DrWeb“If We Don’t Have Free Speech, Then We Just Don’t Have a Free Country” – The New Yorker
Letter from Trump’s Washington
“If We Don’t Have Free Speech, Then We Just Don’t Have a Free Country”
Donald Trump’s attempt to criminalize political expression is crossing a line that’s held since 1798.
By Susan B. Glasser, February 12, 2026
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.
On Tuesday evening, it was revealed that Trump’s Justice Department had sought to indict six members of Congress for the alleged crime of recording a video with a message for U.S. troops—that members of the military are not required to obey illegal orders—which enraged the President. In much of Washington, this development was greeted with horror, but also with a sigh of relief, because the grand jurors in D.C. who had been presented with the bogus criminal case took the extraordinarily unusual step of rejecting the proposed indictment against the “Seditious Six,” as Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth called them. On Thursday, a federal judge issued a temporary injunction against another effort by the Trump Administration to punish one of the six lawmakers, Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, a retired Navy captain whom Hegseth had moved to censure and retroactively demote. In a scathing decision, Richard Leon, a George W. Bush appointee, ruled that the Defense Department had “trampled on Senator Kelly’s First Amendment freedoms” and denounced its arguments as “horsefeathers!”
By all means, let’s cheer these heartening signs of the backbone and integrity of everyday Americans in the face of once unthinkable attacks on our democracy. But best to remember, too, that what Trump is pursuing here is an attempted criminalization of political speech the likes of which has never happened.
Scroll through the list of members of Congress who have been convicted of crimes over the two hundred and fifty years of American history. There have been plenty of crooks, Democrats and Republicans alike, who took bribes or extorted them. But you’d have to go back to 1798 to find the one disgraceful example of a congressman prosecuted for exercising his constitutional right to free speech: Matthew Lyons, of Connecticut, was convicted and jailed for four months after publishing an editorial critical of President John Adams in violation of the Alien and Sedition Acts, which, thankfully, have long since been repealed and repudiated.
The point is this: not even during the violent rupture of the Civil War or the Red Scare crackdown of the First World War or the worst excesses of McCarthyism did any President attempt what Trump has this week. He failed with one indictment and one grand jury, but he has three more years to go. Can anyone say confidently that he will not succeed when he tries once again to jail his political opponents for speaking out against him, as he seems so intent upon doing?
Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.
Continue/Read Original Article Here: “If We Don’t Have Free Speech, Then We Just Don’t Have a Free Country” | The New Yorker
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