Trump’s rapid obliteration of the First Amendment is fit for a king

On Jan. 26, reporters for radio station KCBS showed up for work to do what American journalists have been doing mostly unfettered since the 1791 ratification of the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment: cover breaking news in the San Francisco Bay metropolis.

But this is not 1791 — or even 2024, for that matter. Within days, the government of a nation founded on revolutionary desires for a free press was threatening sanctions under KCBS’s license that allows it to broadcast because officials in Washington didn’t like the story it aired that day.

That’s because the KCBS reporters gained a rare scoop from the San Jose, Calif., area about an in-progress raid by federal agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. In the first month of the new Donald Trump regime that promised voters “mass deportation” of undocumented migrants, ICE’s press strategy has been to grant wide access to friendly reporters — from Fox News to TV’s Dr. Phil — while keeping independent journalists at bay.

On this Saturday, the KCBS weekend crew spoke with a pro-immigrant community group called the Rapid Response Network and told listeners what was happening — including the location of the ongoing raids, and a description of ICE vehicles moving through the neighborhood. It was public information — but too much information for a new kind of American government that cares a lot about terrorizing migrants, but not one whit about press freedom.

Brendan Carr, the Trump regime’s handpicked chair of the Federal Communications Commission, told Fox News (of course!) that the FCC has launched a formal investigation into KCBS’s reporting, claiming the information endangered the ICE agents as well as interfering with their mission to arrest the undocumented. His words were amplified by right-wing conspiracy theorists on Elon Musk-owned X and elsewhere who claimed, without evidence (of course!), that the station’s ICE report linked back to an investment in KCBS’s parent company tied to the liberal billionaire George Soros.

It’s not clear whether the probe will eventually lead to a fine or even stricter sanctions against KCBS, or whether it even exists much beyond Carr’s bloviating on national TV, but the real mission has already been accomplished. It sends a chilling message to any journalist who hopes to aggressively cover what the Trump regime is really up to with his agenda to deport thousands, and perhaps eventually millions, of refugees.

The KCBS threat was hardly a one-off for Carr, who seems more than willing to use the lever of the FCC — granted regulatory powers because of the limited frequencies available to broadcasters before the internet — as a tool to keep his patron Trump’s media critics in check. He’s also proclaimed investigations into National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting System (PBS), claiming the two networks’ brief touting of corporate sponsors is violating a ban on commercials. These pretexts are tiny, but the threats to accountability journalism are huge.

And Carr’s role as a pro-Trump pit bull — in a job that demands a neutral umpire of the public airwaves — is just one front in what, during the first month of the 47th presidency, has already become an all-out war on two-and-a-half centuries of American press freedom, in a conflict fit for a king. (Stay tuned.)

Inspired by his favorite strongman role models — especially Hungary’s Viktor Orbán — Trump, in his first month, has shown that 1984-style direct censorship isn’t necessary to cow the media into a silent state of compliant obedience. Instead, a large and varied arsenal — direct ownership of some key information sites like Musk’s X and government threats against the conflicted owners of others, defamation lawsuits before friendly judges, violent threats from online brownshirts, as well as from his tainted FCC — is called upon to shoot out the security cameras of accountability journalism, much as a bank robber might do.

Except, in this case, the audacious heist is U.S. democracy itself. Placing a giant muzzle on our journalistic watchdogs is a means to an end, which is American monarchy. Intimidation is how this rogue president — while doing utterly shocking things like betraying our democratic ally Ukraine, sending migrants to a concentration camp in the Panamanian jungle, and seeking a quid pro quo to liberate New York’s corrupt mayor, and calling it “Wednesday” — gets bland front pages that treat all of this as normal life. His frontal assault on the First Amendment may mark Trump’s greatest and most insidious victory, so far.

Indeed, Trump’s domination of the information space is becoming so total that also on Wednesday — in another bat-guano crazy move that seeks to end New York City’s congestion pricing program that has been reducing traffic, air pollution, and even collisions — he proclaimed in a post, “LONG LIVE THE KING!” Lest anyone missed the point, it was followed by a White House-approved fake image of a newsmagazine with Trump wearing a crown.

The evisceration of press freedom and Trump’s open embrace of American autocracy are very much the same story. In the 1770s and ‘80s, this nation’s revolutionaries rose up to slip the yoke of the last monarch, Britain’s King George III, in good measure to enshrine the free speech they’d sought on American soil. A few short decades later, the French chronicler of early 19th-century America, Alexis de Tocqueville, found the new nation’s thriving newspapers were a powerful symbol of our experiment with democracy. Now Trump is saying goodbye to all that with blitzkrieg speed.

» READ MORE: 2024’s other big loser? The mainstream media. Is there any path forward? | Will Bunch

Not that we were exactly in a sweet spot when Trump took the oath for the second time on Jan. 20. Since the international group Reporters Sans Frontières launched its World Press Freedom rankings in 2002, the United States had already slid from 17th to just 55th out of 180 nations in 2024. RSF cited the growing hostility from public officials toward a free press as a reason for the decline.

Today, Trump’s all-out war on the First Amendment is giving petty local tyrants permission to take measures that would have been unthinkable a few years back. In Clarksdale, Miss., city officials went before a friendly judge this week and — without a hearing — won a court order commanding the local newspaper to take down an online editorial criticizing them. Yes, this really happened in America. (The paper is appealing).

The decimation of press freedom is made possible by the record-low level of public trust in the media — some of it earned, but much of it driven by a relentless right-wing propaganda campaign that started in 1969 with Spiro Agnew and has never stopped. That unpopularity makes it easy for King Trump to divide and conquer.

Consider the current flap involving the elite Beltway media. One of Trump’s smaller yet more outlandish moves has been to proclaim the Gulf of Mexico will now be called the “Gulf of America.” This is largely a test of dictatorial obedience, and the Associated Press — a fact-based organization that correctly believes the president lacks authority to do this — still calls it the Gulf of Mexico.

In response, Trump is denying the AP access to the Oval Office and Air Force One. Other news organizations have, of course, criticized the move, yet are unwilling to actually walk away from these events in solidarity. “If we can’t stand up to the silly stuff, what guts do we have to stand up to the important?” asked Jeff Jarvis, veteran media critic and visiting professor at Stony Brook University. Jarvis is right, but the media is also in a lose-lose situation.

The White House press corps can cower before a self-proclaimed king, which is the horrendous thing that’s happening now. Fighting back and boycotting the Oval Office until the AP is allowed back would be the moral thing to do, but it would also unleash the next wave of right-wing attacks wrapped in their childish fantasies about a left-wing media conspiracy.

It’s a long road back. No wonder they say it’s good to be the king — until one day it isn’t. Just ask George III, or Louis XVI, or even the right’s apparent fever dream for an American ruler in Julius Caesar. The good news is there are still independent journalists — Gil Duran, Marisa Kabas, Wired’s Vittoria Elliott, and others — who don’t bow to Trump on bended knee. Their stories are ammunition for the growing ranks of protesters who remember the First Amendment and believe it’s a lost cause worth fighting for. The dustbin of history is littered with two-bit narcissists who also proclaimed, “LONG LIVE THE KING!” only to hear in response, “Sic semper tyrannis.”

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