How Trump Is Wielding Power to Stifle Speech
“President Trump uses federal agencies and lawsuits to restrict press freedoms, including Justice Department subpoenas, Pentagon actions against Stars and Stripes, and FCC and FTC investigations. Critics report diminished freedom; allies claim accountability.
President Trump has harnessed agencies across the government to curtail press freedoms, a sweeping campaign that free speech advocates say will have lasting effects.
The Justice Department has sent F.B.I. agents to reporters’ homes to serve subpoenas and, in at least one case, flashed a warrant to seize devices. The Pentagon has fired the editor and publisher of its traditionally independent newspaper, Stars and Stripes, and blocked access to other journalists who refused to sign pledges that would limit their reporting.
Regulatory agencies are using their powers to pressure media organizations over their content. The administration has stripped funding from public television and radio. Angry over stories he does not like, President Trump has sued major news organizations and the White House has taken control of the previously independent press pool that tracks the president, deciding which outlets can participate.
Almost 20 months into Mr. Trump’s second term, his long-running media clashes have grown into a sweeping campaign to control speech in America that stands out for applying so many levers, so fast, all at once.
Driven by personal pique, fury over leaks and a determination to shape the political narrative to his advantage, Mr. Trump is deploying the might of the federal government and filing personal lawsuits — targeting not just journalists and liberal critics, but also comedians and talk show hosts, and the corporate entities behind them.
To the president and his allies, he is simply demanding accountability for what he casts as biased, unfair and sometimes inaccurate coverage and criticism — an effort that has been welcomed by longtime conservative press critics like those at the Media Research Center.
Aides noted that the White House has this year expanded who gets invited to cover events, such as the off-the-record presidential lunch with network anchors that precedes the annual State of the Union address.
In a statement, White House Communications Director Steven Cheung said that “biased reporting from the media is a disservice to the American people,” adding: “We utilize every tool available to ensure that accurate reporting is provided to the public and the stain of those who knowingly peddle false information is held accountable.”
Free speech advocates say the president’s intent is apparent: to punish, intimidate and silence dissenters.
“There’s not a week that goes by where they’re not taking a new step to curtail press freedom in the country,” said Clayton Weimers, the executive director of the North America division of Reporters Without Borders. “We have measured a substantial diminishment of press freedoms.”
When challenged in court, the president and the administration have frequently lost, confronted with strongly worded rulings from judges affirming First Amendment rights.
Still, even the path to legal victory can have severe financial and reputational costs for those he views as adversaries, which have included The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and the BBC. And each time the president assails what has long been considered protected speech, media analysts say, he is eroding norms and undercutting the role of an independent press.
Reporters Without Borders maintains an index that tracks press freedom in 180 countries, clocking governmental threats, subpoenas and the vindictive use of regulations against journalists. The United States now ranks at its lowest since the organization started the index in 2002 — 64th, just above Panama and just below Botswana. The trend is the same at similar indexes kept by the Freedom of the Press Foundation and the V-Dem Institute of Sweden.
There is a long record of U.S. presidents taking steps to curtail speech. President Woodrow Wilson imposed strict censorship and forced dissenting publishers out of business during World War I. Richard M. Nixon kept an enemies list, and his aides threatened F.C.C. action against broadcasters. More recently, the George W. Bush White House expanded government secrecy and the Obama administration went after the sources of journalists through leak investigations.
Mr. Trump had inveighed against the Biden administration for what he and his supporters portrayed as draconian pressure on social media companies to censor disfavored content often at their expense, promising at his second inauguration to “stop all government censorship.”
Now his administration is breaking new ground in stifling dissent with personal lawsuits and novel uses of executive power, longtime First Amendment lawyers say, with implications that extend far beyond Mr. Trump’s presidency.
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“We live in a different world under this administration because the threats are so grave,” said Floyd Abrams, who has worked on free speech cases for 60 years. “It’s one thing to say there’s an extraordinarily powerful First Amendment, but unless and until courts rule on these matters, the threat is very real.”
Harnessing Government Power
Long before he took office, Mr. Trump was well known for his media feuds. As a developer and reality TV star, he was quick to threaten defamation suits against those who challenged his assertions about his business successes and his wealth.
Mr. Trump has been candid about his aim: to inflict pain, even if it was fleeting. After bringing a failed libel suit against the former Times reporter Timothy L. O’Brien, whose book “TrumpNation” estimated Mr. Trump to be worth far less than he claimed, the president gloated about forcing the publisher to spend money. “I did it to make his life miserable, which I’m happy about,” he said.
In his first term, the president branded journalists as “fake news” and crudely attacked reporters, especially women.
In his second term, Mr. Trump is now imprinting his pugilistic approach across the machinery of the federal government. Those who once might have checked him have been replaced by loyalists who often use their power to fulfill Mr. Trump’s desire to punish perceived enemies.
Soon after his inauguration, the White House banned The Associated Press from the Oval Office and Air Force One, ostensibly because the wire service would not call the Gulf of Mexico by Mr. Trump’s preferred name, the Gulf of America. Another reason for the ban: The A.P. would not give the Trump team rights to its photo of Mr. Trump, bloodied with a raised fist, after he was shot in Butler, Pa., in 2024. At a private lunch with Mr. Trump and network anchors last year, White House aides tied the A.P. ban to the denial of the rights to the photo, according to two people briefed on the event.
Mr. Trump’s team is unapologetic about its goal of achieving firmer control over the national information environment — what Mr. Cheung, the communications director, has dubbed in a social media post, “Full Spectrum Dominance.”
Brendan Carr, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission and one of the most aggressive supporters of Mr. Trump’s efforts, has said that the president is “reshaping the media landscape.”
Citing the big broadcast networks, Mr. Carr told an interviewer for CNBC last year that “for years government officials just allowed those entities, with executives sitting in Hollywood and New York, to dictate the political narrative.” Mr. Trump, he added, has “fundamentally changed the game.”
One of the Trump administration’s strategies appeared to take root in a dispute between Elon Musk and the liberal press watchdog group Media Matters for America.
In 2023, Mr. Musk was furious about a Media Matters article that showed pro-Nazi posts were running on his social media platform X alongside promotional posts from major consumer brands, contributing to an advertiser exodus from the site.
A longtime Trump adviser, Stephen Miller, took to X to pointedly note that Republican state attorneys general had the power to consider civil and criminal fraud charges against the group. In short order, Mr. Musk sued Media Matters for allegedly manipulating the X algorithm to produce its results, the Texas attorney general’s office opened an investigation into deceptive trade practices and the Missouri attorney general followed with its own inquiry.
Media Matters won court injunctions blocking the Texas and Missouri investigations. But soon after Mr. Trump took office again, the Federal Trade Commission, newly headed by the conservative lawyer Andrew Ferguson, began its own investigation, demanding internal documents related to Media Matters’ methodology for evaluating media sources and its finances.
The investigation was part of a broader F.T.C. inquiry into whether several groups that work to identify online disinformation were colluding with advertising firms to direct money away from disfavored outlets. Conservatives saw the issue as central to what some labeled a “censorship industrial complex.”
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A federal judge in Washington ultimately determined that the F.T.C.’s investigation of Media Matters presented “a straightforward First Amendment violation.”
But the fight was costly for Media Matters. In addition to paying legal fees, the group said it had self-censored articles to avoid further scrutiny from the agency. (It is still defending itself against Mr. Musk’s suit.)
The F.T.C. also investigated NewsGuard, a site that rates the reliability of online information. It is avowedly nonpartisan in its approach; Fox News, for instance, rates above MS NOW.
In court papers, NewsGuard said it drew attention in part because it had given a low rating to the conservative site Newsmax, which is run by an ally of Mr. Trump’s, Chris Ruddy. Mr. Ruddy had complained that ad agencies were relying on NewsGuard ratings to withhold money from right-leaning outlets like his.
The F.T.C. took another tack that NewsGuard said affected it directly, related to the merger of two of the country’s largest advertising holding companies, Omnicom and Interpublic Group. The F.T.C. entered into a consent decreewith the newly joined company barring it from broadly using ratings like those published by NewsGuard to withhold ad spending from certain sites, among other things. (It could still follow individual clients’ requests to do so.)
In a lawsuit filed in February, NewsGuard said the provision effectively placed it on a blacklist, immediately causing it to lose business.
The F.T.C. ultimately dropped its investigations into both NewsGuard and Media Matters, saying it had achieved its goal of defending free speech through agreements with ad firms. It said it was fulfilling its mission of protecting consumers from anticompetitive behavior that “distorted the marketplace of ideas,” as Mr. Ferguson put it.
Dan Schneider, vice president for free speech at the conservative watchdog group Media Research Center, described the actions by the F.T.C. and the F.C.C. as a correction against abuses under the past two Democratic presidents. “Please, let’s not forget history and rewrite everything that went on before,” Mr. Schneider said.
But Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, a Democratic F.T.C. commissioner fired by Mr. Trump last year, said in an interview that the agency’s actions “a perversion of the F.T.C.’s authorities in order to punish the speech of perceived enemies and reward perceived allies.”
‘Deeply Un-American’
Much of the administration’s action has been led by Mr. Carr. The longtime F.C.C. lawyer is known to frequent the president’s golf clubs when Mr. Trump is there on weekends and often speaks to the president directly about his grievances with news outlets, according to people briefed on their conversations.
He has bent the F.C.C. to the president’s will, investigating the major broadcast networks by reviving largely dormant rules, like those against so-called news distortion — meant to punish the deliberate staging or distortion of a news event. Mr. Carr has also pursued networks for their diversity, equity and inclusion practices, inquiring whether they violate federal law and agency regulations, a tactic the administration has used to significant effect against universities and law firms.
Early on, Mr. Carr extracted extraordinary concessions from Skydance, the company run by the studio executive David Ellison, the son of the billionaire Trump ally Larry Ellison, as it sought to purchase Paramount, the parent company of CBS. To secure F.C.C. approval for the merger, Skydance agreedto end CBS’s diversity policies and appoint a monitor for news bias. (Mr. Trump has since shown a rooting interest in the Ellisons’ attempt to buy Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns CNN.)
Critics, among them F.C.C. chairs from past Republican administrations, have said Mr. Carr is exceeding his authority. Mr. Carr says he is simply following the law by requiring broadcasters to serve the public interest in ways that he says his predecessors had failed to do.
Mr. Trump is clearly pleased with Mr. Carr’s effort to solve the so-called fake news problem, as he put it in a speech in April at a private White House event ahead of the celebrations for America’s 250th anniversary.
“He’s keeping these crooked networks honest,” Mr. Trump said as he spotted Mr. Carr in the crowd, describing his appointee as “the most powerful man in the world.”
After Mr. Trump recently called for punishment of the NBC host Kristen Welker for reporting he did not like, and suggested F.C.C. action against the airing of “fake polls,” Mr. Carr responded by saying the agency was considering “a lot of actions,” including on “fake polls.”
No network has borne the brunt of the president’s ire as much as the Disney-owned ABC network.
Mr. Trump’s animus against ABC grew in 2024, when he sued over the anchor George Stephanopoulos’s characterization of the verdict in the defamation case brought by E. Jean Carroll, who accused Mr. Trump of sexual abuse. ABC settled the suit for $15 million.
In the president’s second term, his anger has increased as the ABC late-night comic Jimmy Kimmel has made him the regular butt of jokes.
Last year, the F.C.C. opened an investigation into the network’s diversity and inclusion hiring policies and revived a conservative group’s complaint over ABC’s 2024 presidential debate.
Early this year, the agency sought to require its talk show “The View” to follow so-called equal-time rules for political candidates, even though the F.C.C. previously agreed that the show qualified for an exemption.
In April, after Mr. Trump and the first lady demanded ABC fire Mr. Kimmelover a joke he made about her being an “expectant widow,” the F.C.C. started an early review of the federal licenses that ABC stations need to operate, years before they are set to expire.
The agency had never brought such a mass challenge to a major network’s station licenses. It said it was doing so because ABC was deficient in its responses to the diversity and inclusion inquiry.
ABC is now fighting the agency’s actions, which it called “deeply un-American.”
The network has asked a federal court to intervene immediately, arguing that Mr. Carr was effectively using the agency’s enforcement process to wage a “retaliatory campaign” that is already negatively affecting its programming decisions.
Out of fear of retaliation, ABC decided to carry live online a prime-time speech that Mr. Trump gave on election security, which it would not have otherwise done, and avoided certain bookings and video clips on “The View,” the network said in court papers.
It also reported onerous F.C.C. demands for documents, including staff communications from inside “The View” and internal ABC News editorial policies.
“It’s unprecedented to seek these records because they are part of the editorial decision-making,” Anna Gomez, the lone Democratic F.C.C. commissioner, said in an interview. “It’s all a strategy, and tools, to intimidate broadcasters into submission.”
Mr. Carr has called ABC’s suit meritless. This month, the F.C.C. moved to get the case dismissed, arguing ABC was simply trying to short-circuit an agency investigation while exaggerating harms to its speech rights.
Trevor Timm, the executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, a nonprofit group that tracks press freedom violations in the United States, said that the administration’s moves “have certainly risen to the level where they’re kind of off the charts.”
Government efforts to subpoena journalists and chill their reporting through threats are at the highest level since the foundation started tracking incidents in 2017.
And as a private citizen, Mr. Trump has filed lawsuits against a wide range of targets including the Guardian newspaper, the journalist Bob Woodward and the Pulitzer Prize board — legal battles often financed by his donor-funded political action committee.
Many of the moves have also drawn stern rebukes and concern from judges.
That was the case after the F.B.I. served a search warrant in January at the home of a Washington Post reporter and seized several of her devices, as part of an investigation into a contractor’s handling of classified material. In February, Judge William B. Porter chastised the government and forbade officials from immediately reviewing the reporter’s materials, saying to do otherwise would be “the equivalent of leaving the government’s fox in charge of The Washington Post’s henhouse.”
While weighing a suit Mr. Trump has personally brought against The Des Moines Register for a poll it published showing him behind in Iowa in 2024, a judge worried that allowing the suit to proceed could have “a massive, chilling effect.”
After a judge harshly questioned government lawyers in July over subpoenas for phone records and testimony from Times journalists who reported on the security capabilities of the new Qatari-donated Air Force One jet, the Justice Department withdrew the subpoenas.
At the time, David McCraw, the paper’s top newsroom lawyer, called the outcome, “an important affirmation of our country’s commitment to a free press,” but added in a statement that the subpoenas “should never have been issued in the first place.”
In siding with The Times in a challenge to restrictions for reporters at the Pentagon, Judge Paul Friedman of U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia wrote in March, “Those who drafted the First Amendment believed that the nation’s security requires a free press and an informed people and that such security is endangered by governmental suppression of political speech.”
After The Times initially prevailed in court, Pentagon officials sidestepped the ruling to again limit the access of journalists to the building. The Times sued again. This time, an appellate panel allowed a key new restriction to stand, at least temporarily — reporters must have escorts inside the Pentagon where they once roamed freely.
The rule remains in place while the legal fight presses on.
Jim Rutenberg is a writer at large for The Times and The New York Times Magazine and writes most often about media and politics.
Maggie Haberman is a White House correspondent for The Times, reporting on President Trump.“
