In case anyone remains confused about his intentions, Donald Trump has redoubled his resolve in recent days to erase rights for his perceived enemies and to insist that his own voice be the only one heard. It’s an echo of France’s King Louis XIV and autocrats everywhere.
Attacks on freedom of speech and assembly, on a free press, and on the right to criticize his government have graduated to official policy, well beyond campaign talk about “weaponization” of Justice and promising investigation and prosecution for those who oppose him.
Trump went to the Justice Department to offer a wildly partisan and self-referential broadside against the rule of law and any notion of law enforcement independent of his White House. Even apart from the remarks in which he called himself the nation’s chief law enforcement officer rather than the attorney general. his very appearance before prosecutors a break in protocol for an independent view of law.
But he went much further, as he has in the weeks, to target individual lawyers and law firms who represented his opponents, journalists, protesters, even anyone who has noted the bad judicial performance of federal Judge Aileen Cannon, who tossed charges against him on the thinnest of legal precedent.
The same Trump who has offered nonstop personal attacks on every judge to oversee prosecutions against Trump was exhorting cheering loyalists at Justice to make new law by pursuing those who would criticize Cannon. The same Trump who is interfering in individual Justice prosecutions, who insists that Justice must be his personal law firm to put those who “rigged” the 2020 elections in jail, is weaponizing Justice with his own bias to decry weaponization of the department.
Justice exists to serve his political and personal needs was the message, and woe to anyone who does not agree. If you care about a pluralistic, democratic America, Trump is waving a red flag of danger.
Punishing Criticism
Trump’s speech just punctuated what we have been seeing in migrant roundups, in arrest and deportation of college protestors, in government legal proceedings filed against television networks and universities, in the dismissals of federal workers who will not just go along with illegal orders. Just yesterday, the State Department tossed out the ambassador of South Africa for criticism of Trump’s support for white South Africans.
In what The New York Times described as an “acid recitation of grievances against his enemies,” Trump made clear that he is just getting started on a combination of retribution for perceived wrongs in the past and elimination of anything critical from “illegal reporting” by newspapers who don’t tell the news or recall the 2020 elections and January 6 scheming as he would.
He wants to remake libel protections set by Supreme Court cases and has sued or threatened networks over individual editing decisions that would otherwise have passed unnoticed. He is proud to have coined “fake” news as a label for anything that he finds unappealing, truth notwithstanding.
What Trump wants is government propaganda, not journalism. But more broadly, he is threatening constitutionally protected speech. And we have seen some media owners with other business interests altering their editorial tone in response.
It took a federal judge to halt, for now, a Trump executive order to strip law firm Perkins Coie, whose lawyers represented Hillary Clinton in 2016, of security clearances and to bar the firm from entry into federal buildings — essentially blocking a named law firm from handling cases against his government. That halt judgment came with vehemence over the order’s unconstitutionality on multiple grounds as well as its “chilling” attack on the right to legal representation. Trump says it is just the first of many law firms he will seek to shut.
What is worse is that clients have fled from Perkins Coie for fear of association with any anti-Trump message, and that other big law firms withheld condemnation in a too-widespread position of acceptance.
Unfree Speech
The decision to arrest, hold incommunicado and deport a Columbia University graduate student who has legal green card status for protesting over conduct in the Israel-Hamas war has stirred free speech advocates over its extreme claims that any speech not seen as supportive of this government’s foreign policy interests is suddenly grounds for deportation. At least one more Columbia student has been arrested, and a third voluntarily left the country. More broadly, Trump is insisting that “illegal protests” on campuses nationwide be canceled, at the threat of loss of federal money for universities and research.
We’ve seen intense Trump and MAGA political pressure and personal attacks on judges in Trump’s court cases and their families, on former special counsel Jack Smith, on congress members who don’t vote his way, on Black Lives Matter protesters. Trump attacks those who advocate for views countering his own in the nation’s culture wars as well as those who think promoting Tesla sales to boost the sagging popular views of Elon Musk over his chainsaw approach to government is perfectly okay. We have free speech at the Kennedy Center for the Arts if it involves promoting Christmas but not if it highlights gay pride themes.
The specific prompts and their weight in our daily lives are almost immaterial. The only thing that seems to matter is that what you and I say and think matters heavily if it involves any possible criticism of Trump’s life and outlook. He is a runaway narcissist.
For Trump, Justice has served as Ground Zero for a deep state out to stop him, and he is showing by the day that he is succeeding in stopping its independence through dismissals and reassignments, orders to drop cases or, as this week, to add actor Mel Gibson, a Trump supporter, to a list of those who should receive restored gun ownership despite a domestic violence conviction.
Trump argued in his address to Congress that he had “brought free speech back to America.” What he has done is to pressure social media companies to drop practices to sift out partisan misinformation while targeting a lengthening list of individuals, groups, businesses and others who express any opinion other than his.
