Jake Tapper Called Out Obama and Biden for Free Speech Abuses. He Says Trump Is on a New Level.

"I have not seen ever before a direct infringement on the right to free speech like that," CNN's Jake Tapper says of the Trump administration's actions in the Jimmy Kimmel saga.

"I have not seen ever before a direct infringement on the right to free speech like that," CNN's @jaketapper tells @nickgillespie on The Reason Interview podcast. pic.twitter.com/42LHYb2sPt

— reason (@reason) October 29, 2025

It's only been a little more than a month since Brendan Carr, the head of Donald Trump's Federal Communications Commission (FCC), explicitly called for late-night host Jimmy Kimmel to be pink-slipped by ABC and its corporate parent Disney. The president also chimed in at the time, averring, "I would think maybe their [ABC's] license should be taken away." 

Trump's language was characteristically imprecise—the FCC doesn't license networks but only individual broadcast stations—but the threat was crystal clear: Put the kibosh on Kimmel or else suffer the wrath of the government, even as a key merger of major ABC station owners is coming before the FCC.

So far, it hasn't worked out Trump's way. After a brief suspension, Kimmel came back on air, seeing "a clear late-quarter boost" in the wake of the president's jawboning.

In a new interview with Reason, Jake Tapper, the host of CNN's The Lead and a veteran of both ABC News and '90s alternative site Salon, tells me that the Trump administration's attacks on the press are unprecedented in his years of covering politics. "I have not seen ever before a direct infringement on the right to free speech like that."

Tapper isn't romanticizing Trump's predecessors. "I don't like what the Biden administration did with social media companies," he says, referring to the way officials pressured platforms like Twitter (now X) and Facebook to remove or suppress the reach of content critical of its COVID and other policies. 

As Robby Soave reported for Reason in 2023, "health advisers at the CDC had significant input on pandemic-era social media policies at Facebook….They were consulted frequently, at times daily. They were actively involved in the affairs of content moderators, providing constant and ever-evolving guidance. They requested frequent updates about which topics were trending on the platforms and they recommended what kinds of content should be deemed false or misleading."

Tapper also coauthored this year's Original Sin, about the Biden White House's largely successful attempt to cover up the president's lack of cognitive functioning before the June 2024 debate with Trump made that impossible. "Joe Biden and his inner circle did the country dirty," by hiding his mental decline, says Tapper, who suggests that the Democratic Party hasn't even started to process how such a debacle unfolded.

Tapper notes that Barack Obama was also guilty of trying to corral the press, citing attempts in 2009 to block Fox News' access to White House officials. "I stood up when the Obama administration was saying that Fox was not a legitimate news organization, when they were declaring that from the White House podium," he says, noting that he still gets "shit" from liberals and progressives for defending Fox's access. "Why is it appropriate for a White House to label a credentialed news organization not legitimate?"

But Trump is in a whole other league when it comes to threatening the press, says Tapper. Lawsuits against ABC News, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Des Moines Register, among other outlets, are clear attempts to bring the watchdog press to heel, says Tapper. 

CBS's owner Paramount settled a suit over trivial edits to a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris, he notes, adding that Trump has stopped heckling the Tiffany Network since it was purchased by Skydance, which is owned by the son of billionaire Larry Ellison, a major Trump donor. "He always excludes CBS now, ever since the Ellisons took over," says Tapper. "And he says, 'Larry Ellison is a good friend of mine. He's a good guy, blah blah blah. They're gonna make it fair….That's not how presidents should be talking about people who cover them. Presidents in general should think we're all pains in the ass. Every president. About every news outlet."