The Trump Administration’s Chokehold on Free Speech
I examined hundreds of assaults on the First Amendment, revealing the regime’s systemic speech-chilling campaign
Since the beginning of Trump’s second term, stories about White House attacks on First Amendment freedoms have come in seemingly daily barrages. Soon after Trump’s inauguration, I started to document and catalog each incident — a list that soon totaled nearly 200 attacks on free speech.
That list became the basis for my new Free Press report: CHOKEHOLD: Donald Trump’s War on Free Speech & the Need for Systemic Resistance. And as I told Brian Stelter of CNN, it was an exhausting and sobering process to observe, inventory and make sense of the chaos. But one thing is clear: The administration has waged an unrelenting assault on free speech and dissent, collaborating with the most powerful and wealthy people to weaken our most basic freedoms.
Brian Stelter
These free-speech assaults come in countless forms: violent physical attacks on reporters covering protests against ICE, law enforcement targeting and detaining foreign students for months due to their political speech, the White House firing — and the Justice Department prosecuting — government servants who refuse to comply with Trump’s personal vendettas. While each attempt at censorship is noteworthy and often unprecedented, the sheer volume of speech-chilling attacks has helped ensure that even the most egregious assaults quickly fall out of the news cycle and public consciousness.
We’re little more than a week into December and the Trump administration has already launched new attacks against free expression. Earlier in the month, news broke that Attorney General Pam Bondi had ordered the FBI to compile a target list of what the Justice Department is calling “domestic terrorist” organizations (in other words, groups supporting causes the administration seeks to suppress). Meanwhile, the University of Alabama has discontinued Black- and women-focused student magazines, citing the Justice Department’s efforts to limit diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. These are just a couple of examples of the relentless censorship campaign led by a cadre of the most wealthy, conservative and powerful institutions and individuals to muzzle free speech and undermine dissent across America.
Silencing dissent
Our report — CHOKEHOLD: Donald Trump’s War on Free Speech & the Need for Systemic Resistance — exposes the patterns behind the administration-wide campaign to silence dissent.
CHOKEHOLD pierces the chaos of Trump administration attacks to reveal a methodology involving close coordination among the White House, government agencies and Trump’s media allies to normalize some of the most egregious abuses of our First Amendment rights. This censorship playbook is responsible for the administration’s central retaliatory ethos and inspires a set of strategies that loyal actors in government use to silence dissent and chill free expression. The rules of behavior involve shameless lying combined with other efforts to distort reality and unjustly vilify anyone who attempts to call Trump to account. Essential to this effort is a loyal cabal of henchmen, deployed to carry out Trump’s threats of reprisal.
CHOKEHOLD identifies five key findings:
- Trump’s tyrannical playbook has infected the entire administration with an ethos of retaliation, targeting free speech that contradicts him.
- No one is safe from attack in Trump’s quest to control the message, though the administration targets the press most of all.
- The modes of attack are erratic, but they are also extensive and relentless.
- While this speech-chilling campaign is vastly unpopular and often loses in court, its speed and scale are unprecedented in U.S. history.
- Collective resistance has blunted Trump’s censorship campaign and must be sustained.
Threats to free speech, late-night comedy and beyond
Approaching the one-year mark of Trump’s second term, the White House has undermined free speech using myriad actions and threats. The attacks largely fail judicial scrutiny and have roused significant and wide-ranging public opposition. Yet the administration continues to actively disregard existing law, violate court orders it dislikes and lie in official proceedings to concoct arguments that support Trump’s censorship agenda.
The media in particular have been bombarded at a scale and pace no other sector has experienced. There are countless examples that didn’t receive the level of scrutiny or number of headlines that followed news of ABC’s temporary suspension of Jimmy Kimmel Live! in September, after FCC Chairman Brendan Carr threatened to take action against the company if it didn’t make its programming Trump-friendly.
Receiving far less coverage are the examples of numerous reporters federal law enforcement and ICE agents have targeted for engaging in the First Amendment-protected act of recording protests. I’m thinking of Mario Guevara, a journalist from El Salvador — and a longtime Georgia resident — who was arrested, detained and eventually deported for filming police during a protest. I’m thinking of Rümeysa Öztürk, a Tufts University graduate student who was arrested and detained for simply writing an Op-Ed in her student newspaper that urged the school to cut ties to Israel over the war in Gaza.
We chart these and other crackdown methods in the report and map them to a yearlong timeline, including nearly 200 specific incidents involving threats to free expression.
The collective drumbeat
Through it all, I found one constant — and hopeful — sign: Coordinated resistance has successfully blunted the potency of Trump’s censorship campaign. There are so many examples of this, including law firms and universities rejecting the administration’s unjust demands or millions of protesters taking to the streets. These efforts mirror the power collective resistance has played throughout modern U.S. history to move society forward — seen in the Civil Rights Movement, the antiwar movement during the Vietnam War, the uprising at Stonewall and other movements. While the United States is sliding into authoritarianism, we still have relatively free and fair elections, a largely independent press and the ability for millions of people to show up in the streets to protest. Sustained and systemic resistance has worked over the past year and will remain essential in the months and years ahead.
If only one person speaks out against injustice, their speech is notable but also more vulnerable to attack under this administration. If more people speak out, the collective can more easily withstand attack from those in power. Democracies erode little by little; aspiring dictators need to scare only some of us and the rest will often self-censor. The very reason we must speak out together is so we can leverage our collective power.
About the author
Nora Benavidez leads Free Press’ democracy, free speech and tech initiatives, including its policy, legal and campaign efforts to curb disinformation, hate and other manipulation online while protecting digital civil rights, privacy and free expression. Follow Nora on Bluesky.
Teamwork
On Tuesday morning, Free Press Co-CEO and Pressing Issues co-editor Craig Aaron appeared on Democracy Now! to talk about the CHOKEHOLD report and all this merger madness surrounding Netflix, Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery.
Story updates
We have updates to two stories Pressing Issues has featured this year.
This week, as a follow-up to statements that Spanish-language networks UnivisionTelevisa and Telemundo made about broadcasting Department of Homeland Security ads, Mijente announced a series of in-person demonstrations across several cities.
Julio Ricardo Varela
The developer behind the iPhone app ICEBlock has sued the Trump administration for First Amendment violations. The app tracked the activity of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and was available on Apple’s App Store before the Department of Justice demanded that the company remove the app. Apple complied.
MATT O’BRIEN
The kicker
“Democratic erosion is rarely a single dramatic break; it’s a series of plausibly deniable moves that normalize power over principle.” — CHOKEHOLD
