In Assault on Free Speech, Trump Targets Speech He Hates

 

News Analysis

In Assault on Free Speech, Trump Targets Speech He Hates

 

The president’s complaints about negative coverage undermine the rationales offered by his own officials.

“They’ll take a great story and they’ll make it bad,” President Trump said last week, referring to network newscasts. “See, I think that’s really illegal.”Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

 

Peter Baker

By Peter Baker

Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent, is covering his sixth presidency. He reported from Washington.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/21/us/politics/trump-free-speech.html

Sept. 21, 2025, 10:04 a.m. ET

 

As President Trump threatens a wide-ranging crackdown on mainstream media institutions and political opponents, his aides and allies have cast the administration’s moves as critical to stanching misinformation and hate speech that could lead to political violence.

 

But Mr. Trump himself has repeatedly made clear in recent days that he has a different goal. For him, it’s not about hate speech, but about speech that he hates — namely, speech that is critical of him and his administration.

 

He has suggested that a clutch of protesters who yelled at him in a restaurant be prosecuted under laws targeting mobsters. He demanded that multiple late-night comics who mocked him be taken off air. He threatened to shutter television broadcasters that he deemed unfair to him. He sued The New York Times for allegedly damaging his reputation. And that was just last week.

 

When threatening government action against those who anger him, Mr. Trump can be strikingly transparent about what is driving him. He talks regularly about how journalists, commentators and political actors should not be “allowed” to be so harsh toward him. Having installed a partisan ally to run the F.B.I., he muses openly about which political critics he would like to see investigated.

 

Mr. Trump is not the only president to bristle at opposition or news coverage, nor the first to try to punish those who angered him. But in modern times, no president has gone so far in using his power to pressure media figures and political opponents, historians say.

 

At the end of a week dominated by a fraught national debate over free speech that followed the assassination of the conservative activist Charlie Kirk, Mr. Trump summed up his view on Friday in a remark that would have been shocking if made by any previous president.

 

“They’ll take a great story and they’ll make it bad,” he told reporters in the Oval Office, referring to network newscasts. “See, I think that’s really illegal.”

 

The president’s outbursts undermine the rationales offered by his own officials. Attorney General Pam Bondi, who initially claimed she had the right to investigate businesses that refused to print memorial vigil posters for Mr. Kirk, later emphasized that the government is focused on hate speech that crosses the line into threats of violence. Brendan Carr, the chairman of the F.C.C., has argued that many broadcasters have a liberal bias and do not meet the agency’s standard for serving the public interest.

 

Last week, Mr. Carr threatened consequences if ABC did not take action against the late-night host Jimmy Kimmel for his comment that “the MAGA gang” was trying to characterize the suspect in Mr. Kirk’s killing “as anything other than one of them.” The comment was factually wrong, the F.C.C. chairman argued, and part of a “concerted effort to lie to the American people.” Disney, the owner of ABC, complied and suspended Mr. Kimmel’s show.

 

But Mr. Trump then made clear he has a broader, more personal goal.

 

In a social media post, the president celebrated Mr. Kimmel’s removal and demanded that two other late-night hosts, Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers, meet a similar fate. “That leaves Jimmy and Seth, two total losers, on Fake News NBC,” the president wrote. “Their ratings are also horrible. Do it NBC!!!”

 

Thomas Berry, director of the Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, said the president effectively refuted Mr. Carr’s attempt to maintain that punishing ABC for Mr. Kimmel’s statement would be a fair and neutral application of F.C.C. guidelines.

 

“This continues a pattern of Trump being his own lawyers’ worst enemy with his public statements,” Mr. Berry said. “Whereas Carr focused on the alleged falsity of the statement, Trump simply admits that he wants the F.C.C. to go after stations that are unfriendly to him.”

 

Asked about the disparate justifications offered by Mr. Trump and administration officials, Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, said, “President Trump is a strong supporter of free speech, and he is right — F.C.C. licensed stations have long been required to follow basic standards.” She added that “the Biden administration actually attacked free speech by demanding social media companies take Americans’ posts down.”

 

Vice President JD Vance likewise pointed to allegations of censorship lodged against President Joseph R. Biden Jr. to defend the Trump administration’s actions. “The bellyaching from the left over ‘free speech’ after the Biden years fools precisely no one,” he wrote on social media on Friday.

 

The Biden administration urged social media companies to prevent the proliferation of what it deemed misinformation about Covid-19. Republicans contended that amounted to unconstitutional coercion to censor unpopular views and a judge issued an injunction, but the Supreme Court rejected a challenge, saying the plaintiffs did not have standing to sue.

 

Mr. Trump, who was barred from Twitter and Facebook after encouraging a crowd of supporters that attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to block the transfer of power, has since cast himself as a champion of free speech. Upon returning to office, he signed an executive order “ending federal censorship.”

 

Craig Shirley, a presidential historian and biographer of President Ronald Reagan, said Mr. Trump’s experience was so searing that he did not believe the president would improperly restrain others’ free speech, whatever his public exhortations.

 

“We all especially know Biden used government to censor Trump, kicking him off many media platforms, a clear violation of the law,” Mr. Shirley said. “As his own First Amendment rights were abridged, my guess is he’s especially sensitive to anyone else seeing their First Amendment rights taken away.”

 

Presidents have wrestled with the bounds of free speech since the beginning of the republic. John Adams signed the Sedition Act during what was called the Quasi-War with France, banning “false, scandalous or malicious” criticism that put the government or its leaders “into contempt or disrepute,” a measure that was used to jail prominent journalists.

 

During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln likewise shut down some antiwar newspapers, detained journalists without trial and censored dispatches. Woodrow Wilson during World War I signed the Espionage Act, which was used to imprison antiwar leaders and stop post office distribution of antiwar publications.

 

“Donald Trump is hardly the first president to crack down on the press and cause controversy by doing so,” said Harold Holzer, author of “The Presidents vs. the Press,” the definitive history on the subject. “But he is the first to do so in what is not a national emergency.”

 

Mr. Holzer, director of the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College in New York, said that at least Adams, Lincoln, Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt were acting in times of war or national security crisis. “Trump,” he said, “has no such justification.”

 

Other presidents sought to pressure news organizations in less expansive ways. President Richard M. Nixon tried to block publication of the Pentagon Papers, which detailed the U.S. government’s failures in the Vietnam War, and his allies challenged the licenses of television stations owned by the publisher of The Washington Post, whose Watergate coverage infuriated him.

 

President George W. Bush’s White House barred The Times from Vice President Dick Cheney’s plane for a time out of pique at a story. President Barack Obama’s administration conducted more leak investigations than all his predecessors combined and once tried to exclude Fox News from a joint interview for television reporters, only to back down when other networks protested.

 

But Mr. Trump’s campaign against news media outlets has gone far beyond those of his modern-day predecessors, taking form long before the Kirk assassination. Even before his latest lawsuit against The Times, he sued ABC, CBS and The Wall Street Journal. He slashed federal funding for PBS and NPR. He moved to dismantle government broadcasters like Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Martí, Radio Free Asia and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks.

 

He threw The Associated Press out of the White House press pool because it refused to call the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.” And the White House seized control of the press pool altogether, determining which news organizations would be permitted into the Oval Office or on Air Force One to question him, something no other president attempted.

 

His Pentagon has similarly sought to curtail beat reporters covering defense issues by removing certain outlets from their work space and limiting access to the building. On Friday, the Pentagon went further, announcing that journalists must agree not to seek unauthorized information or risk losing their credentials to cover the military.

 

The administration has sought to stifle speech beyond news organizations, penalizing universities and other institutions that advocate diversity and threatening to bar foreign visitors who express disfavored opinions about Gaza or Mr. Kirk. Books about sensitive subjects have been removed from military academy libraries and information about topics like climate change scrubbed from government websites.

 

Mr. Trump has increasingly shown his willingness to invoke government reach to go after those who openly question or criticize him. When former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, a Republican and estranged ally, said on television last month that Mr. Trump “doesn’t care” about maintaining separation between his office and criminal investigations, the president proved the point by threatening a criminal investigation of Mr. Christie.

 

This past week brought more examples. On Monday, Mr. Trump said that he had asked Ms. Bondi to consider “bringing RICO cases against” the protesters who yelled at him in the restaurant, referring to the racketeering statute used to prosecute the mafia.

 

On Tuesday, Mr. Trump erupted at Jonathan Karl of ABC News for asking about Ms. Bondi’s plan to target “hate speech.” She would “probably go after people like you,” he snapped, “because you treat me so unfairly.” When Mr. Karl revisited the subject in the Oval Office on Friday, Mr. Trump berated him again. “You’re guilty, Jon,” he said.

 

During his flight home from London on Thursday night, Mr. Trump told reporters on Air Force One that his administration should curtail broadcasters that air coverage that is excessively negative toward him. “I would think maybe their license should be taken away,” he said.

 

Asked if he really thought the restaurant protesters should go to jail, he doubled down. “When you take a look at the way they acted, the way they behaved, yeah, I think they were a threat,” the president said.

 

His undisguised motives leave even some on the political right stunned. Mr. Berry, the Cato scholar, said he used to think that government coercion of private speakers, a practice often called “jawboning,” would be effective only if it was secret.

 

“But now we see the Trump administration engage in jawboning out in the open, in public interviews, and we mostly see the administration’s allies cheer it on,” he said. “It seems the attitude of most Trump allies is no longer ‘jawboning is wrong,’ but ‘Biden did it first, so two wrongs make a right.’”

 

Maggie Haberman contributed reporting.

 

Peter Baker is the chief White House correspondent for The Times. He is covering his sixth presidency and sometimes writes analytical pieces that place presidents and their administrations in a larger context and historical framework.