The New Yorker:

Donald Trump’s attempt to criminalize political expression is crossing a line that’s held since 1798.

By Susan B. Glasser

During the 2024 campaign, after years of attacking the media as “enemies of the people,” Donald Trump presented himself as not a scourge of free speech but as its champion, promising to be a President who would reclaim this most fundamental right from the “left-wing censorship regime.” In his second Inaugural Address, on January 20, 2025, he pledged to reverse “years and years of illegal and unconstitutional federal efforts to restrict free expression,” promising to sign an executive order that same day “to immediately stop all government censorship and bring back free speech to America.” After pausing for a standing ovation led by his new Vice-President, the self-styled free-speech warrior J. D. Vance, Trump added, “Never again will the immense power of the state be weaponized to persecute political opponents. Something I know something about. We will not allow that to happen, it will not happen again. Under my leadership we will restore fair, equal, and impartial justice under the constitutional rule of law.”

There are many brazen falsehoods that have shaped Trump’s second term thus far, but this might be the most offensive lie of them all—because it is this President’s systematic campaign to stamp out dissent and punish those who disagree with him that will be remembered as among the most singularly un-American aspects of his disruptive tenure. Donald Trump relies on the First Amendment when he belittles, denigrates, humiliates, and slurs his opponents. The First Amendment protected him when he lied during the campaign about Haitian immigrants eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio, and the First Amendment protected him last week when he reposted a racist video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes. But it is now clear that he sees the Constitution as something that applies only to those who agree with him. For everyone else, this is not the free-speech Presidency he promised but a free-speech crackdown without modern precedent.

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