Trump’s Aggressive Actions Against Free Speech Speak a Lot Louder Than His Words Defending It
Art by Nick Roney
Harvard University took the extraordinary step of suing the Trump administration on April 21, 2025, claiming that the pressure campaign mounted on the school by the president and his Cabinet to force viewpoint diversity on campus violated the Constitution’s guarantees of free speech.
“Defendants’ actions are unlawful,” Harvard’s lawsuit states. “The First Amendment does not permit the Government to ‘interfere with private actors’ speech to advance its own vision of ideological balance.’”
Yet in his first term, President Donald J. Trump declared that free speech mattered.
Trump issued the “Executive Order Restoring Free Speech and Ending Federal Censorship” on March 21, 2019. In it, he expressed the importance of free inquiry and open debate to education and directed federal officials to use the federal government’s funding of higher education to ensure that universities promote free inquiry.
Channeling free-speech champions Benjamin Franklin and James Madison, Trump wrote that “free inquiry is an essential feature of our Nation’s democracy.”
As a professor of constitutional, criminal and comparative law, and as a citizen who enjoys his liberty, I agree.
Free speech is fundamental to human progress. Scientific, medical, technological and social advancements all rely on the free flow of information. Robust discussion and disagreement are equally important to maintaining a healthy constitutional republic.
In the words of the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”
The First Amendment’s free speech and press clauses protect all forms of expression – oral, print, digital and artistic – from governmental interference or punishment.
Of the many types of speech, political speech is the most protected.
On the first day of his second term in office, Trump issued another free speech executive order. It affirms the administration’s commitment to free speech, directs that tax money is not used to abridge free speech and instructs federal employees to “identify and take appropriate action to correct past misconduct by the Federal Government related to censorship of protected speech.”
In a vacuum, Trump’s orders appear to bode well for free speech.
But what is important is free speech reality, not rhetoric. Three months into his second term, where does Trump stand?
The many interconnected orders, letters, statements and actions of Trump’s White House make an assessment of any positive effects difficult. On the other hand, the Trump administration has clearly violated and chilled free speech on many occasions.
Repression and retaliation
Attempts to silence the president’s adversaries are developing as a pattern.
Law firms and attorneys who have sued or prosecuted Trump, or represented his adversaries, have been targeted for retribution and concessions. It began with an executive order on March 6, 2025, directed at the U.S.-based global law firm Perkins Coie, which had once represented Trump’s opponent in the 2016 presidential race, Hillary Clinton. A second order was issued on March 14, 2025, against Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison because it once employed an attorney who investigated Trump. Subsequently, at least six other prominent law firms were also targeted.
Several law firms acceded to the president’s demands, agreeing to accept clients without regard to political beliefs, to eliminate DEI practices, and to perform pro bono work valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars for causes Trump supports.
The firms that didn’t accede to the president’s demands had their security clearances removed, access to federal buildings restricted, and were banned from working for federal agencies. A few of the firms that didn’t relent have won temporary injunctions barring the administration’s actions against them.
The nonpartisan free speech advocacy organization Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression decried the orders as threatening the foundations of justice and free speech. In one of several challenges to these orders, U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell wrote on March 12, 2025, that Trump’s order appeared motivated by “retaliatory animus” and concluded that it “runs head on into the wall of First Amendment protections.” Two other federal courts reached similar conclusions.
In the first three months of his second term, Trump withdrew Secret Service protection of several prominent critics who are former federal government officials, including John Bolton, a former Trump national security adviser. Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, his top aide, Brian Hook, and former high-level health official Anthony Fauci also lost their security protection.
It is hard to imagine that these decisions won’t have a profoundly chilling effect on potential critics of the president, especially since the revocations were publicly announced and each individual has been the subject of credible threats resulting from their governmental service.
Targeting the press
A similar pattern exists for journalists, where Trump is using his power to punish organizations whose reporting he doesn’t like.
AP journalists were banned from the White House and Air Force One on Feb. 11, 2025, for refusing to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, the new name Trump had ordered for the body of water. On April 9, 2025, this ban was found to violate the First Amendment by a judge nominated by Trump during his first term.
Denouncing CNN and MSNBC as “illegal” and claiming they are paid political operatives, Trump suggested they should be investigated during a speech at the U.S. Department of Justice.
Trump effectively closed Voice of America, after 83 years of continuous broadcasting, for being “anti-Trump” and radical in its views. By charter, the broadcaster represents “America, not any single segment of American society,” with “accurate, objective, and comprehensive” news and “a balanced and comprehensive projection of significant American thought and institutions” through television, radio, internet, social media and satellite broadcasts to peoples around the world.
The Federal Communications Commission has initiated regulatory actions against the licenses of several television stations for broadcasts that have been accused by the President of being anti-Trump or biased in favor of Kamala Harris. Early in the process, the outcomes of these actions are to be determined.
Pressuring universities and students
Other administration actions, I believe, raise serious free speech issues.
Harvard isn’t the only university feeling pressure.
The administration is threatening to withhold federal money from universities as a way to coerce many of them to comply with administration policies in ways that implicate free speech and in some instances violate legal processes for the withholding of federal support.
Some of the Trump administration’s recent immigration enforcement efforts have targeted international students who are in the U.S. lawfully but who participated in Palestinian rights protests and disagreed with Israel’s actions during the war in Gaza.
The administration claims that some students whose visas have been revoked were either Hamas supporters or violated criminal laws. The administration has also said that many students are being deported under broad authority the secretary of state has to deport those deemed a danger to national security.
Democracy and free speech
In the past decade, the U.S. has fallen in press freedom, rule of law and democratic governance, resulting in the classification of a “flawed democracy” by the Economist Intelligence Unit, a democratic watchdog. Unsurprisingly, there has been a simultaneous rise in public support for authoritarianism. These changes make support for free speech increasingly important.
On March 4, 2025, Trump declared in a speech before a joint session of Congress that he “stopped all government censorship and brought free speech back to America.”
The record doesn’t support this claim.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
How Trump Plays the Media
Image by Mohamed Nohassi.
It’s not a good time to be an American journalist. Or a consumer of American journalism. Or, for that matter, even a skimmer of the headlines crawling across American phones.
Donald Trump is suing media corporations and targeting individual journalists on social media. The White House press office is playing musical chairs at its press conferences and withholding press pool reports it dislikes. Republicans in Congress have called on public broadcasters to defend themselves against “systemically biased content” and are trying to claw back their funding. Large newspapers are choosing to tailor what they write to stay in the government’s good graces and smaller ones are being forced to do the same. Sources are increasingly reluctant to go on the record and violence against journalists has become a punchline. Even student newspapers haven’t escaped the threats.
In the how-petty-can-you-get category, White House officials have refused to answer questions from journalists who use identifying pronouns. “Any reporter who chooses to put their preferred pronouns in their bio clearly does not care about biological reality or truth and therefore cannot be trusted to write an honest story,” Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt wrote in an email to the New York Times. (Sometimes I think that if I roll my eyes any more often, they’ll fall out of their sockets.)
It’s probably uncharitable to pick on journalists when they’re under attack from so many powerful and malign forces, but it’s still necessary to keep the news media true to their purpose.
Bad News
It’s not as if we weren’t warned. Scholars studying autocrats note that one of their first targets on gaining power is almost invariably an independent and open press. Trump made it all too clear during his second presidential campaign that he views journalists as his enemies and, now that he’s back in the White House, he continues to disparage, ignore, or run circles around traditional news outlets. What’s new is the willingness of all too many media corporations to cave in so cravenly.
Even before Trump won the election, the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times had set bad examples by squelching already-written editorial endorsements of Kamala Harris for president. I guess you might say that they were just hedging their bets if they hadn’t followed up by instituting distinctly dubious new editorial policies. Washington Post owner and billionaire Jeff Bezos, refocused his paper’s opinion section on defending “personal liberties and free markets,” while LA Times owner, billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, fired his paper’s editorial board and instituted AI-generated “political ratings” for its opinion section. Both papers have been hemorrhaging subscribers and much-admired journalists ever since.
I’m not sure why anyone was surprised that Bezos betrayed the editorial independence of the Washington Post. Although he had previously exercised restraint there, he’s been rapacious in steering Amazon, his main hustle, which came under attack in the first Trump administration. The Post has essentially been a hobby and hobbies are easily cast aside when they become inconvenient. Apparently, principles are, too.
It doesn’t help that other large media companies have recently capitulated to lawsuits that Trump, as one of his hobbies, filed or threatened to file. Last December, ABC News settled a defamation suit involving star anchor George Stephanopoulos’s description of Trump’s sexual abuse trial with an apology and $15 million for a Trump-related foundation. In January, Meta settled a lawsuit from 2021 over the company’s suspension of Trump’s social-media accounts in the wake of the January 6th assault on the Capitol. It agreed to pay him $25 million and, coincidentally (of course), tossed out all its DEI initiatives. Recently, CBS’s parent company, Paramount Global, agreed to mediation for a lawsuit Trump brought over editorial decisions made when 60 Minutes aired an interview with Kamala Harris. (He later upped his demand to a whopping $20 billion in damages.) In all three cases, Trump’s legal claims were widely seen as weak, yet the companies chose not to test them in court.
Of course, you won’t be surprised to learn that Trump wasn’t satisfied with such groveling. He never will be. (He recently renewed pressure on the Federal Communications Commission to pull CBS News’s license.) His need to dominate, which makes your average control freak look weak-kneed, keeps him demanding ever more obeisance. Take, for instance, his response to the Associated Press’s policy of continuing to call the body of water he renamed the “Gulf of America,” the “Gulf of Mexico.” He promptly banned AP reporters from covering most of his official events. Even after AP won a lawsuit on First Amendment grounds and the judge in the case, a Trump appointee no less, ordered the White House to lift all restrictions on the news agency, an AP reporter and photographer were still barred from a White House news conference on the very day the court order was to take effect.
AP, a 178-year-old cooperative, with four billion readers daily in nearly 100 countries, could afford to take the federal government to court. Many smaller news outlets can’t.
More Bad News
However much Donald Trump may overestimate his abilities, he is a pro at playing the media. His instinct, talent, skill — I don’t know exactly what to call it — is to read the room remarkably accurately, and his rooms are increasingly restricted to his boosters. He’s spent decades both courting and denigrating the press, all the while honing his innate sense of what makes news. You’d think that, after all this time, journalists would have figured out how to cover Donald Trump. They haven’t.
This is not for lack of trying. Back when newspapers delivered the news once or twice a day, reporters “worked a story,” filling in details to make it as complete as possible by deadline. Now, with our 24/7 news cycle, digitized news media, and myriad distractions, when news drops, reporters put up a quick placeholder — a few sentences on a website or live blog — and then add to it continually as the story and their understanding of it develop. The result is news dolloped out in bite-sized bits, digestible but seldom filling. Meanwhile, news outlets suffer from a journalistic version of FOMO (fear of missing out on a scoop), which can lead to their chasing dubious stories with sometimes unsettling consequences, as when multiple news outlets picked up a false report on X about Trump’s tariffs, which sent the stock market soaring and then erasing $2.4 trillion in value within half an hour.
Trump thrives in just such a context by carelessly creating chaos and a continuous loop of contradictory headlines. His former aide Steve Bannon seemed amused when he suggested in 2018 that the way to drive the media crazy was “to flood the zone with shit.” It’s a practice the humor-deficient Trump has ardently embraced.
For a prime example, you need look no further than the staged unveiling of his tariff policies. Like a carnival barker calling out, “Step right up, ladies and gents, for the greatest tariff show on Earth!,” he teased for months about the tariffs to come, christening April 2nd as “Liberation Day” and promising to divulge what they were then. That day dawned and percentages determined by a formula about as sophisticated as something scribbled on the back of an envelope were revealed to much fanfare and wall-to-wall press coverage. A few days later, some of the tariffs were imposed. A few days after that, many of them were paused, then some withdrawn, others left pending or threatened, and on (and on) it goes. With the policy changing by the hour, so did the rationales for it, leaving the media endlessly scurrying to catch up.
As the world economy tanked in response, news stories dutifully noted the justifications du jour, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s appraisal that it took “great courage” for Trump to “stay the course” as long as he did. (Most of the reciprocal tariffs lasted about 12 hours.) But the general tone of the reporting shifted, as if the media suddenly sensed that they could finally say out loud that the wannabe emperor had no clue. So I guess it is “the economy, stupid” (to cite President Bill Clinton’s aide James Carville), not civil liberties, health care, job security, historical accuracy, or any of the other basics, which I stupidly thought might tip the balance in reporting.
Some Good News
Tempting as it may be, the media can’t ignore what a president says. It’s unprofessional to abet the public’s ignorance. It’s also dangerous to democracy. An ill-informed populace is easily manipulated and, in regions without a local news source — in 2024, there were 206 “news deserts” in the United States, encompassing almost 55 million Americans — it’s hard to maintain a sense of community or organize to challenge bad governance. Still, amid all the chaos and cruelty of the Trump administration, the media are not defenseless. His endless efforts to undermine them attest to their continuing power and importance. Being of a practical turn of mind, I’ve culled some ideas for how to use that power from several sources and added a few of my own to come up with seven-and-a-half propositions for good journalism in the Age of Donald J. Trump.
1. Get the story right
If you think about it, the only thing journalists have going for them is that people believe them. Without that, their usefulness ceases to exist. So, it’s important (particularly in the Age of Trump) that they call out lies and flimflam in clear, accurate, precise, straightforward language, including in headlines. For example, Trump’s desire to turn Gaza into a golf course is ethnic cleansing, not a “plan to rebuild” Gaza, and tariffs are “import taxes,” not an incentive to reindustrialize America. It’s necessary also to keep repeating the truth in the face of lies: immigrants, for instance, are considerably less likely to be imprisoned for crimes than U.S.-born people (though you certainly wouldn’t know that from listening to Trump and crew), and pulling funding from universities is as much about curbing antisemitism as Covid was about clearing our sinuses.
2. Supply significance, context, proportion, and consequences
Key tasks for reporters and analysts are to separate the substantial from the silly, the consequential from the sensational, and random musings from faits accomplis, then to report the hell out of the real issues, keep them prominent within the churn of news cycles, and explain why they matter. A place to begin is by giving less attention to Trump’s executive orders — aptly defined by a law professor as “just press releases with nicer stationery” — and more attention to the effects of his policies that get enacted. And while his ruminations may bear noting, they could appear, not in headlines, but on, say, page 11 (or its online equivalent), which is where the Boston Globe relegated its report of the local 100,000-strong Hands Off! protest.
3. Heed framing
News stories are a snapshot of a specific, often fleeting moment during which reporters decide what to include, what to leave out, and what to emphasize. The problem arises when conventional thinking and herd instinct solidify those choices as the only choices. There may be just two dominant American political parties, for instance, but there are other political forces at work in the country and we’d all benefit if they weren’t covered primarily as nuisances or threats. And while gyrations of the stock market matter, they matter less to most people than gyrations in their rents or mortgages, grocery bills, or prospects for retirement.
4. Resist euphemisms, circumlocutions, and normalizing the abnormal
The term “sanewashing” — reporting Trump’s loony pronouncements as if they were lucid thoughts or comments — hasn’t been popping up much since the 2024 presidential campaign ended. It’s been replaced by the tendency of mainstream journalism to reinforce the status quo, as when the CEO of CNN instructed his staff to omit mention of Trump’s felonies and his two impeachments in their inauguration coverage. Or maybe it’s been folded into the journalistic task of trying to make sense of events — what The Atlantic‘s editor Jeffrey Goldberg called a “bias toward coherence” — which presented the schoolyard taunts about tariffs slung between Trump advisors Elon Musk and Peter Navarro as if they were serious policy discussions.
5. Lead with empathy
They’re called news stories for a reason. As cheap as tug-the-heartstrings journalism can be, readers, listeners, and viewers pay attention to stories about people, especially when they’re like them. So, while USAID staff getting locked out of their offices by Elon Musk’s DOGE may not resonate with many Americans, parents whose kids are locked out of daycare because its funding was cut by Musk, a billionaire father of perhaps more children than he can keep track of, probably will.
6. Control the message
Here’s the central messaging thing about Trump: he’s remarkably skilled at lassoing any discussion, any topic he brings up, and holding onto it. That means the media, whose relationship with politicians should be inherently adversarial, all too often starts out on the defensive if it tries to hold him accountable for his words and deeds. Of course, he never apologizes, never takes responsibility for anything, never rules anything out, and never admits to error or failure. Instead, when he says something outlandish and gets called on it, he doubles down and dispatches his minions to repeat and embellish it. The media then amplify and discuss it, as if it were actual governance, rather than gibberish, whim, or theatrics. Which means that we get stories about what Trump said and then stories about the stories about what he said, and on and on until he comes up with a new distraction.
7. Be creative, adventuresome, and strategic, and always, always stick up for each other
This is hardly the first time the press has faced government hostility, and the American news media have struggled for years to overcome skepticism and win over tough audiences. Trade publications, podcasts, newsletters, and other independent and niche outlets fill some gaps and help engage not-so-obvious audiences, but standing up to power can be a very lonely task. In a time when even Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski admits to being scared, self-censorship can seem like an all too appealing choice. So it’s essential for other journalists to unite to resist unfair restrictions on any journalist, as even Newsmax and Fox News did against Trump’s treatment of AP. Journalists can also highlight the courage of their colleagues to let them know they’re not alone.
Of course, just about all of the above costs money, so my final nudge is not to journalists but to those of us who value good journalism. Support your local and national outlets however you can and, as stakeholders, urge them to do better. For all the deserved criticism of the American media, they remain one of the strongest pillars propping up what’s left of democracy in a time that’s been anything but good for the First Amendment. We can’t afford to let them topple.
This piece first appeared on TomDispatch.
As History Erasure Intensifies, Independent Internet Archives Are Helping Fortify the ‘Digital Preservation Infrastructure’
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Photograph Source: Jason “Textfiles” Scott – CC BY 2.0
Despite Donald Trump’s disavowal of Project 2025, his administration began enforcing that initiative’s agenda immediately after his second inauguration. This includes efforts to erase history through education cuts, classroom and book censorship, website scrubbing, and the silencing of media outlets and institutions like PBS, NPR, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
One week after Trump’s inauguration on January 20, 2025, in a post on the online platform Free Government Information, data services librarian emeritus from the University of California, San Diego, James A. Jacobs wrote, “There is a difference between the government changing a policy and the government erasing information, but the line between those two has blurred in the digital age… In the digital age, government publishing has shifted from the distribution of unalterable printed books to digital posts on government websites. Such digital publications can be moved, altered, and withdrawn at the flick of a switch. Publishing agencies are not required to preserve their own information, nor to provide free access to it.”
While noting that “digital government information was being lost before President Trump,” Jacobs stressed that “[t]he scale of loss and alteration of information under Trump may prove to be unprecedented” and that “librarians, archivists, and citizens” must create a “new distributed digital preservation infrastructure.”
Organizations like the Freedom Archives in Berkeley, California, have been working for decades to preserve online information on history, social issues, and activism. Established in 1999, this nonprofit educational facility houses audio, video, and print materials that “chronicle the progressive history of the Bay Area, the United States, and international movements for liberation and social justice,” according to the organization’s website. Its digital collection of content on progressive movements, culture, and activism includes materials on subjects like Black liberation, gender and sexuality, and Indigenous struggles.
The Freedom Archives’ co-director and co-founder, Claude Marks, notes that conservative extremists “are purposefully rewriting history to eliminate references to slavery of Blacks from Africa and genocide against Indigenous people, and the purpose of that is to reify and reinforce white supremacy. Oftentimes, the truth lies more with the resisters who may have been defeated in various struggles with their colonizers. If that’s your shared point of view, you want to protect access to material that gives voice to those people who were engaged in liberatory struggles and were fighting for justice and human rights.”
For instance, nearly 37 states in the U.S. have measures in place “that limit how America’s undeniable history of racism—from chattel slavery to Jim Crow—can be discussed in public school classrooms,” according to a 2023 articlein the Conversation.
Many fear this attempt to rewrite history, especially under the Trump administration, might have far-reaching consequences. “The danger isn’t just that they’ll purge accurate data from the past but that if and when that data is ever reposted that some of it will be modified with false information,” saidCharles Gaba, a health care policy data analyst and web developer, according to a February 2025 Salon article.
As an independent organization, the Freedom Archives is largely funded through grassroots efforts. “We’re not vulnerable to: ‘Oh, we didn’t get that big grant through the Department of Education,’ which will no longer exist [soon],” Marks says.
The Freedom Archives’ staff has collaborated with archives and organizations like the Manilatown Heritage Foundation, the Bay Area Lesbian Archives, and the Los Angeles-based Southern California Library, which “documents and makes accessible histories of struggles that challenge racism and other systems of oppression so we can all imagine and sustain possibilities for freedom.”
It has also worked with Interference Archive, a Brooklyn, New York-based organization that curates in-person and online exhibits of “cultural ephemera” such as posters, books, zines, and flyers created by activists and participants in social movements. Interference Archive uses these materials “to animate histories of people mobilizing for social transformation” and to preserve and honor “histories and material culture that is often marginalized in mainstream institutions,” its website states.
Highlighting the importance of these efforts to archive information, the New England Archivists state, “Archives are the foundation of a democratic society. They exist to safeguard the rights of individuals, ensure transparency, and hold public servants accountable.”
Another notable online library is the Internet Archive, whose Wayback Machine contains “more than 928 billion web pages saved over time,” the site explains. In March 2025, the Wayback Machine’s director, Mark Graham, toldNPR that the Internet Archive was the only place to find an “interactive timeline” of the January 6, 2021, attack on the United States Capitol and that “it’s in the public’s interest to save such records.” More people have been referring to the information on the Internet Archive website since Trump took office.
In April 2025, the San Francisco Standard reported that the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) had cut funding for the Internet Archive while the organization “was halfway through an NEH [National Endowment for the Humanities] grant of $345,960.” Jefferson Bailey, the Internet Archive’s director of archiving and data services, said that funding from other sources would help the organization stay afloat, but he worried about the impact of the cuts on smaller nonprofits.
One such nonprofit is the HathiTrust Digital Library, which contains digital copies of more than 18 million items from research libraries. The universities of the Big Ten Academic Alliance (formerly known as the Committee on Institutional Cooperation) and the 11 libraries of the University of California launched the archive in 2008 “to ensure that those digitized collections—and the libraries that steward them—remain strong and serve scholarship into the future,” the website explains. “Our reach now includes members outside of the United States. Over 18 million digitized library items are currently available, and our mission to expand the collective record of human knowledge is always evolving.”
Meanwhile, the Zinn Education Project (ZEP) provides educational materials for middle and high school teachers. “Based on the approach to history highlighted in Howard Zinn’s best-selling book A People’s History of the United States, our teaching materials emphasize the role of working people, women, people of color, and organized social movements in shaping history,” the site states. Free downloadable lessons and articles are categorized by theme, time period, and reading level.
A worldwide network of volunteers curates the Marxist Internet Archive, a storehouse of writings by nearly 1,000 authors “representing a complete spectrum of political, philosophical, and scientific thought.” The site’s content comprises more than 180,000 documents published in 83 languages. Its founders’ primary motivation for starting this archive was to dispel misinformation and misconceptions about Marxism, the site explains.
Open Culture consolidates, curates, and provides free access to culture and educational media, including history, politics, e
The Public Domain Review’s archives cover subjects like culture, history, politics, and war. “It’s our belief that the public domain is an invaluable and indispensable good, which—like our natural environment and our physical heritage—deserves to be explicitly recognized, protected, and appreciated,” the nonprofit’s website notes.
Many of these organizations’ ties to progressive movements extend far beyond archiving. For example, Marks says that “as participants in a broader struggle for liberation, justice, and global values that are liberatory instead of oppressive and colonial,” the Freedom Archives’ staff participates in local and national activism and stays conscious of “the importance of causes like international solidarity—defending the right for Cuba to exist without an embargo, the right of the Palestinians to survive the genocide, and the right to their own identity and state. As long as we’re doing that, I have faith that all these movements will survive the brutality and the willingness of the powers of the empire to try to destroy them and snuff them out.”
This article was produced by Local Peace Economy.
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