Trump Has Been Trampling Free Speech for More Than 40 Years—and It Keeps Getting Worse
The president stands out from his modern predecessors by openly displaying his contempt for the First Amendment.
Three decades before he was first elected president, Donald Trump had big plans for a 26-acre building site near the South Street Seaport in Manhattan. "New York City deserves to have the tallest and greatest building in the world, and I would be very interested in doing it," he told The New York Times on July 30, 1984. He imagined a 150-story structure, including offices, apartments, and a hotel, that would be 1,940 feet high, surpassing Chicago's Sears Tower, then the world's tallest building, by nearly 500 feet.
Paul Gapp, the Chicago Tribune's architecture critic, did not think much of that plan. "The only remotely appealing aspect of Donald Trump's proposed 150-story Manhattan skyscraper, announced several days ago, is that it would not be done in the Fence Post Style of the 1970s," Gapp wrote. "The world's tallest tower would be one of the silliest things anyone could inflict on New York or any other city." Trump was indulging in "Guinness Book of World Records architecture," Gapp said.
Trump did not like what Gapp said. And according to Trump, Gapp had no right to his opinion. Two months after the Tribune published Gapp's column, Trump sued him and the newspaper for defamation. The complaint alleged that Gapp's criticism of the theoretical skyscraper, which also included a Wall Street Journal interview in which he called it "aesthetically lousy," had damaged Trump's reputation to the tune of $500 million, the equivalent of $1.6 billion today.
U.S. District Judge Edward Weinfeld, who dismissed Trump's lawsuit in September 1985, had little trouble recognizing that Gapp's comments were "entitled to complete immunity under the First Amendment protection" for "expressions of opinion." But far from deterring Trump, that episode was the first of his many attempts to punish people for saying things he did not like—an urge he has found irresistible as president, especially during his current term.
Those vendettas frequently run into legal obstacles, as recently illustrated by Trump's attempt to ban disfavored journalists from the White House. Given his strikingly poor track record in court, you may wonder why he bothers. His take on a defamation lawsuit he filed in 2006 provides a clue.
In his 2005 book TrumpNation, financial journalist Timothy O'Brien dared to suggest that the developer was worth less than he claimed. Trump responded by suing O'Brien and his publisher for defamation, claiming they had caused him $5 billion in damages—about $8.5 billion today. Although that lawsuit also flopped, Trump had no regrets. "I spent a couple of bucks on legal fees, and they spent a whole 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 is still using lawsuits to make his enemies suffer. In 2022, he sued CNN, seeking $475 million in punitive damages. Trump said CNN had defamed him by describing his claim that Joe Biden stole the 2020 election as "the Big Lie." Three years later, a federal appeals court decisively rejected Trump's understanding of defamation.
Two years ago, Trump sued CBS and The Des Moines Register, preposterously claiming that their journalism—a pre-election interview with Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris and a poll giving her a lead in Iowa, respectively—amounted to consumer fraud. In the CBS case, Trump averred that he had suffered "at least" $20 billion in damages. He ultimately extracted 0.08 percent of that amount in a settlement, although an Iowa judge dismissed the lawsuit 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 questioning the effectiveness of his National Guard deployment in the District of Columbia. As Trump sees it, even criticism of a president's policies qualifies as libel.
Trump, in short, is still fond of frivolous litigation. He thinks it is "disgusting the way the press is able to write whatever they want to write," and he wants to "open up our libel laws" so he can "win lots of money" when news outlets publish stories that are "purposely negative and horrible and false." But as president, Trump has many other weapons at his disposal, and he has used them in a way that sets him apart from his recent predecessors.
In terms of measurable consequences, Trump's weaponization of government against his political opponents pales beside what happened during the "Quasi-War" with France, the Civil War, and World War I, when dissenters went to prison. But Trump has tried to do something similar on a smaller scale, deploying the criminal justice system against his nemeses in retaliation for their constitutionally protected speech. He also has used regulatory threats, sanctions against reporters, immigration law, federal grants, and executive orders to make people think twice about crossing him. And unlike, say, President Richard Nixon, who had no compunctions about abusing his powers for political purposes but generally did so secretly, Trump has done all this openly, proudly displaying his contempt for the First Amendment.
When Dissent Was a Crime
In 1798, amid a panic about a possibly imminent war with France, Congress approved the Sedition Act, which made it a crime, punishable by a fine up to $2,000 (something like $54,000 today) and up to two years in jail, to write or publish "any false, scandalous, and malicious writing" against "the government of the United States," Congress, or the president. The Federalists who controlled Congress viewed their Democratic-Republican opponents as "Jacobins" apt to welcome French conquerors, and they saw criticism of President John Adams and his allies as an intolerable threat to order and national security.
The case against Matthew Lyon, a Democratic-Republican congressman from Vermont, illustrates the Sedition Act's broad sweep. Lyon's purported crimes included a letter in Spooner's Vermont Journal averring that Adams had forsaken "every consideration of the public welfare" in "a continual grasp for power" and "an unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp, foolish adulation, and selfish avarice."
Lyon's indictment, legal historian Wendell Bird notes in his 2020 book Criminal Dissent, "showed how relatively mild criticism could be treated as criminal libel under the Sedition Act" and "how opinion as well as fact could send someone to prison." Lyon was convicted and sentenced to four months in jail plus a $1,000 fine.
Based on court records, Bird counted 51 Sedition Act prosecutions involving 126 defendants, including 14 newspaper editors and three politicians. That tally, he says, "shows a far more serious and determined Federalist effort to criminalize dissent and to suppress the opposition press and party" than previous accounts recognized. Nearly all the defendants were Democratic-Republicans. Bird found just one acquittal, reflecting the influence of Federalist judges who were keen to facilitate such cases.
The Sedition Act, which expired in March 1801, was largely a response to a war that never actually happened. As you might expect, real wars tend to inspire broader repression.
In August 1862, at President Abraham Lincoln's behest, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton responded to draft resistance with orders that suspended the writ of habeas corpus across the country. 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 mandate "allowed local sheriffs and constables to decide arbitrarily who was loyal or disloyal, without even considering the administration's main goal of enforcing the draft," historian David Greenberg writes. "At least 350 people were arrested in the following month," and "some of the accused had done nothing worse than bad-mouth the president."
More than 4,000 civilians were tried by military commissions during the Civil War. Focusing on arrests of civilians in loyal states, historian Mark E. Neely Jr. concluded that "most had nothing to do with dissent or political opposition." But some cases did involve disloyal speech, as opposed to espionage, sabotage, violence, or obstruction of troops.
In April 1863, Union Gen. Ambrose Burnside issued General Order No. 38, which authorized the arrest of people "declaring sympathies for the enemy." The most famous target was Ohio congressman Clement Vallandigham, a Democrat who was arrested for publicly condemning the war as "wicked, cruel, and unnecessary," saying it was "not being waged for the preservation of the Union" but for "the freedom of the blacks and the enslavement of the whites." After Vallandigham was convicted, the Supreme Court declined to hear his petition, saying it had "no power to review" decisions by military commissions.
The Lincoln administration also shut down more than 300 newspapers, which were typically published by Democrats sympathetic to the Confederacy. This was "the greatest amount of newspaper suppression in the nation's history," journalism professor David W. Bulla noted in 2009, although he highlighted an 1863 letter from Lincoln to a general in Missouri suggesting that the president had second thoughts about the crackdown.
Something similar happened during World War I, when Congress approved the Espionage Act of 1917, which made it a crime, punishable by up to 20 years in prison, to obstruct military recruitment. The Sedition Act of 1918 extended that crime to include "any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language" regarding "the form of government of the United States," the Constitution, or the armed forces.
President Woodrow Wilson's underlings arrested more than 2,000 people under those laws, resulting in some 1,000 convictions. The defendants included Charles Schenck and Elizabeth Baer, Socialist Party leaders who were accused of distributing anti-draft pamphlets. In the 1919 case Schenck v. United States, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld their Espionage Act convictions, saying such speech posed a "clear and present danger" in the context of an ongoing war. A week later, the justices applied the same reasoning in upholding the Espionage Act conviction of perennial Socialist presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs, who had been sentenced to 10 years in federal prison for criticizing the war and the Wilson administration.
In 1919 and 1920, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer oversaw a campaign against communists and anarchists that included thousands of arrests. Hundreds of foreign citizens who had been legally residing in the United States—including Russian-born anarchist Emma Goldman, who had received a two-year prison sentence for encouraging draft resistance—were deported based on their political views.
The repression was not limited to opponents of the war. Wilson also targeted women's suffrage activists, who had embarrassed him by demanding that he embrace their cause. From 1917 to 1919, hundreds of White House picketers were arrested, ostensibly for obstructing the sidewalk, and 168 went to jail, in some cases repeatedly.
Trump Tries to Emulate Wilson
So far, Trump has not managed to imprison his political opponents. But not for lack of trying.
In November 2025, after Sen. Mark Kelly (D–Ariz.) and five other Democratic members of Congress posted a video reminding U.S. military personnel of their duty to "refuse illegal orders," Trump said they "should be ARRESTED AND PUT ON TRIAL." He accused Kelly et al. of "SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR AT THE HIGHEST LEVEL," adding that their conduct was "punishable by DEATH!"
Trump's reasoning might have passed muster in 1798, 1862, or 1918. But nowadays, such "seditious behavior" is not a crime under the U.S. Code, let alone a crime that triggers the death penalty. And as a federal judge later noted, the allegedly criminal video was "unquestionably protected" by the First Amendment. But that did not deter Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, from trying to deliver on her boss's threat.
Last February, Pirro sought an indictment charging the legislators with felonies under a federal law that applies to someone who "causes or attempts to cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, or refusal of duty by any member of the military or naval forces of the United States"—language that resembles a provision of the 1917 Espionage Act. But the grand jury apparently was not willing to participate in Trump's vendetta. After it unanimously refused to approve the indictment, Pirro gave up.
Unlike Pirro, Lindsey Halligan, the defense lawyer whom Trump appointed as the interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia in September 2025, had no prior prosecutorial experience. But Halligan was more successful at helping Trump. At first.
Halligan took office two days after Trump publicly demanded that Pam Bondi, then the attorney general, find a crime to pin on former FBI Director James Comey, long an object of the president's ire because of his role in the "Russiagate hoax" during Trump's first term. "We can't delay any longer," Trump told Bondi in a Truth Social post. "JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!" The same post noted that Trump had appointed Halligan, "a really good lawyer," to replace Erik Siebert, who had proven insufficiently keen on prosecuting Trump's enemies, as interim U.S. attorney.
Halligan acted quickly, delivering an indictment three days after taking Siebert's place. It charged Comey with lying to Congress during testimony he gave on September 30, 2020, meaning Halligan had managed, just barely, to meet the statutory deadline for prosecuting him. But two months later, a federal judge dismissed the indictment after concluding that Halligan had been illegally appointed.
What to do? Todd Blanche, who took over the Justice Department after Bondi got the ax last March, had a solution. In April, Blanche announced a new indictment, this time charging Comey with publicly threatening to assassinate Trump.
While the first indictment was legally shaky, the second one was doomed right out of the gate. It hinged on a photo that Comey had posted on Instagram nearly a year before, showing seashells arranged in the sand to form the numerical slogan "86 47"—a ubiquitous expression of opposition to Trump that plainly did not fit the Supreme Court's definition of a "true threat."
The indictment, which alleged two felonies with combined maximum prison sentences of 10 years, laid bare Trump's goal. As with the attempted prosecution of Kelly et al., he was literally trying to imprison someone for saying something that offended him.
Trump Threatens Journalists
As those cases illustrate, Trump either does not understand or does not care how First Amendment jurisprudence has evolved since the Supreme Court blessed the imprisonment of anti-war activists. In the 1969 case Brandenburg v. Ohio, the Court renounced the "clear and present danger" test it had applied in Schenck. Even advocacy of illegal conduct, it held, cannot be treated as a crime unless it is both "directed" at inciting "imminent lawless action" and "likely" to do so. Neither Kelly's video nor Comey's photo comes close to meeting that test.
Trump also seems hazy on what the Supreme Court has said about flag burning, which it has twice recognized as a constitutionally protected form of expression. Justice Antonin Scalia, whom Trump has described as the very model of a "great" jurist, joined both of those decisions. Yet Trump avers that only "stupid people" believe it is unconstitutional to jail flag burners, a policy he has repeatedly recommended. In a 2025 executive order, he instructed Bondi to "prioritize" the prosecution of flag burners.
Trump is equally unfazed by the First Amendment concerns that drove the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to abandon the "Fairness Doctrine" during the Reagan administration. Under that policy, broadcasters were required to cover public issues in a fair and balanced manner. Far from encouraging a diversity of viewpoints, the FCC concluded in 1985, the rule "inhibits the presentation of controversial issues," "unnecessarily restricts the journalistic freedom of broadcasters," and "creates the opportunity for intimidation of broadcasters by government officials."
Back then, the FCC worried about politically motivated interference in broadcast journalism. By contrast, Brendan Carr, the commission's Trump-appointed chairman, sees such meddling as an important part of his job.
During Trump's first term, then–FCC Chairman Ajit Pai pushed back against the president's threats to revoke broadcast licenses in response to news coverage he viewed as biased against him. "I believe in the First Amendment," Pai said in 2017. "The FCC under my leadership will stand for the First Amendment."
Carr, who agrees with the president that broadcasters are legally obliged to treat Trump fairly, clearly has no such compunctions. Carr signaled his sympathy for Trump's perspective immediately after taking office, when he reopened two spurious "news distortion" investigations. The probes focused on ABC's fact-checking of Trump during a 2024 presidential debate and the editing of a 60 Minutes interview with Harris—the same interview that Trump claimed qualified as consumer fraud because the editing made her seem slightly more cogent.
Even less plausibly, Carr perceived potential "news distortion" when late-night comedian Jimmy Kimmel erroneously implied, during a September 2025 monologue, that conservative activist Charlie Kirk's assassin was a Trump supporter. In response, Carr publicly threatened stations that aired Kimmel's ABC show with fines or license revocation if they failed to punish him for that stupid but constitutionally protected remark. ABC and its affiliate stations immediately fell in line, suspending Kimmel for a week, which was the punishment that Carr had recommended. This year, after Kimmel made a joke alluding to Trump's age and the first lady's feelings about their marriage, the president demanded that ABC go further, saying Kimmel "should be immediately fired."
Carr also has threatened to revoke a long-standing exemption that allows TV talk shows like Kimmel's to interview political candidates without worrying about complying with the FCC's "equal time" rule, which would effectively ban such segments. The FCC chairman has bragged about requiring changes to journalistic practices at CBS as a condition for approving the merger of Paramount, the network's parent company, with Skydance Media. And in April, he announced an unprecedented early review of the broadcast licenses held by ABC-owned TV stations, threatening to put them out of business if the FCC decides they are not operating in "the public interest."
That review is "more intrusive, burdensome and extreme than anything I observed as a chairman," Mark Fowler, who chaired the FCC during the Reagan administration, says in a declaration supporting ABC's First Amendment challenge to Carr's scrutiny. "The blatant interplay between presidential complaints respecting ABC's broadcast content and subsequent [FCC] punitive actions," he adds, "define the Chairman as a biased political operative with a personal stake and bias in this case's outcome. Never in its history has the agency ever acted so corruptly and unlawfully to intrude on broadcasters' First Amendment rights."
Carr understands the amorphous "public interest" standard as an obligation to please the president. For example, he says ABC's decision against airing a primetime speech that Trump delivered in July—a judgment call that was unremarkable in light of similar coverage decisions by TV networks under prior administrations of both parties—will figure in the FCC's review of ABC's licenses. By conflating "the public interest" with Trump's personal grievances, Carr aims to justify what amounts to a Fairness Doctrine on steroids, effectively prohibiting broadcast programming that he views as biased against the president.
If Trump had his way, that standard would be extended to other media. In September, when he announced that he was banning CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House "effective immediately," he warned that "Other Fake News Media Outlets" would be added to the list. Like Trump's earlier attempts to banish specific reporters (Jim Acosta and Brian Karem) or news organizations (the Associated Press), his exclusion of CNN et al. raised obvious due process and First Amendment concerns. Less than a week after the president's announcement, a Trump-appointed federal judge ordered the White House to restore the press passes it had revoked, noting that the news outlets had received no advance notice or explanation, let alone "an opportunity to be heard."
The post hoc justification for expelling CNN et al. claimed they had "exhibited behavior in violation of the standards of professionalism and decorum expected of those given access to the White House Complex." That rationale is so vague and subjective that it could be stretched to cover any journalist who irks the president. Worse, Trump's defense of the bans suggested he would like to do more than bar journalists he dislikes from the White House.
"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 that a court should allow fake news to be written day after day after day," he told reporters. "There's something wrong with a country that can allow people to write purposely negative stories."
Trump, who has described "the FAKE NEWS media" as "the enemy of the American People" and accused journalists covering the Iran war of "virtual TREASON," improbably claimed to "cherish" freedom of the press. "The White House is not instituting an assault on the Free Press," he insisted. "It is instituting an assault on the FAKE NEWS."
Trump seems genuinely oblivious to the point that the First Amendment aims to prevent the government from drawing such distinctions. Far from indicating that something is "wrong" with the United States, the freedom to write stories that the president deems "purposely negative" is central to the right that Trump supposedly cherishes.
The FTC Investigates Trump's Enemies
The FCC is not the only regulatory agency that has targeted the president's enemies. In 2025, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) launched a probe of Media Matters for America, an organization founded in 2004 as a progressive counterpart to the conservative Media Research Center.
Since the FTC has no authority over nonprofit organizations like Media Matters, you might wonder how such an investigation could possibly be justified. The main provocation seemed to be a November 2023 Media Matters report claiming that Twitter, which by then had been rebranded as X, was "placing ads for Apple, Bravo, IBM, Oracle, and Xfinity next to pro-Nazi content."
The platform's owner, Trump ally Elon Musk, responded by threatening a "thermonuclear lawsuit" against Media Matters, while Stephen Miller, now a White House deputy chief of staff, suggested that "conservative state Attorneys General" should investigate the organization for "fraud." Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey took Miller's advice, launching investigations that were ultimately blocked by federal courts on First Amendment grounds. After those threats fizzled out, the FTC began its own probe of Media Matters.
The FTC's Trump-appointed chairman, Andrew Ferguson, had previously signaled his inclination to open such an investigation. A year after Media Matters published its story about "pro-Nazi content," Marc Andreessen—like Musk, a major Trump donor—complained about an "orchestrated advertiser boycott against X." Ferguson, then a member of the FTC's Republican minority, agreed that "concerted refusal to deal can violate the antitrust laws." Touting his qualifications for the job that Trump later gave him, Ferguson bragged about his "track record" of "standing up" to "the radical left" and promised to "investigate and prosecute collusion" on "advertiser boycotts."
As FTC chairman, Ferguson brought in several vociferous critics of Media Matters as senior staff members. And in May 2025, four months after Ferguson took office, Media Matters received a sweeping civil investigative demand (CID) from the FTC, which sought a long list of internal documents, including financial records and sensitive journalistic material.
The FTC initially did not explain the justification for those highly invasive and burdensome demands. But after Media Matters challenged the CID in federal court, the commission said it was investigating "potentially unlawful advertiser boycotts."
It was not clear why the FTC thought Media Matters had any records relevant to that inquiry. And in August 2025, U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan concluded that the commission's putative motive, like the rationales for the Texas and Missouri probes, looked like a cover for unconstitutional retaliation against Media Matters. Sooknanan issued a preliminary injunction against the FTC's investigation, saying "Media Matters is likely to show that retaliatory animus was the but-for cause of the FTC's CID."
When the FTC asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit to overturn that injunction, its arguments reinforced the impression that the commission targeted Media Matters because of views it had expressed. "Even publicly available information makes clear why Media Matters might receive a CID in an investigation into advertiser boycotts," the FTC's lawyers said. "For example, Media Matters' website calls for an advertiser boycott even today. Moreover, Congressional testimony has suggested that Media Matters participates in deplatforming and demonetization campaigns."
That supposed evidence "confirms that the FTC is simply targeting Media Matters for speech," the organization argued. According to the Supreme Court, it noted, "the First Amendment protects the right to engage in politically motivated boycotts as a means of encouraging social change." Perhaps sensing this was a case it could not win, the FTC voluntarily withdrew its CID and dropped its appeal.
The FTC also has targeted NewsGuard, a company that rates the transparency and credibility of online news sources. Although Ferguson views NewsGuard as biased against conservatives, there is not much evidence to support that claim. But even if it were true, NewsGuard's advice would be constitutionally protected.
Unfazed by that consideration, the FTC sent NewsGuard a CID the same month it revealed its investigation of Media Matters. According to a First Amendment lawsuit that NewsGuard filed in February, the FTC sought "vast numbers of confidential and sensitive documents." Its CID, which included "31 Specifications" with "dozens of subparts," was "designed to burden and bleed NewsGuard," the company's lawyers at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) alleged. Toward the same end, they said, the FTC had attacked NewsGuard's revenue by conditioning the merger of two advertising agencies on the resulting company's agreement to refrain from subscribing to the rating service.
As in the Media Matters case, the FTC withdrew its CID after NewsGuard sued. But it did so prior to any ruling, and five days later U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich denied NewsGuard's motion for a preliminary injunction. NewsGuard appealed that decision last April, arguing that the FTC was still seeking to undermine its business. The case is pending in the D.C. Circuit.
In both cases, the FTC launched investigations based on nothing more than constitutionally protected speech. "NewsGuard's rating service is quintessential journalistic activity protected by the First Amendment," Robert Corn-Revere, FIRE's chief counsel, noted when the company filed its lawsuit. He added that the Supreme Court, in the 2024 case Moody v. NetChoice, "unanimously affirmed that the government has no legitimate role in saying what counts as the right balance of private expression" or trying to "'un-bias' what it thinks is biased."
Trump Targets Protesters, Students, Lawyers, and Universities
Under Trump, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has displayed a similar disregard for the First Amendment. As of August, nine of the 12 regional federal appeals courts had recognized a First Amendment right to record the public conduct of on-duty law enforcement officers. Yet DHS officials have described such recording as a form of "violence" and a "tactic" used by "demonstrators" and "violent offenders" bent on fomenting "unlawful civil unrest." Taking their cues from the top, the department's employees routinely harass peaceful protesters for exercising a right upheld by every circuit court that has addressed the issue.
Those camera-shy DHS employees are charged with executing Trump's deportation campaign, which for the most part has targeted unauthorized residents with no criminal records, despite his promise to focus on "the worst of the worst." According to Trump, that category includes foreign students who express views that offend him. Taking a page from the Wilson administration, Trump has made a show of trying to deport students he describes as "terrorist sympathizers."
The most striking example is Tufts University graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk, who was arrested and detained in March 2025 because she had co-authored an anti-Israel op-ed piece in the school newspaper a year earlier. That May, a federal judge ordered Ozturk's release on bail, and last February an immigration judge concluded that there was no legal basis to deport her. The case was ultimately resolved after Ozturk completed her Ph.D. and agreed to leave the country.
Four months later, in a separate case involving student journalists at Stanford University, a federal judge in California ruled that it is unconstitutional to deport legal residents for speech protected by the First Amendment. "The government has offered a chilling message regarding protected speech," U.S. District Judge Noël Wise wrote in her August 28 ruling. "Speak out against Israel or in support of Palestinians and we will revoke your visa and deport you. Behave. Noncitizen students heard the warning and heeded." She concluded that the statutory provision on which the Trump administration relied in cases like Ozturk's, which authorizes deportation to avoid "adverse foreign policy consequences," is unconstitutional as applied to protected speech.
That conclusion was consistent with the Supreme Court's 1945 ruling in Bridges v. Wixon, which held that "freedom of speech and of press is accorded aliens residing in this country." It was also consistent with a January 2026 decision by William Young, a federal judge in Massachusetts who likewise ruled that the Trump administration's speech-based deportation policy violated the First Amendment.
Trump suffered similar setbacks when he tried to punish law firms for representing clients and causes he abhors. Beginning in February 2025, he issued a series of executive orders that suspended the security clearances of lawyers at the targeted firms, barred them from federal contracts and government buildings, and suggested that anyone doing business with them might also suffer reprisals. Four law firms challenged those orders in federal court, arguing that they violated the First Amendment, and all four won on summary judgment, obtaining permanent injunctions. The government's appeals are pending in the D.C. Circuit, where the signs are not promising for Trump.
The Trump administration also has used federal grants to punish the president's political opponents. In July, for example, the Energy Department admitted that the Office of Management and Budget had selectively canceled funding for clean energy projects "based solely on the political identity of the grant recipient's state," as opposed to "any programmatic, statutory, cost-reduction, or performance-based factor."
Last year, the Trump administration froze $2.2 billion in research grants to Harvard University, demanding that it implement a long list of hiring, admission, administrative, curricular, and disciplinary reforms, ostensibly to address antisemitism. In September 2025, a federal judge in Massachusetts ruled that the Trump administration, under the "smokescreen" of fighting antisemitism, had engaged in "unconstitutional coercion," "impermissibly retaliated against Harvard for refusing to capitulate to the government's demands," and "imposed unconstitutional conditions on Harvard's receipt of federal funding." The government's appeal is pending in the 1st Circuit.
Trump Advertises His Intolerance
Such judicial pushback suggests the hazards of comparing Trump's free speech record to the crackdowns under Adams, Lincoln, and Wilson. Since then, Supreme Court decisions have established robust First Amendment protections that pose a challenge even to the most determined authoritarian.
Under Trump, "there's been nothing on the scale of the historic free-speech crackdowns of the early republic, Civil War, or World War I," says Gene Healy, author of The Cult of the Presidency and a senior scholar at the foundation that publishes Reason. "Trump hasn't locked up a congressman or a presidential candidate for making an anti-war speech. Sure, he sounds like he'd enjoy [doing] that sort of thing, but he can't. The First Amendment's stronger, institutionally, than it was a century ago."
FIRE's Corn-Revere makes the same point. "It's tough to compete with Wilson," he notes, "but he was in office before First Amendment jurisprudence began to develop." It therefore makes more sense to ask how Trump compares to his relatively recent predecessors.
During the Biden administration, Trump argues, Special Counsel Jack Smith weaponized the government against him by charging him with mishandling classified documents and illegally trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election. But whatever you think of those cases, they at least involved conduct that extended beyond constitutionally protected speech, unlike the video and the seashell picture that Trump portrays as criminal.
Richard Nixon was no fan of the press. But with the notable exception of trying to block publication of the Pentagon Papers, an attempt at prior restraint that the Supreme Court rejected in 1971, he preferred to target journalists on the sly. He wiretapped them, for example, and put them on an "enemies" list that was sent to the IRS, the Justice Department, the FBI, and the Secret Service. Among other things, the articles of impeachment that drove Nixon from office cited his use of illegal surveillance and IRS audits to discredit and harass those enemies. But Nixon, unlike Trump, did not brag about using his powers to suppress dissent.
Nixon, like several of his predecessors, threatened his critics with adverse FCC action, but he did so more subtly than Trump. In 1972, for example, Nixon privately discussed punishing The Washington Post for its Watergate coverage by threatening the broadcast licenses of TV stations it owned. But when Nixon supporters filed challenges against two of those stations, the White House denied that they were acting at the administration's behest.
Also during the Nixon administration, Chuck Colson, director of the White House's newly created Office of Public Liaison, privately pressured network executives to rein in coverage and commentary viewed as unfavorable to the president. With Nixon's approval and with "some cooperation from top FCC officials," economist Thomas Hazlett notes in his history of broadcast regulation, Colson threatened to "challenge license renewals by asserting violations of the Fairness Doctrine." The threats seemed to have some impact, especially at CBS, which cut down a report on the Watergate break-in toward the end of Nixon's 1972 campaign and "announced it would no longer follow presidential statements with immediate news analysis by network correspondents."
Trump, by contrast, publicly and habitually threatens to yank the licenses of broadcasters who displease him, and he has installed an FCC chairman who seems inclined to deliver on those threats. Carr, who relishes his reputation as Trump's "media pit bull," goes beyond "some cooperation." He embraces Trump's take on "the public interest," which precludes journalism that the president views as unfair to him.
Woof woof ! pic.twitter.com/V9lKidHDZ9
— Brendan Carr (@BrendanCarrFCC) March 19, 2025
"When 97 percent of the stories [about me] are bad," Trump told reporters last year, "it's no longer free speech." When TV networks "take a great story" and "make it bad," he added, "I think that's really illegal."
Hazlett emphasizes the long history of attempts to regulate broadcast content by invoking "the public interest." But because of "Trump's braggadocio," Hazlett says in an email, "this threat to free speech is clearer" and more "obviously hostile." He credits Trump with "making the censorship threats so obvious and noxious" that Democrats and broadcasters have turned against "the very regulatory system that they created and defended."
Just as Trump did not invent political abuse of the FCC, he is not the first president who has tried to shut out allegedly hostile journalists. During the Obama administration, for instance, the White House planned to exclude Fox News from interviewing Kenneth Feinberg, who was charged with overseeing executive compensation at companies that received bailout money under the Troubled Asset Relief Program. But that punishment was far less severe than Trump's banishment of "Fake News Media Outlets," and the White House backed down after CNN, ABC, CBS, and NBC objected.
Trump has rightly condemned the Biden administration for bullying social media platforms into suppressing content it viewed as dangerous to public health, democracy, or national security. But the Trump administration is pursuing a similarly alarming agenda by trying to "un-bias" the internet.
In May 2025, Ferguson launched an investigation of social media moderation practices, touting it as a blow against "the tyranny of Big Tech" and "an important step forward in restoring free speech." Carr likewise sees "reining in Big Tech" as necessary to protect freedom of speech, saying "the censorship cartel must be dismantled." But the First Amendment does not forbid the sort of "censorship" that Carr has in mind. To the contrary, it protects the right of private organizations and businesses to exercise editorial discretion. By seeking to override such decisions, Trump's bureaucrats are undermining the First Amendment in the name of protecting it.
'Unfiltered Contempt for the First Amendment'
Unlike his modern predecessors, Trump wears his disregard for the First Amendment on his sleeve. Whether he is suing journalists, trying to imprison opponents, demanding prosecution of flag burners, threatening to yank broadcast licenses, expelling reporters from the White House, arresting foreign students, using executive orders to cripple law firms, or pressuring universities, Trump wants everyone to know these are the consequences of daring to exercise your constitutional rights in a way that annoys him.
"What's different compared to other modern presidents is unfiltered contempt for the First Amendment, with the volume cranked up to 11," Healy says. Lyndon B. Johnson "called the head of CBS and helped get the Smothers Brothers canceled. Trump just puts it on blast that he wants Jimmy Kimmel fired. Nixon had an enemies list, but he didn't read it out in a press conference—it was supposed to be secret. Trump openly targets Democratic law firms." Trying to look "on the bright side," Healy ventures that "open presidential contempt has some advantages over the subtle, secret version," because "at least it puts you on notice."
Trump is also unusual in rebelling at the First Amendment's constraints in a wide variety of contexts. "It is the range of tactics and the full frontal assault on the press that is remarkable, as well as the nakedness of the motivations," Corn-Revere says. Since the beginning of Trump's second term, he notes, we have seen "a record number of positive [First Amendment] rulings" because "we are witnessing an astonishingly broad array of efforts" to "suppress dissent," "undermine the press," "cripple universities," "intimidate law firms," and "use the FCC and FTC as extensions of the White House with a goal of suppressing criticism."
Trump promised something quite different at the beginning of his second term, when he issued an executive order aimed at "restoring freedom of speech and ending federal censorship." He said he was determined to "ensure that no Federal Government officer, employee, or agent engages in or facilitates any conduct that would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen." Given Trump's long history of trying to punish speech, that commitment was hard to believe at the time. It becomes an even sadder joke every time he betrays it.
