There’s no consensus, nor much discussion, on what would constitute the next step—or whether it would even be wise. Dan Gillmor, a former journalist who is co-founder, News Co/Lab and professor of

practice at Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School of

Journalism and Mass Communication, is arguing for even more collaboration—“broad and deep, across organizations and platforms.” He wrote earlier this week, “Don’t just leave it to the editorial writers.” He argues that journalists need to pool their limited resources “across organizations and platforms,” to deepen their contextual reporting on the Trump administration’s policies and behavior. Some media outlets, like ProPublica, already partner with other outlets to do deep reporting; Gillmor believes that shared endeavors should be the journalistic norm. His advice to brethren: “You need to fight, not against Trump, but for a free press and freedom of expression.”

But that level of collaboration makes Abrams nervous: “The press ought to take care not to vindicate critiques from the right that they are engaged in an anti-Trump crusade … in a perceived effort to bring down the Trump administration.” That’s similar to what Shafer and Cannon warned about the editorials, and it frames the press’s current dilemma: With America’s democratic traditions arguably at stake, can it more assertively perform its constitutional role of holding power accountable without risking an ever greater public backlash?

“It’s a completely legitimate question,” Gillmor told me. “The enemies of press freedom who run our government have the upper hand, for sure … So what does journalism have to lose by trying something new?” He said that big outlets should partner with small outlets to report with context on how Trump administration decisions in Washington are affecting local communities—and collaborate more with readers as well. Granted, “none of this would mollify a significant portion of [Trump’s] hard-core base, but we shouldn’t be saying, ‘What’s the point of doing good journalism if they’re going to hate us anyway?’ It will take time for the press to get out of this, to build more trust, but we’ve got to work on it. I have an abiding belief in our value.”

And Abrams said that, in some ways, things could be worse. Trump, for all his bluster, has not moved to jail journalists—as John Adams did with the Sedition Act of 1798, and as Abraham Lincoln did (albeit in wartime) with repeated suspensions of the writ of habeas corpus. “And Teddy Roosevelt did his best to jail Joseph Pulitzer. This president hasn’t done anything like that.”

But his words alone—sowing discord and more threats of violence— prompted a rare, if symbolic, rebuke Thursday from the U.S. Senate, which unanimously “affirms that the press is not the enemy of the people; reaffirms the vital and indispensable role that the free press serves to inform the electorate … and views efforts to systematically undermine the credibility of the press as an attack on the democratic institutions of the United States.” It was a welcome gesture, tempered by the sobering realization that the chamber deemed it necessary to state the obvious.