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Trump’s War on Media, Truth, and the Constitution [1]

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Date: 2025-02-23

There may not be much left to celebrate on July 4, 2026, the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and the birth of the new country and a year and a half into Donald Trump’s second term a President. Trump’s deluge of questionable executive orders and his pronouncement that he is above the law because he wants to make the country great again, threaten the basic principles that have governed the United States since its inception. To beat his critics into silence, Trump has launched a war against the media, truth, and the Constitution. As George Orwell recognized in his 1949 dystopian novel 1984, Big Brother’s control over the public’s perception of realty required complete control of the media allowing him to “extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent thought.”

The First Amendment to the United States Constitution ratified in 1791 incorporated freedom of speech and of the press into the founding document of this country. It declares “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

The First Amendment was a direct rebuke to British sedition and libel laws dating back to the colonial era that outlawed criticism of the monarchy or government. Donald Trump, who recently crowned himself King in a Truth Social post, does not believe he is restricted by this constitutional mandate and he has launched an all-out war to silence the media reminiscent of similar campaigns in Germany under Adolph Hitler and the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin.

So far Trump has deployed two to strategies to intimidate and muzzle the media. He restricted the ability of the legitimate press to report on questionable administration activities and he launched nuisance suits in the courts threatening critical media with enormous payouts if they lose and huge legal fees just to contest the accusations. Paul Krugman, former CUNY and Princeton professor and New York Times columnist argues that Trump’s war on the media has led to the press’s “sanewashing” Trump, reporting on crazy statements and outrageous actions as they they were legitimate, in an effort to avoid his wrath.

Shortly after starting his first term in 2017, Trump accused the press of being an “enemy of the American people,” a strategy employed by dictators to delegitimize critical reporting and create public confusion about which stories are real and which ones are propaganda.

So far kowtowing to the self-proclaimed King has not prevented Trump from revenging what he sees as past slights and insufficient current pandering. The Trump administration ordered The New York Times, NBC News, NPR, and Politico to vacate office space in the Pentagon. “Media” companies replacing them include rightwing Trump friendly New York Post, Breitbart News and One America News. The Associated Press was blocked from covering White House events for not immediately referring to the Gulf of Mexico by its Trump designated new name.

Since his second inauguration, Trump has demonized what he calls the “fake news media.” Without evidence, he falsely claimed on his personal Truth Social outlet that government agencies gave “billions of dollars” to news organizations to create good stories about the Democrats and he demanded that The Washington Post fire a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist who wrote that Republican senators “should be ashamed of themselves” for quietly approving Trump’s unqualified nominees for cabinet positions. Meanwhile Trump bro Elon Musk demanded that The Wall Street Journal fire an investigative reporter who exposed racist posts on social media by one of Musk’s DOGE boys.

Brendan Carr, Trump’s nominee to head the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), has launched investigations into NPR and PBS for liberal bias and Comcast, the owner of NBC News, for promoting diversity, equity and inclusion, and the FCC is threatening to investigate MSNBC and NBC for distorted election coverage. Carr reopened a probe of CBS for “news distortion” because of how it handled the Presidential debate between Trump and Kamala Harris and Trump has demanded that CBS lose its broadcasting license. CBS News’ parent company, Paramount, is reportedly preparing to settle the lawsuit to avoid any Trump repercussions. ABC has already agreed to pay $15 million as part of a legal settlement after Trump accused anchor George Stephanopoulos of defaming him.

A major weapon in the Trump campaign against the media, the truth, and the Constitution will be Kash Patel, recently approved by Senate Republicans as head of the FBI. On a 2023 podcast, Patel stated “We’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections.”

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/2/23/2305724/-Trump-s-War-on-Media-Truth-and-the-Constitution?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web

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