This is an adapted excerpt from the December 14 episode of “Ayman.”
If you listened to newly elected President Donald Trump and his Republican allies during the campaign, it was clear that they were running as a party of free speech.
“I will bring back freedom of speech in America because it has been taken away,” Trump said at a rally in September. “They have taken away your freedom of speech, and the fake news is a threat to this country.”
“Donald Trump is the candidate for the First Amendment,” JD Vance told the crowd at another rally in October. “He is the candidate of free speech.”
But just a month after his election victory, the so-called free speech candidate is threatening to go after a cornerstone of the First Amendment, the free press: “They [the media] I think we’re much better now,” Trump said recently at the New York Stock Exchange after Time Magazine named him person of the year. “If they don’t, we’re just going to have to deal with them again, and we don’t want to do that,” Trump added.
As if that weren’t enough, members of Trump’s new administration have also likely attacked freedom of speech. Starting with Kash Patel, whom Trump would like to lead the FBI. “We’re going after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig the presidential election,” Patel said on Steve Bannon’s podcast. “Whether it’s criminal or civil, we’ll figure it out.”
Then there’s Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. When he endorsed Trump, Kennedy argued that it was Democrats, not Republicans, who were the ones silencing people they disagreed with. However, Kennedy is now indicating that if confirmed, he will likely fire about 600 National Institutes of Health employees who disagree with his views.
Don’t forget Trump’s first friend, billionaire Elon Musk. The owner of Musk said on his social media platform earlier this year that “without freedom of speech, all is lost.”
But during his tenure as X’s owner, the company suspended the accounts of journalists who criticized him or his Republican allies like Vance. And now, despite never having been elected by anyone, Musk is threatening Senate Republicans with a primary challenger backed by him if they don’t line up and support Trump’s nominees.
Patel, Kennedy and Musk have issued a stark warning to potential Trump dissidents: follow the rules or face the consequences.
And it’s all in service of Trump, a man who has called for the imprisonment of anyone who desecrates the American flag. Someone who has threatened to go after broadcasting licenses of channels because of reporting he doesn’t like. Someone who, according to Rolling Stone, is reportedly planning to escalate his war on speakers and the press using media subpoenas, communications seizures, prosecution of whistleblowers and legal threats against news media.
As one conservative lawyer familiar with Trump’s media plans warned in that report, “It will be brutal.”
The idea that Trump and his allies are champions of free speech has always been absurd. For them, freedom of speech means being able to shout the loudest and silence anyone who disagrees with them.
Allison Detzel contributed.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
