Trump’s ‘Free Speech’ Presidency Racked Up 200 Censorship Attempts In Its First Year

from the the-most-censorial-president-in-history dept

We’ve said it before, and we’ll keep saying it because apparently it needs repeating: Donald Trump is not a free speech president. He just plays one on TV while doing the exact opposite behind the scenes. And in front of the scenes. And basically everywhere. Over and over and over again.

Nora Benavidez at Free Press (not the Bari Weiss publication, but the civil society group that has been around for years) has done the tedious but essential work of actually counting the censorship attempts from the Trump administration over the administration’s first year. Writing in the New York Times, she puts the number at around 200 documented instances:

Since returning to office, Mr. Trump and his administration have tried to undermine the First Amendment, suppress information that he and his supporters don’t like and hamstring parts of the academic, legal and private sectors through lawsuits and coercion — to flood the zone, as his ally Steve Bannon might say.

Two hundred. In a single year. From the guy who never shuts up about how he’s the greatest defender of free speech in American history.

As we pointed out a few months back, Trump didn’t just stumble into hypocrisy—he (as he does so often these days) literally said the quiet part out loud when explaining his executive order attempting to criminalize flag burning:

“We took the freedom of speech away.”

That’s… that’s not the flex you think it is, my dude.

The examples Benavidez catalogs range from the high-profile to the quietly terrifying. Many you’ve probably heard about:

His administration banned Associated Press reporters from certain parts of the White House and Air Force One because the outlet uses “Gulf of Mexico” rather than the term Mr. Trump prefers, “Gulf of America.” It tried and failed to force some of the nation’s biggest news organizations to agree to restrictions on coverage of the Pentagon. He has said critical coverage of his initiatives is “really illegal.”

And, of course, the administration has weaponized immigration enforcement as a speech-suppression tool:

In March, Mahmoud Khalil, a green card holder and a leader of pro-Palestinian demonstrations on the Columbia campus, was arrested and detained by immigration officials for several months. That month, Rumeysa Ozturk, a student visa holder, was arrested by immigration officials and detained for several weeks, apparently because she was an author of an opinion essay criticizing Tufts University for its response to the Israel-Hamas war.

Arresting people and threatening deportation because of their political speech. That’s not a misunderstanding of the First Amendment—it’s a direct assault on it.

And the targets keep expanding.

After Federal District Court Judge James Boasberg ruled against the administration in a case involving the deportation of Venezuelans to El Salvador, Mr. Trump called for the judge to be impeached. A trainee was dismissed from the F.B.I.’s academy, apparently for having displayed an L.G.B.T.Q. Pride flag. The F.B.I. also appears to have fired agents for kneeling during George Floyd protests.

The administration has gone after law firms, forcing settlements where they agree to do pro bono work for administration-approved causes. Universities have been coerced into changing policies and paying millions. Social media platforms—the same ones MAGA world spent years screaming about for “censorship”—have been sued over their content moderation decisions and forced into “settlements” to stay in the good graces of our thin-skinned dictator wannabe:

Mr. Trump has sued social media platforms for their content moderation policies — free-speech decisions, in other words — leading to Meta, X and YouTube capitulating through settlements totaling around $60 million.

Let’s be clear about what that means: the President of the United States sued private companies because he didn’t like how they exercised their own First Amendment rights regarding what speech to host on their own platforms. And got them to pay up, because the alternative of being a constant target, was worse.

That’s the opposite of free speech.

Remember all those years of Republicans insisting that when private platforms made moderation decisions they didn’t like, it was “censorship,” but when the government did it, that was just fine? Yeah. We’re living in that world now.

Benavidez makes an important point about how this all works together:

What is important to recognize is that these efforts work in concert in their frequency and their volume: Even the most egregious cases seem to quickly fade from public consciousness, and in that way, they’re clearly meant to overwhelm us and make us think twice about exercising our rights.

This is the Bannon “flood the zone” strategy applied to constitutional rights. You can’t focus on any single outrage because there are fifteen new ones by the time you finish reading about it. Each individual act of censorship might spark a news cycle, but two hundred of them? That’s just… Tuesday.

And here’s what’s maddening: this is the same guy whose supporters spent years screaming that the Biden administration was engaged in unprecedented censorship because some officials sent some angry emails to social media companies—emails that, as we’ve covered extensively, the companies routinely ignored. That was the constitutional crisis that required Elon Musk to buy Twitter and “free the bird.”

But actual government coercion? Actual arrests? Actual lawsuits forcing private companies to change their speech policies? Actual bans on journalists? That’s apparently just “making America great again.”

Benavidez closes with a warning that shouldn’t need stating but apparently does:

But constitutional rights and democratic norms don’t disappear all at once; they erode slowly. The next three years will require a vigilant defense of free speech and open debate.

She’s right. And part of that vigilance means not letting the “free speech” crowd get away with pretending that the guy actively engaged in government censorship at scale is somehow its greatest defender.

Two hundred times. In one year. And we’re just getting started on year two.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, censorship, donald trump, free speech