President Donald Trump and his ally Elon Musk portray themselves as near-absolutists when it comes to free speech, engaged in an epic fight to let Americans speak openly again after years of enduring liberal efforts to shut down conservative voices.
But since taking office, the president has mounted what critics call his own sweeping attack on freedom of expression. Some of it aims to stamp out diversity, equity and inclusion and what he terms “radical gender ideology.” Some of it is aimed at media organizations whose language he dislikes. In other cases, the attacks target opponents who have spoken sharply about the administration.
Together, critics — and in some cases, judges — have said Trump’s efforts have gone beyond shaping the message of the federal government to threaten the First Amendment rights of private groups and individuals.
“You can claim that you are championing expression and are a free-speech supporter, but saying those things doesn’t change what are a number of steps that add up to government censorship,” said Michelle Deutchman, executive director of the National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement at the University of California. “The government is using content-based and even viewpoint-based discrimination to make decisions about what words and thoughts people can express.”
Trump’s orders banning DEI efforts threaten organizations receiving federal money if they advocate for diversity and inclusion. That violates the First Amendment, a judge said recently, because it targets “viewpoints the government wishes to punish and, apparently, attempt to extinguish.”
Another Trump directive, forbidding schools nationwide from teaching about “gender ideology” or “discriminatory equity ideology,” is drawing similar criticism from free-speech advocates, who say the president has no authority to punish local school districts for teaching ideas he rejects.
The White House is also punishing the Associated Press, a major news organization, for continuing to call the Gulf of Mexico by its long-standing name rather than switching to “Gulf of America,” as Trump has dictated. In a lawsuit protesting its ban from White House events, the AP noted that “the Constitution does not allow the government to control speech.”
Taken together, many free-speech advocates said, the actions amount to a heavy-handed and likely illegal effort to control the national conversation. But a senior White House official took strong issue with that characterization.
“President Trump is the most transparent president in American history,” said principal deputy press secretary Harrison Fields. “He is a defender of the First Amendment. Any suggestion otherwise is laughable.”
It was President Joe Biden, Fields said, who pressured social media companies to remove posts related to covid-19, saying they were dangerous misinformation. “Compared to his predecessor, who forced private industry to censor content, President Trump will ensure the free flow of ideas to continue,” he said.
Trump’s assault on progressive speech has been largely, though not exclusively, in the service of beating back what he and his supporters depict as a “woke” leftism that proclaims America a racist country and gender a social construct.
In many ways, this is the latest — and perhaps most ferocious — chapter in a long-running cultural battle. Conservatives have complained for years that liberals bully and vilify them if they depart from progressive orthodoxy. Progressives say it is Republicans who are mounting a sweeping assault on free speech, seeking to punish those who dare to raise America’s troubled racial past or explore the complex subject of gender identity.
Trump has charged aggressively into this volatile terrain.
The sternest rebuke to his approach so far may have come from U.S. District Judge Adam Abelson, who on Feb. 21 largely suspended Trump’s orders targeting DEI programs. The judge said a requirement that anyone receiving federal grants or contracts must certify that they do not promote DEI “on its face” violates freedom of speech.
Another part of the orders, threatening action against companies that promote DEI, is also “facially unconstitutional,” the judge said. Noting that the administration had not issued similar warnings to those who oppose DEI, he added, “That is textbook viewpoint-based discrimination.”
The administration has appealed the ruling. “The administration feels that every order that they have signed is legal and within its Article II powers, and we feel the Supreme Court will have the final say in our favor if it goes that far,” the senior official said.
Critics cite other examples of what they call a reckless approach to free speech.
Brendan Carr, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, has warned Comcast Corp. that a statement on its website saying “diversity, equity and inclusion are a core value of our business” might violate federal regulations, for example.
Veterans Affairs Secretary Douglas A. Collins has banned the display of gay pride and similar flags in employees’ private offices and cubicles. Collins said the new guidelines would bring “consistency and simplicity to the display of flags,” but some employees complain that the administration is going out of its way to target their personal identity and expression.
Outside the government, universities, companies and nonprofits around the country are rapidly removing statements that support DEI for fear of provoking the administration’s wrath. In the view of many free-speech experts, that is a classic “chilling effect” prompted by a government threat, even if the courts may eventually overturn some of Trump’s actions.
“The law moves more slowly than what is happening right now,” Deutchman said. “Even during the time when it is getting challenged in court and gets a preliminary injunction, some of the damage is already happening. It’s beyond a chilling effect — it’s more like a freeze.”
Hawaii Gov. Josh Green, a Democrat, took particular issue with the administration’s efforts to cull words like “gender” and “inclusion” from public documents.
“All words should be usable, and then we should have a strong debate,” Green said. “I find that to be the more punitive part of what we saw from the election … I think that that’s the red meat that president is throwing to the base.”
Green, a physician, said words like “gender” and “transgender” are medical terms that are crucial for researchers studying health disparities. “These are the kind of words that are being plucked from the lexicon, and that is not helpful,” he said.
In some cases, the administration’s actions seem more personal.
Edward Martin, Trump’s interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, challenged Rep. Robert Garcia (D-California) after Garcia told CNN that Democrats should forcefully oppose Trump and Musk. “What the American public wants is for us to bring actual weapons to this bar fight,” Garcia said. “This is an actual fight for democracy.”
Martin, the chief federal prosecutor in Washington, fired off a letter to Garcia demanding that the congressman “clarify” his remarks. “This sounds to some like a threat to Mr. Musk,” Martin wrote. “We take threats against public officials very seriously.”
Garcia said that was a pretext to go after speech critical of the administration. “I will not be silenced,” he posted on X.
Trump and his aides see the landscape through a very different prism, insisting they are not imposing speech restrictions but dissolving them.
Within hours of taking office, Trump issued an executive order titled “Restoring freedom of speech and ending federal censorship.” Some free-speech advocates welcomed the order, which broadly directed federal agencies not to trample on free expression.
Rick Hess, a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, agreed that some of the concerns about Trump’s actions are valid. But he said Biden also threatened private speech when he was in office, for example, with an executive order promoting DEI.
“There is a game of one-upmanship,” Hess said. “You did not hear the same voices raising the same concerns when President Biden did his whole-of-government equity order, which for many on the right raised similar concerns.”
In recent years, he added, some colleges have required job applicants to submit statements attesting to their commitment to DEI.
“Context is important,” Hess said of Trump’s actions. “It’s not like there were only wonderful, healthy First Amendment precedents, then this. This is part of a pattern.”
Yet Trump and his allies have gone after news organizations, using tactics that are unprecedented in recent memory.
After Trump proclaimed that the Gulf of Mexico should be called the “Gulf of America,” the Associated Press — noting that the body of water also borders Mexico and Cuba — decided to stick with the name that had been in use for more than 400 years.
The White House said the AP was “lying” by using that name and banned the news organization from spaces like the Oval Office and Air Force One, which are critical for covering the president. The AP has sued, saying “the press and all the people in the United States have the right to choose their own words and not be retaliated against by the government.”
The White House responded that getting to ask the president questions is a privilege, not a right. A judge has declined to order the AP’s immediate reinstatement as the case unfolds.
Even before he took office, Trump sued the Des Moines Register and its pollster, J. Ann Selzer, complaining that a pre-election poll that wrongly showed Vice President Kamala Harris leading in Iowa was a form of fraud. (Trump won Iowa 56-43 percent.)
“The Harris Poll was no ‘miss’ but rather an attempt to influence the outcome of the 2024 Presidential Election,” the suit claimed, without providing evidence. Selzer’s lawyers called that assertion “a transparent attempt to punish news coverage and analysis of a political campaign.”
Of potentially greater concern to free-press advocates, White House officials recently announced that they, not the White House press corps, would decide which reporters get access to the president through the press pool, a rotation for covering smaller events.
Journalists from an array of outlets said the move would allow the White House to punish some organizations and reward others for their coverage. “In a free country, leaders must not be able to choose their own press corps,” the White House Correspondents’ Association said in a statement.
The senior administration official said the move was aimed at including more news organizations in the coverage. “We’ve been very clear that the move to shake up the press briefing room is about allowing more access, not less, to the president in the more intimate parts of the White House,” the official said. “This is about expanding access, not limiting access.”
Carolyn Iodice, legislative and policy director of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, said people in power often want to control the conversation in ways the U.S. Constitution forbids.
“It’s always a struggle. Free speech is about power, and those who have power are often interested in retaining it,” Iodice said. “Controlling speech is one way to do that. So there is always this impulse to chip away at First Amendment protections.”
