Tyrant Tramples On Our First Amendment

Trump is just the man the Founders feared

I intended to publish this before the second shooting. But I still think this is an important issue to keep in mind while the current crisis plays out.

Donald Trump doesn’t want you to speak. He doesn’t want you to write, broadcast, or protest. In fact, if you have anything negative to say -- even if it’s a joke -- he wants you gagged. Tyrants always want it this way.

The President/dictator of the United States went after talk shows a bit ago, siccing the Federal Communications Commission on them. Commission Chairman Brendan Carr targeted three late-night hosts, including Stephen Colbert (CBS), Jimmy Kimmel (ABC), and Seth Meyers (NBC), with warnings that they may be violating federal regulations. All three have sharply criticized Trump while choosing not to host his defenders. A fourth show, ABC’s morning hit The View, was also hit with a warning:

The FCC licenses the broadcasters who present these shows, and the purpose of the warning is obvious. Trump and the chairman Carr don’t like the political content of the shows. He is invoking an old rule requiring equal airtime for candidates, with the exception of news programs. Talk shows were granted this exception long ago. Now Carr wants to bring it back.

Carr is acting as a tool of Trump’s agenda, which calls for silencing his critics through various means. Recently, Attorney General Pam Bondi threatened podcaster and former CNN host Don Lemon with legal action related to his reporting at a church in St. Paul, Minnesota that is run by a pastor who is an avid supporter of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency. Bondi’s pretext? Lemon, while working as a reporter, violated congregants’ right to worship. Bondi’s petition to a magistrate was thrown out, but she’s contemplating an appeal. (To be fair, the IS a law against this in theory… same law that was created to prosecute people blocking access to abortion clinics. Is this an overstep? I mean it is Trump, so there is not trust anyway.)

ICE, which is flooding Minnesota with thousands of agents who are acting like storm troopers, is more than newsworthy. At the beginning of their major operations, an agent shot and killed a woman named Renee Good as she sat behind the wheel of her car. Then came Alex Pretti, the VA nurse who was murders after being assaulted and disarmed by federal agents. The killings, captured by multiple cameras, has sparked an anti-ICE campaign which, combined with the agency’s sweeping arrests of supposedly undocumented immigrants, makes news every day.

Agents for ICE have also been involved in arresting foreign university students whose only “crimes” have involved speaking out against the administration’s policies favoring Israel in its recent war against Hamas in Gaza. According to the agency, their statements made them “terrorist sympathizers” and thus eligible for expulsion. Four of those arrested have sued and won a delay in their deportation. The judge in the case found that government officials engaged in an “unconstitutional conspiracy” to violate their free speech rights. Here again, the government, determined to punish people with opinions Trump doesn’t like, is expected to appeal.

Meanwhile, the Justice Department has raided a Washington Post reporter’s house, seizing two laptops in their pursuit of a whistleblower who may have been in contact with the journalist. The obvious purpose is to interfere with reporters’ work with government insiders who want to provide them with information. The Post, and others, have depended on so-called “leakers” for decades and produced vast numbers of important reports based on the information they provided. A judge has temporarily blocked the department from reviewing the contents of the computers, but this ruling is also under appeal.

Meanwhile, anyone who has watched a Pentagon or White House press conference lately has seen remarkable new dynamics. The regular journalists representing major mainstream news outlets abandoned the Defense Department press room after officials issued a new rule requiring them to submit their reports for government review. They have been replaced by a coterie of oddball bloggers, Substackers, and podcasters who function as an echo chamber for official policies.

Over at the White House, regular journalists are hanging in there but have been joined by similar non-reporters. When Trump took questions at a recent news conference, he ignored the legit domestic press in favor of the newcomers and a handful of foreign reporters who asked about obscure topics. When the event was over, Trump noted the crowd in the room and asked if the group had gathered to celebrate the first anniversary of his second term. In an unseemly display of sycophancy, quite a few of the newcomers actually applauded.

In October, Trump re-filed a $1.5 billion lawsuit against The New York Times, alleging he was defamed when the paper published articles describing how he had gained wealth and prominence in part due to fraud. (A civil jury in Manhattan concluded the same thing.) Trump is also suing the paper over its publication of a poll showing the majority of Americans don’t approve of his job performance.

The Times lawsuit is being pursued by Trump as an individual. It is a part and parcel of a series of legal actions he has taken against major media. In the case of two suits, he cowed ABC News and CBS News into making settlements rather than engaging in long, expensive legal battles. In the time since, ABC has continued its normal operation but CBS has clearly been intimidated into making big changes. It replaced its head of news with a pro-Trump journalist named Bari Weiss, who has, in turn, installed a pro-Trump newscaster as the anchor of the nightly news. Ratings for the show have tanked.

Finally, Team Trump has gone after historians at both the Smithsonian and the National Parks Service. The Smithsonian was forced to remove references to Trump’s first term impeachment from an exhibit. Similarly, the Parks Service was ordered to remove references to slavery at its historical sites.

As it pursues truth-tellers and inconvenient protesters, the administration is displaying a level of authoritarianism never seen in the United States. The Founders made freedom of the press and freedom of speech bedrock rights so that informed citizens would recognize and reject tyrants. They would recognize in the tyrant Trump just the man they feared would seize power.