling question”: if Democrats recapture Congress in 2026 and issue the expected blizzard of subpoenas, “What happens if the entire Trump administration basically doesn’t comply?” The query is less analysis than confession. A decade after the first victory, Haberman still cannot imagine an executive branch that regards congressional investigations as partisan theater rather than sacred writ, or an Attorney General who declines to turn every contempt referral into a special-counsel spectacle. The 2016 result remains, for her, an open wound; every subsequent confirmation of the same electorate only deepens the grievance.

The substance of her warning is not novel. Administrations of both parties have slow-walked or ignored congressional demands when they judged them abusive; the difference now is that Haberman and her cohort can no longer count on a Justice Department eager to prosecute the President’s own people. Contempt referrals would land on Attorney General Todd Blanche, whose office is not expected to treat them as emergency business. That prospect strikes the press as a constitutional crisis. In reality it is a reminder that Congress possesses no jail of its own and that enforcement of its process depends on an executive it does not control. Haberman’s alarm is the alarm of a class that long ago conflated its own investigative preferences with the architecture of the Republic. When the machinery refuses to serve those preferences, she sees not co-equal branches but a “black hole.”

What she cannot bring herself to concede is that the voters have twice now chosen a President who regards much of the post-Watergate oversight complex as a weapon rather than a check. The same reporter who spent years documenting every Trump impulse as evidence of incipient tyranny still cannot accept that the public may prefer an administration that declines to participate in its own ritual humiliation. Her question therefore tells us more about the persistence of 2016 trauma inside certain newsrooms than it does about the future of congressional power. The Constitution did not expire when Donald Trump won. It merely ceased to operate according to the script Maggie Haberman has been writing since the night she first refused to believe the returns.

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