Donald Trump vs. the Constitution

A conversation with Floyd Abrams on Trump’s First Amendment rights, the 14th Amendment, and the “smoking gun” that disqualifies him from office.

Attorneys for The New York Times leave the Supreme Court on June 26, 1971, after presenting arguments against the government in the Pentagon Papers suit. From left: Lawrence McKay; Floyd Abrams; Alexander Bickel; James Goodale, Times Vice President; and William Heggerty. (AP Photo/Charles Harrity)

By Michael Judge

I first met Floyd Abrams, legal counsel for The New York Times in the 1971 Pentagon Papers case and America’s preeminent First Amendment litigator, in the mid-1990s. I was a student in his Columbia Graduate School of Journalism course, co-taught with Pulitzer Prize-winner Anthony Lewis, on First Amendment law. It was conducted, like most law-school courses back then, in the Socratic method, and my fellow students and I lived in fear of being called on to summarize, for example, the Supreme Court’s 1964 ruling in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan. Mercifully, I did well enough to pass, and soon went to work for the Times’s downtown rival, The Wall Street Journal, something Abrams …