On his first day back in the Oval Office, Donald Trump took a large, righteous step toward promoting a cherished First Amendment value by signing Executive Order (EO) 14149. Titled “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship,” the EO extends unfettered protection for free expression, bluntly proclaiming that “[g]overnment censorship of speech is intolerable in a free society.” It adds that “it is the policy of the United States to . . . secure the right of the American people to engage in constitutionally protected speech.”
The EO marked a laudable rebuke of what I’ve described as “the Biden administration’s jawboning––verbal arm twisting––of platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and X to delete or otherwise obscure conservative-leaning perspectives about matters like COVID-19 mask mandates and vaccines, and the 2020 presidential election.” The EO asserts that:
Over the last 4 years, the previous administration trampled free speech rights by censoring Americans’ speech on online platforms, often by exerting substantial coercive pressure on third parties, such as social media companies, to moderate, deplatform, or otherwise suppress speech that the Federal Government did not approve.
The EO was welcome news for both online speakers and platforms because the US Supreme Court in 2024 dodged the substantive merits of jawboning claims brought by two states and several individuals (including Jay Bhattacharya, Trump’s pick to head the National Institutes of Health). The presence of high-profile technology company leaders at Trump’s swearing-in ceremony, when coupled with his EO signing that day, created the optics “that Trump stands with them in protecting platform free expression for all viewpoints.”
Sadly, the EO is proving to be little more than optics, a feckless First Amendment façade failing to cloak Trump’s vastly more numerous retributive assaults on the freedoms of speech and press. For instance, Trump’s efforts to control speech at private universities gut the notion that he’s all about safeguarding free expression. He’s certainly not when it comes to the expressive rights of educational institutions and their faculty.
The Wall Street Journal recently opined that “trying to dictate [university] curriculum and faculty choices is an intrusion on free speech and risks defeat in court.” Indeed, Harvard University President Alan Garber asserts in a lawsuit that “[n]o government—regardless of which party is in power—should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.”
The Trump administration is also aggressively embracing the role of free-press destroyer, seeking to control or harm news organizations that don’t adopt the president’s narrative or convey stories he doesn’t like. The White House has restricted the Associated Press’s (AP) press-pool access because it still uses a term Trump rejects (Gulf of Mexico). The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is using (and is threatening to further deploy) its news distortion rule to punish broadcasters for coverage not aligning with Trump’s views. I’ve contended this constitutes FCC regulatory overreach into an area––news judgment––where it should have minimal authority.
Trump’s attacks on the press also involve civil lawsuits, including one against pollster Ann Selzer and the owner of the Des Moines Register that Trump filed in December and amended once in office. Additionally, Trump has sued CBS and its owner, Paramount Global, over a pre-election 60 Minutes interview by Bill Whitaker with Kamala Harris.
Sometimes the administration utilizes more sweeping anti-press tactics. For example, Attorney General Pam Bondi on April 25 issued a memorandum that “rescind[s] Merrick Garland’s policies precluding the Department of Justice from seeking records and compelling testimony from members of the news media in order to identify and punish the source of improper leaks.” Bruce Brown, president of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, responded that:
Some of the most consequential reporting in U.S. history—from Watergate to warrantless wiretapping after 9/11—was and continues to be made possible because reporters have been able to protect the identities of confidential sources and uncover and report stories that matter to people across the political spectrum.
Trump doesn’t want “consequential reporting” unless the consequences favor him. The president views press freedom as transactional; fail to scratch his back, he’ll claw yours. As the AP’s amended complaint against the White House notes, Trump has stated “that the AP ‘has been very, very wrong on the election, on Trump and the treatment of Trump’ and that ‘they’re doing us no favors and I’m not doing them any favors.’” Indeed, after throttling the AP’s press-pool access, the administration has “made room for a new cohort of more partisan attendees, like right-wing podcasters, who often ask less-adversarial questions than traditional journalists.”
Ultimately, while pockets of the press and academia certainly may be too liberal for some conservatives, the president’s multi-pronged attack on First Amendment freedoms and dissent should be more disturbing.
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