Trump’s Decades-Long Erosion of Free Speech Continues to Worsen

Long before he entered national politics, Donald Trump entertained ambitious plans for a 26-acre development adjacent to the South Street Seaport in Manhattan. In a 1984 interview with The New York Times, he stated that “New York City deserves to possess the tallest and most remarkable building in the world, and I would be very interested in pursuing it.” He pictured a 150-story edifice housing offices, residences, and a hotel, standing at about 1,940 feet—nearly 500 feet taller than Chicago’s Sears Tower, which was then the record-holder for height.

Paul Gapp, the architecture critic for the Chicago Tribune, did not regard the concept favorably. “The only remotely appealing facet of Trump’s touted 150-story Manhattan skyscraper, revealed a few days ago, is that it would not be executed in the Fence Post Style of the 1970s,” Gapp observed. “The world’s tallest tower would be among the silliest burdens anyone could impose on New York or any other city.” He described Trump’s pursuit as indulging in “Guinness Book of World Records architecture.”

Trump did not appreciate Gapp’s assessment. And in Trump’s view, Gapp had no authority to share his viewpoint. Two months after the Tribune published Gapp’s critique, Trump sued the Chicago-based columnist and the newspaper for defamation. The suit argued that Gapp’s remarks about the theoretical skyscraper, combined with a Wall Street Journal interview in which the tower was described as “aesthetically lousy,” had damaged Trump’s reputation to the tune of $500 million—roughly $1.6 billion in today’s money.

U.S. District Judge Edward Weinfeld, who dismissed Trump’s suit in September 1985, had little trouble recognizing that Gapp’s comments were “entitled to complete immunity under the First Amendment protection” as expressions of opinion. Yet far from deterring Trump, that incident marked the first of many episodes in which he sought to punish people for voicing views he disapproved of—an impulse that would recur repeatedly during his presidency.

Those vendettas often encountered legal obstacles, as demonstrated by Trump’s later attempt to bar unfavorable journalists from White House access. Given his dismal track record in the courts, one might wonder about his motivation. A clue lies in a defamation suit he filed in 2006.

In his 2005 book TrumpNation, financial journalist Timothy O’Brien suggested that the developer’s net worth was inflated. Trump answered by suing O’Brien and the book’s publisher for defamation, claiming they had caused him damages of $5 billion—roughly $8.5 billion today. Although that lawsuit also failed, Trump did not express remorse. “I spent a few dollars on legal fees; they spent a lot more,” he told The Washington Post in 2016. “I did it to make [O’Brien’s] life miserable, which I’m happy about.”

Trump continues to use lawsuits as a weapon against critics. In 2022, he sued CNN for $475 million in punitive damages, arguing the network had defamed him by describing his claim that Joe Biden stole the 2020 election as “the Big Lie.” Three years later, a federal appellate court decisively rejected Trump’s reading of defamation law.

Two years prior, Trump sued CBS and The Des Moines Register, contending that their journalism—a pre-election interview with Kamala Harris and a poll giving her an Iowa lead, respectively—amounted to consumer fraud. In the CBS case, Trump asserted that he had suffered “at least” $20 billion in damages. He ultimately secured a settlement yielding a mere 0.08 percent of that amount, though an Iowa judge dismissed the suit against the Register with prejudice in September.

Last August, Trump threatened the Center for American Progress with a $5 billion defamation lawsuit unless it retracted a report casting doubt on the effectiveness of his National Guard deployment in the District of Columbia. In Trump’s view, even criticism of a president’s policies can qualify as libel.

In short, Trump remains fond of frivolous litigation. He believes that “it’s gross how the press can write whatever they want,” and he wants to “open up our libel laws” so he can “win substantial sums” when outlets publish stories he deems deliberately hostile and false. But in his role as president, Trump possesses a broad arsenal beyond lawsuits, and he has wielded it in ways that differentiate him from his more recent predecessors.

In terms of measurable outcomes, the weaponization of the state against political adversaries under Trump is less dramatic than the historical abuses that arose during the Quasi-War with France, the Civil War, or World War I, when dissenters faced imprisonment. Yet he has sought to implement a comparable strategy on a smaller scale—employing the criminal justice system against those he views as opponents because of constitutionally protected speech. He has also brandished regulatory pressure, sanctioning reporters, wielded immigration measures, controlled federal funding, and issued executive orders to discourage challenge. And unlike a president such as Richard Nixon, who resorted to power selectively and often clandestinely, Trump has pursued such measures openly, unmistakably signaling his contempt for the First Amendment.

When Dissent Was a Crime

In 1798, amid fears of an imminent war with France, Congress enacted the Sedition Act, which criminalized writing or publishing “any false, scandalous, and malicious publications” against the U.S. government, Congress, or the president. Fearing internal subversion, the Federalists in control of Congress deemed Democratic-Republicans as Jacobins who might welcome French conquest, and they viewed criticism of Adams and his allies as a threat to national security.

Matthew Lyon, a Democratic-Republican lawmaker from Vermont, became a notable example. He faced charges for a letter in Spooner’s Vermont Journal accusing Adams of abandoning “every consideration of the public welfare” in a continuous quest for power and in “an unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp, foolish adulation, and selfish avarice.”

Legal historian Wendell Bird, in his 2020 work Criminal Dissent, noted that Lyon’s case showed how even mild criticism could be criminalized under the Sedition Act, and how opinion as well as fact could lead to imprisonment. Lyon was convicted and sentenced to four months in jail and a $1,000 fine.

Reviewing court records, Bird identified 51 Sedition Act prosecutions involving 126 defendants, including 14 newspaper editors and three politicians. He argued that this tally reveals a far more aggressive Federalist effort to criminalize dissent and silence the opposition press than earlier historians had acknowledged. Nearly all defendants were Democratic-Republicans, with only one acquitted, underscoring the judiciary’s Federalist leanings that helped sustain such prosecutions.

The Sedition Act expired in March 1801, largely in response to a war that never came to pass. As one might expect, real wars often trigger broader repression.

In August 1862, at President Abraham Lincoln’s urging, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton moved to suspend habeas corpus nationwide. He authorized the arrest and military trial of anyone “engaged, by act, speech, or writing, in discouraging volunteer enlistments, or in any way giving aid and comfort to the enemy, or in any other disloyal practice against the United States.”

That directive left local sheriffs and prosecutors to decide loyalties with little regard for the primary aim of enforcing the draft. “At least 350 people were arrested in the following month,” historian David Greenberg notes, “and some of the accused had merely spoken ill of the president.”

More than 4,000 civilians were tried by military commissions during the Civil War. Focusing on arrests in loyal states, historian Mark E. Neely Jr. concluded that most detainees “had nothing to do with dissent or political opposition.” Nonetheless, some cases did involve disloyal speech, rather than espionage, sabotage, violence, or obstruction of troops.

In April 1863, Union General Ambrose Burnside issued General Order No. 38, permitting the arrest of people “declaring sympathies for the enemy.” The most famous target was Ohio congressman Clement Vallandigham, a Democrat who was arrested for denouncing the war as “wicked, cruel, and unnecessary,” arguing that its aims were not the Union’s preservation but “the freedom of the blacks and the enslavement of the whites.” After Vallandigham’s conviction, the Supreme Court declined to hear his petition, saying it had no authority to review military commissions’ decisions.

The Lincoln administration also shuttered more than 300 newspapers, typically those run by Democrats sympathetic to the Confederacy. Journalism professor David W. Bulla observed in 2009 that this marked “the greatest suppression of newspapers in the nation’s history,” noting, however, a 1863 letter from Lincoln to a Missouri general suggesting the president had second thoughts about the crackdown.

A similar pattern emerged during World War I, when Congress enacted the Espionage Act of 1917, criminalizing actions that obstructed recruitment or military efforts, with penalties up to 20 years’ imprisonment. The 1918 Sedition Act extended those provisions to disallow “disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language” about the government, the Constitution, or the armed forces.

Under President Woodrow Wilson, more than 2,000 people were arrested under those laws, yielding around 1,000 convictions. Among the defendants were Charles Schenck and Elizabeth Baer, Socialist Party leaders accused of distributing anti-draft pamphlets. In Schenck v. United States (1919), the Supreme Court upheld their Espionage Act convictions, declaring such speech a “clear and present danger” in wartime. A week later, the Court applied the same logic to Eugene V. Debs, a recurring Socialist presidential candidate who had been sentenced to ten years for criticizing the war and the Wilson administration.

In 1919 and 1920, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer oversaw a crackdown on communists and anarchists that resulted in thousands of arrests. Hundreds of foreign nationals legally residing in the United States—including Emma Goldman, the Russian-born anarchist who had faced a two-year prison sentence for encouraging draft resistance—were deported based on political beliefs.

The repression was not limited to antiwar factions. Wilson also targeted women’s suffrage advocates, who had embarrassed him by pressing for the presidency to endorse their cause. From 1917 to 1919, hundreds of White House picketers were arrested for obstructing sidewalks, and 168 were jailed, sometimes repeatedly.

Trump Tries to Emulate Wilson

Thus far, Trump has not succeeded in imprisoning his political adversaries. But he has not shied away from attempting it.

In November 2025, after Sen. Mark Kelly (D–Arizona) and five other Democratic lawmakers posted a video urging U.S. service members to “refuse illegal orders,” Trump urged they “should be ARRESTED AND PUT ON TRIAL.” He accused Kelly and the others of “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR AT THE HIGHEST LEVEL” and warned that their conduct was “punishable by DEATH!”

Although such “seditious behavior” might have been deemed valid in the late 18th and 19th centuries, today it does not constitute a crime under the U.S. Code—let alone a capital offense. And as a federal judge later observed, the video in question was plainly protected by the First Amendment. Yet Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, pressed ahead with the punishment bait.

In February, Pirro sought to indict the lawmakers on felonies under a federal statute that criminalizes disloyal conduct within the military—language echoing the 1917 Espionage Act. The grand jury, however, declined to approve the indictment, and Pirro abandoned the effort.

Lindsey Halligan, the interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia appointed by Trump, initially aided Trump’s cause. Halligan indicted James Comey for allegedly lying to Congress during testimony in 2020, attempting to meet a statutory deadline. Yet a federal judge later dismissed the indictment on the grounds that Halligan had been illegally appointed. The question lingered: what next?

Todd Blanche, who succeeded Bondi as head of the Justice Department, proposed a new line of attack. In April, Blanche announced another indictment, charging Comey with publicly threatening to assassinate Trump. But this second indictment flopped from the start, hinging on a photo Comey had posted on Instagram showing seashells arranged to spell out “86 47,” a symbol commonly used to oppose Trump, which did not fit the Supreme Court’s definition of a “true threat.”

The indictment alleged two felonies with a combined maximum prison sentence of ten years, and clearly outlined Trump’s objective: imprison someone for saying something that offended him, just as he had sought to do with the journalists who irritated him in the past.

Trump Threatens Journalists

These cases reveal a pattern in which Trump appears to either misunderstand or disregard the evolution of First Amendment jurisprudence since the Supreme Court allowed imprisonment of anti-war activists. In the 1969 Brandenburg v. Ohio decision, the Court discarded the “clear and present danger” standard from Schenck. It held that advocacy of illegal conduct cannot be criminalized unless it is directed toward inciting imminent lawless action and is likely to produce such action. Neither the Kelly video nor the Comey photograph meets that standard.

Trump also seems unaware of the Supreme Court’s rulings on flag burning, which the Court has twice recognized as a constitutionally protected form of expression. Justice Antonin Scalia, whom Trump has lauded as a model jurist, joined both decisions. Yet Trump maintains, and has proposed, that only “stupid people” believe flag-burners deserve protection from punishment. In an executive order from 2025, he instructed Bondi to “prioritize” prosecuting flag burners.

Trump also remains unfazed by First Amendment concerns that once led the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to abandon the Fairness Doctrine during the Reagan era. The doctrine required broadcasters to present public issues in a balanced manner. In 1985, the FCC concluded that the rule “inhibits the presentation of controversial issues,” “unnecessarily restricts journalistic freedom,” and “creates opportunities for government intimidation of broadcasters.”

Under Trump, however, the commission’s chair—his appointee Brendan Carr—views such interference as an essential facet of his job. During Trump’s first term, former FCC Chairman Ajit Pai resisted the president’s threats to revoke licenses in response to coverage he perceived as biased against him. “I believe in the First Amendment,” Pai asserted in 2017. “The FCC under my leadership will stand for the First Amendment.”

Carr, who agreed with the president that broadcasters must treat Trump fairly, displayed no such scruples. He signaled early support for Trump’s viewpoint by reopening two dubious “news distortion” inquiries—one into ABC’s fact-checking of Trump during a 2024 debate and another into the editing of a 60 Minutes interview with Harris, which Trump claimed amounted to consumer fraud because the edit made her appear more coherent.

More implausibly, Carr perceived potential “news distortion” when late-night host Jimmy Kimmel allegedly suggested, in a September 2025 monologue, that a conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s assassin shared Trump’s political leanings. Carr publicly warned stations that aired Kimmel’s program that they could face fines or license revocation if they did not sanction him for that, which led ABC and its affiliates to suspend Kimmel for a week—the penalty Carr had proposed. This year, after a joke about Trump’s age and the first lady’s marriage, the president demanded that ABC go further and fire Kimmel “immediately.”

Carr has also threatened to revoke the long-standing exemption that allows TV talk shows to interview political candidates without triggering the FCC’s “equal time” requirement, a move that would effectively bar such segments. He boasted about pressuring CBS to alter its journalistic practices as a condition of approving Paramount’s merger with Skydance Media. And in April, he announced an unprecedented early review of the licenses held by ABC-owned stations, threatening to shutter them if the FCC deemed they were not acting in the “public interest.”

That review drew sharp criticism from veteran FCC figures. Mark Fowler, who led the agency during the Reagan era, described the process as “more intrusive, burdensome, and extreme than anything I observed when I was chairman,” arguing that it reflected political manipulation of broadcast content and punitive actions. He contended the chairman acted as a biased political actor with a stake in the outcome, noting no historical precedent for government interference of broadcasters’ First Amendment rights on such a scale.

Carr appears to interpret the vague “public interest” standard as a mandate to placate the president. For instance, he maintains that ABC’s decision not to air a primetime address by Trump—a routine editorial judgment in light of prior practices by networks—will influence the FCC’s license review. By equating “the public interest” with Trump’s personal grievances, Carr seems to justify a version of the Fairness Doctrine intensified to suppress what he views as biased coverage against the president.

If Trump has his way, this standard could extend to other media too. In September, when he announced a ban on CNN, NOW, and Politico from White House access “effective immediately,” he warned that more outlets would be added. Like his earlier attempts to eject individual reporters (such as Jim Acosta or Brian Karem) or news organizations (the Associated Press), the move raised due process and First Amendment concerns. Less than a week later, a Trump-appointed federal judge ordered the White House to restore the revoked press badges, noting that outlets had received no notice or opportunity to be heard.

The justification offered after the fact—that these outlets had “displayed behavior violating the standards of professionalism and decorum”—was so vague that it could encompass any journalist who irritates the president. Even more troubling, Trump’s defenders signaled a willingness to expand bans beyond reporters to other media actors.

“Media Outlets shouldn’t be able to constantly write or report FICTION and LIES when they’re covering the President,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “I don’t think a court should permit fake news to be published day after day.” He added, “There’s something wrong with a country that allows people to publish activities that are deliberately negative.”

Trump, who has described “the FAKE NEWS media” as “the enemy of the American People” and accused reporters covering the Iran crisis of “virtual TREASON,” paradoxically professed to “cherish” freedom of the press. “The White House is not launching an assault on the Free Press,” he insisted. “It is launching an assault on the FAKE NEWS.”

Trump seems oblivious to the principle that the First Amendment exists to curb government power to draw lines of distinction. Rather than revealing a flaw in the United States, the freedom to publish stories the president labels “deliberately negative” is central to the right he says he upholds.

The FTC Investigates Trump’s Enemies

The FCC isn’t the sole agency that has pursued actions against Trump’s adversaries. In 2025, the Federal Trade Commission launched an inquiry into Media Matters for America, a liberal-leaning watchdog founded in 2004 as a counterpart to its conservative peers.

Since the FTC has no authority over nonprofits, questions naturally arise about its justification. The primary provocation seemed to be a November 2023 Media Matters report alleging that X (formerly Twitter) was placing advertisements next to pro-Nazi content for brands like Apple, Bravo, IBM, Oracle, and Xfinity.

Elon Musk, the platform’s owner and a Trump ally, responded by threatening a “thermonuclear lawsuit” against Media Matters, while Stephen Miller—now a White House deputy chief of staff—advocated investigations by conservative state Attorneys General for alleged “fraud.” Attorneys General from Texas and Missouri pursued those inquiries, but federal courts blocked them on First Amendment grounds. After those efforts stalled, the FTC initiated its own probe into Media Matters.

FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson—appointed by Trump—had previously signaled interest in pursuing such an investigation. A year after Media Matters published its report, Marc Andreessen, another major Trump donor, complained about an “orchestrated advertiser boycott against X.” Ferguson, then a Republican member of the FTC, asserted that “concerted refusals to engage can violate antitrust laws.” He boasted about his readiness to “investigate and prosecute collusion” around advertiser boycotts, underscoring his readiness to take on dissenting voices.

As FTC chair, Ferguson brought in critics of Media Matters to key positions. In May 2025, four months after he took office, the FTC issued a sweeping civil investigative demand (CID) seeking internal documents, including sensitive financial and journalistic records.

Initial explanations from the FTC about the CID were scarce. After Media Matters challenged the demand in court, the commission claimed it was probing “potentially unlawful advertiser boycotts.” The question remained why Media Matters would possess materials relevant to that inquiry. In August 2025, U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan concluded that the commission’s alleged motive appeared to be a pretext for unconstitutional retaliation against Media Matters, issuing a preliminary injunction against the CID. Sooknanan suggested the organization would show that retaliatory motives were the actual cause of the FTC’s demand.

When the FTC sought to overturn that injunction by appealing to the D.C. Circuit, its arguments reinforced the impression that the agency targeted Media Matters for its speech. “Even publicly available information reveals why Media Matters might receive a CID in an advertiser boycott inquiry,” the FTC claimed. “Media Matters’ site now calls for advertiser boycotts, and Congressional testimony has hinted at participation in deplatforming and demonetization campaigns.”

That supposed evidence, the organization argued, shows the FTC is merely going after speech protected by the First Amendment. Citing the Supreme Court, which has recognized that the government has no legitimate role in controlling the balance of private expression or bias, Media Matters argued that the CID was an unconstitutional intrusion. Facing a likely defeat, the FTC withdrew the CID and dropped its appeal.

The FTC also targeted NewsGuard, a firm rating the transparency and credibility of online news outlets. Ferguson dismissed concerns about bias but offered little proof. Even if bias existed, NewsGuard’s guidance remains protected by the First Amendment.

Nevertheless, the FTC issued a CID to NewsGuard in the same month that it announced its probe of Media Matters, demanding an extensive set of confidential and sensitive documents. NewsGuard described the CID as an attempt to burden and squeeze the company, noting that the agency had also pressured the advertising industry to influence NewsGuard’s revenue by tying it to a merger deal.

As with Media Matters, NewsGuard challenged the CID in court. The district court initially denied the request for a preliminary injunction, and NewsGuard appealed. The case remains before the D.C. Circuit. Advocates for the First Amendment contended that the FTC’s actions were an improper effort to suppress political speech.

In both instances, the FTC’s actions appeared to rest on nothing more than protection of speech the agency disfavors. Robert Corn-Revere, FIRE’s chief counsel, argued that NewsGuard’s ratings constitute quintessential journalistic activity protected by the First Amendment. The Supreme Court’s Moody v. NetChoice (2024) decision reinforced that government cannot dictate the scope of private expression or “un-bias” what it deems biased.

Trump Targets Protesters, Students, Lawyers, and Universities

Under Trump, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has demonstrated a similar disregard for First Amendment rights. Across the federal appellate landscape, most circuits have recognized a First Amendment right to record public law enforcement activity. Yet DHS officials have described such filming as “violence” and a tactic used by demonstrators and “violent offenders” seeking to foment unrest. Following the president’s lead, DHS personnel frequently harass peaceful protesters exercising a right repeatedly recognized by courts in multiple circuits.

These aggressively enforcing agents have carried out Trump’s deportation drive, which has largely targeted undocumented residents rather than the “most dangerous” individuals he had promised to pursue. He labeled foreign students who voiced dissent as potential threats. Taking a page from earlier administrations, Trump has sought to deport students he characterizes as “terrorist sympathizers.”

A stark example is Tufts University graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk, who was arrested in March 2025 for co-authoring a campus anti-Israel op-ed written a year earlier. After a federal judge ordered her released on bail, an immigration judge later concluded there was no basis to deport her. The matter was finally resolved when Ozturk completed her Ph.D. and left the country.

Four months later, in a separate case involving Stanford University student journalists, a federal judge in California ruled that deporting lawfully residing noncitizens for protected speech violated the First Amendment. Judge Noël Wise declared that the government’s warning—“Speak out against Israel or in support of Palestinians and we will revoke your visa”—sends a chilling message, and she found the statute relied upon by the administration unconstitutional as applied to protected speech.

These outcomes align with the Supreme Court’s 1945 Bridges v. Wixon decision, which held that aliens in the United States have freedom of speech and press. They also comport with Judge William G. Young’s January 2026 Massachusetts ruling that the Trump administration’s speech-based deportation policy violated the First Amendment.

Trump faced similar defeats when he sought to punish law firms for representing causes he opposed. Beginning in February 2025, he issued executive orders blocking security clearances for at- issue lawyers, directing them from federal contracts and government buildings, and signaling that others doing business with them could suffer consequences. Four firms challenged these orders in court, and all four prevailed on summary judgment, obtaining permanent injunctions. Appeals remain in the D.C. Circuit, where prospects for Trump appear dim.

The administration also leveraged federal funding to pressure opponents. In July, for instance, the Energy Department revealed that the Office of Management and Budget had selectively cut clean-energy funding “based solely on the political identity of the grant recipient’s state,” rather than on programmatic or performance factors.

Last year, the Trump administration frozen $2.2 billion in research grants to Harvard University, demanding a broad package of reforms to address antisemitism. In September 2025, a federal judge in Massachusetts ruled that, under the guise of combating antisemitism, the administration had engaged in unconstitutional coercion and retaliation against Harvard for resisting the government’s demands, imposing conditions on federal funding. The government’s appeal is pending in the First Circuit.

Trump Advertises His Intolerance

These judicial rebukes illustrate the peril of comparing Trump’s free speech approach to the historically sweeping crackdowns of Adams, Lincoln, or Wilson. Since then, Supreme Court rulings have strengthened First Amendment protections that resist even determined autocrats.

Gene Healy, author of The Cult of the Presidency and senior scholar at the Reason Foundation, argues that Trump has not imprisoned a congressman or candidate for anti-war speech. “There hasn’t been a crackdown on dissent on the scale of earlier moments,” he says, noting that the First Amendment has grown stronger over time and institutionalized protections now stand in the way of such actions.

FIRE’s Robert Corn-Revere echoes the point. “Trump’s not the first president to push against press freedoms, but he’s amplifying it in ways past leaders did not,” he observes. Since Trump’s second term began, he notes, there has been a spate of court rulings affirming First Amendment rights, while governments and institutions have pursued a broad array of tactics intended to curb dissent, undermine the press, and curb academic and legal institutions unfavorable to the administration.

During the Biden era, Trump contends that Special Counsel Jack Smith weaponized the government by accusing him of mishandling classified documents and attempting to overturn the 2020 election. Regardless of one’s view of those cases, they nevertheless involved actions beyond constitutionally protected speech, unlike the video and seashell photograph Trump cites as criminal.

Nixon, who harbored distrust for the press, did not prize openness. Apart from his thwarted attempt to suppress publication of the Pentagon Papers, he preferred to target journalists covertly, wiring them, placing them on an enemies list, and sending that list to the IRS, Justice Department, FBI, and Secret Service. The impeachment charges against Nixon cited such surveillance and audits as means to harass opponents. Yet Nixon did not publicly flaunt his suppression of dissent the way Trump does.

Like several predecessors, Nixon toyed with the idea of punishing critics with regulatory actions on broadcast content, but he did so with more discretion than Trump. In 1972, for example, Nixon privately discussed coercing The Washington Post via threats to broadcast licenses owned by the newspaper’s affiliates. When challengers to those stations pressed their suits, the White House denied acting at the president’s direction.

Under Nixon, Chuck Colson pressed network executives to curb coverage deemed unfavorable to the White House. Working with Nixon’s authorization and with input from top FCC officials, Colson threatened to challenge license renewals by invoking the Fairness Doctrine. The strategy appears to have influenced CBS to trim a report on the Watergate break-in and to reduce its on-air commentary in response to presidential statements during the 1972 campaign.

Trump, by contrast, makes public, ongoing threats to revoke broadcasters’ licenses for coverage he dislikes, and he has placed in office an FCC chairman who seems predisposed to follow through. Carr embraces Trump’s idea of the “public interest,” which at least in practice excludes journalism the president regards as unfair. In that sense, Trump has created a climate where government alignments with media policy are increasingly overt.

Woof woof ! pic.twitter.com/V9lKidHDZ9

— Brendan Carr (@BrendanCarrFCC) March 19, 2025

“When 97 percent of the stories [about me] are negative,” Trump told reporters last year, “that’s not freedom of speech anymore.” He added that networks “take a great story and twist it,” which he called “almost illegal.”

Hazlett emphasizes the long-running tendency to regulate broadcast content under the umbrella of “the public interest.” Yet, he notes, Trump’s swagger makes the censorship threat more explicit and more offensive. He credits Trump with making the intimidation obvious and “noxious,” provoking Democrats and broadcasters to resist the very regulatory framework they once championed.

Trump isn’t the first commander-in-chief to harass hostile journalism. During the Obama administration, for example, the White House pursued plans to bar Fox News from interviewing Kenneth Feinberg, who oversaw executive compensation at firms receiving bailout funds under TARP. That punishment was far milder than Trump’s ban on several outlets, and the White House backed down after a chorus of objections from major networks.

Trump has correctly criticized the Biden administration for pressuring social media platforms to suppress content deemed dangerous to public health, democracy, or national security. But his own agenda seeks to “un-bias” the internet in a manner that raises serious concerns about centralizing control over speech.

In May 2025, Ferguson announced an inquiry into how social platforms moderate content, presenting it as a stand against “the tyranny of Big Tech” and a vital step toward “restoring free speech.” Carr likewise frames “reining in Big Tech” as essential to protecting free speech, arguing that the “censorship cartel” must be dismantled. Yet the First Amendment does not permit government intervention to override private editorial decisions. By attempting to supersede such choices, Trump’s regulatory apparatus risks eroding, rather than defending, constitutional protections.

‘Unfiltered Contempt for the First Amendment’

Trump’s stance is notably explicit: he makes no effort to conceal his contempt for the First Amendment. Whether through lawsuits, attempts to jail opponents, calls to prosecute flag burners, threats to strip broadcasting licenses, eject journalists from the White House, deport foreign students, or weaponize executive orders against law firms and universities, he wants the public to understand the price of exercising constitutional rights in ways that irritate him. 

“What distinguishes him from other modern presidents is the sheer, unfiltered contempt for the First Amendment, magnified to an eleven,” Healy says. Lyndon B. Johnson once pressed to remove CBS people from coverage, but Trump goes further—publicly calling for the firing of Jimmy Kimmel and openly naming Democratic firms as targets. Nixon compiled an enemies list; Trump broadcasts it in real time. He has taken to naming Democratic law firms as targets as well.

Healy suggests that the openness of Trump’s contempt carries its own trickle-down effect: it forces accountability into the public view in ways that more discreet forms of censorship do not. Corn-Revere adds that the breadth of Trump’s efforts—ranging from press persecution to campus intimidation, to leveraging the FCC and FTC to suppress criticism—represents a striking departure from the more covert, defensive actions of earlier leaders. Since the start of his second term, he notes, we have witnessed an unusual number of positive First Amendment rulings precisely because of the broad array of governmental actions aimed at stifling dissent and press freedom.

At the outset of his second term, Trump announced an executive order claiming to restore free speech and end federal censorship. He proclaimed a commitment to ensuring that no federal officer, employee, or agent would engage in conduct that abridges the free speech of any American citizen. Yet given Trump’s long record of punishing speech he dislikes, many viewed that pledge as implausible, a realization that only becomes clearer with each new betrayal of that vow.