By The Editorial Board
The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom.
Feb. 28, 2025, 5:03 a.m. ET
Illustration by Rebecca Chew/The New York Times
In 1791, the nation’s founders ratified the First Amendment to the Constitution. It would come to offer protections in the new nation essentially never seen before: the right to ask things of and to criticize the government; to express opinions, popular or not; to assemble peacefully; to practice diverse religious beliefs; and to have a free press that publishes information without fear of censorship or retribution.
This constitutional provision reflects the framers’ intent to establish a society where individuals have the ability to voice their views and participate actively in shaping the nation’s governance while holding their leaders accountable. Together, these five guaranteed liberties continue today to make the people of the United States the freest in the world.
President Trump and many of his supporters — from tech leaders like Elon Musk to populist politicians like Vice President JD Vance — have spent the past several years portraying themselves as free-speech crusaders. Capitalizing on the censorial strains of the left, they regularly lecture about the necessity of letting people say whatever they want, even if it’s hateful, asinine or corrosive.
That form of free-speech absolutism, which aims to defend not just favored speech but also disfavored speech, has a long and welcome role in American society. The problem is that for all their bluster, these supposed free-speech crusaders have proved themselves consistently intolerant when it comes to words, ideas and perspectives they disagree with.
Over the past month Mr. Trump and his allies have embarked on an expansive crackdown on free expression and disfavored speakers that should be decried not just as hypocritical but also as un-American and unconstitutional.
In the distorted view of the Trump administration, protecting free speech requires controlling free speech — banning words, phrases and ideas that challenge or complicate a government-favored speech. Officials in Washington have spent the past month stripping federal websites of any hint of undesirable words and thoughts, disciplining news organizations that refuse to parrot the president’s language, and threatening to punish those who have voiced criticism of investigations and prosecutions.
The Orwellian nature of this approach is deliberate and dangerous. This posture is not about protecting free speech. It is about prioritizing far-right ideology — and at times celebrating lies and hate speech under the guise of preventing the criminalization of language — while simultaneously trying to silence independent thought, inconvenient truths and voices of dissent.
When Mr. Trump announced that he was changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, for example, it seemed to be an essentially harmless bit of nationalistic chest-puffery, paling in comparison to the real damage he intended to do to national security, public health, the Civil Service and the rule of law. But then he made it clear that compliance was mandatory.
Earlier this month, a reporter for The Associated Press showed up at an Oval Office event, and was barred from entering because the news organization continued referring to the gulf by the internationally recognized name it has had since at least the 16th century. That was an editorial decision that The A.P., just like The Times and many other outlets, has every right to make on its own without government interference.
The White House press office then upped the ante; it is now keeping both A.P. reporters and photographers away from many press events and off Air Force One on presidential trips, making it far more difficult for the nation’s largest wire service to provide essential coverage. The A.P., to its great credit, has sued officials in the administration, saying it was doing so “to vindicate its rights to the editorial independence guaranteed by the United States Constitution and to prevent the executive branch from coercing journalists to report the news using only government-approved language.”
Federal District Judge Trevor McFadden has yet to rule on The A.P.’s request, but made it clear that the White House appeared to be improperly punishing the wire service for its editorial decision. “It seems pretty clearly viewpoint discrimination,” the judge said at a preliminary hearing.
This struggle is obviously about more than the name of a body of water; the White House wants to use coercion to control how it is covered, and even who gets to cover the president. On Tuesday, the press office said it would begin handpicking the news organizations that cover Mr. Trump as part of the press pool, a decision that up to now has been made by a group representing the news outlets themselves. The White House immediately cut Reuters and HuffPost from the pool and added two sycophantic outlets, Newsmax and The Blaze.
“The White House press pool exists to serve the public, not the presidency,” said Bruce Brown, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.
Politicians are allowed to criticize the press — that is free speech, too, and there is nothing new about it — but there is a difference between using language and using muscle. Government officials are supposed to use their considerable regulatory powers for the benefit of the public, not for personal or partisan goals. This administration, however, is mustering the arms of government to suppress speech it doesn’t like and compel words and ideas it prefers. It sees the press not as an institution with an explicit constitutional privilege but as a barrier to overcome, like an inspector general or a freethinking Republican senator. Members of Congress can be targeted for primaries, and inspectors general can be fired; under the same mentality, reporters need to be excluded and their bosses subjected to litigation.
The Trump administration’s intention can be seen clearly by looking at the way it communicates with the public. All federal contracts, job descriptions and social media posts are being scrutinized for any hint of “gender ideology,” according to a memo from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management; federal employees “whose position description involves inculcating or promoting gender ideology” must be placed on leave.
The National Park Service erased the letters “T” and “Q”: from L.G.B.T.Q.+ references on its website describing the Stonewall National Monument in New York City. More than 8,000 federal websites, in fact, have been taken down or altered to remove concepts derided by the MAGA movement. These include thousands of pages about vaccine research and S.T.D. prevention guidelines, efforts to prevent hate crimes, prevention of racial discrimination in drug trials and disbursement of federal grants, and details of environmental policies to slow climate change.
The government won’t even describe its own museum collections as “diverse.” The word was eliminated from an Interior Department website describing federally owned works of art and natural history, though it has one of the broadest and most significant collections in the world.
The open hypocrisy on matters of speech is perhaps best exemplified by the actions of Mr. Musk, even before he became the Trump administration’s designated wrecking ball to crucial institutions of government. Mr. Musk has every right to say what he wants on X, a forum owned by a private company. Describing himself as a “free speech absolutist,” he said he acquired Twitter in 2022 to create “a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner.” He seemed particularly agitated that the platform had earlier dared to distinguish between lies — like those about Covid vaccines and the 2020 election — and verifiable truth.
But nearly immediately he began to demonstrate that the only free speech he championed was his own. Within a couple of months, he had suspended the accounts of journalists who had written critically about his business practices or the flights of his private plane. (So much for the hope he had earlier expressed that “even my worst critics remain on Twitter, because that is what free speech means.”)
Then he began suppressing access to posts with words like “transgender” and “bisexual,” or ideas like Ukraine’s battling against Russian aggression, and made it more difficult for users of his platform to read articles from independent news organizations, including The Times and Reuters. Purveyors of hate speech were invited to return to Twitter, which he later renamed X, and when some critics advocated a boycott of the platform in response, he moved to block them. Mr. Musk even boosted his own pronouncements on X, forcing his posts to appear loudly even on the timelines of those who chose not to follow him.
And when he couldn’t quiet his critics, he sued them. He filed suit against Media Matters for America, a liberal media watchdog group that wrote about advertisements on X appearing next to neo-Nazi content, and then sued a group of prominent businesses, including Unilever and CVS, for what he said was an illegal advertising boycott of his platform. (Last year a federal judge threw out a similar lawsuit Mr. Musk brought against the Center for Countering Digital Hate.)
When the magazine Wired published the names of six inexperienced young men working for Mr. Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, Mr. Musk falsely announced on X that publication of the names constituted a “crime.” And later, illustrating the connection between Mr. Musk’s aims and those of the administration, one of the loyalists that Mr. Trump installed as a federal prosecutor in Washington made an inflammatory announcement that he would use his position within the Justice Department to defend claims that Mr. Musk had raised.
The administration’s desire to control speech and thinking has also extended to Congress, the military and college campuses. Among other recent examples:
The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom.
Feb. 28, 2025, 5:03 a.m. ET
Illustration by Rebecca Chew/The New York Times
In 1791, the nation’s founders ratified the First Amendment to the Constitution. It would come to offer protections in the new nation essentially never seen before: the right to ask things of and to criticize the government; to express opinions, popular or not; to assemble peacefully; to practice diverse religious beliefs; and to have a free press that publishes information without fear of censorship or retribution.
This constitutional provision reflects the framers’ intent to establish a society where individuals have the ability to voice their views and participate actively in shaping the nation’s governance while holding their leaders accountable. Together, these five guaranteed liberties continue today to make the people of the United States the freest in the world.
President Trump and many of his supporters — from tech leaders like Elon Musk to populist politicians like Vice President JD Vance — have spent the past several years portraying themselves as free-speech crusaders. Capitalizing on the censorial strains of the left, they regularly lecture about the necessity of letting people say whatever they want, even if it’s hateful, asinine or corrosive.
That form of free-speech absolutism, which aims to defend not just favored speech but also disfavored speech, has a long and welcome role in American society. The problem is that for all their bluster, these supposed free-speech crusaders have proved themselves consistently intolerant when it comes to words, ideas and perspectives they disagree with.
Over the past month Mr. Trump and his allies have embarked on an expansive crackdown on free expression and disfavored speakers that should be decried not just as hypocritical but also as un-American and unconstitutional.
In the distorted view of the Trump administration, protecting free speech requires controlling free speech — banning words, phrases and ideas that challenge or complicate a government-favored speech. Officials in Washington have spent the past month stripping federal websites of any hint of undesirable words and thoughts, disciplining news organizations that refuse to parrot the president’s language, and threatening to punish those who have voiced criticism of investigations and prosecutions.
The Orwellian nature of this approach is deliberate and dangerous. This posture is not about protecting free speech. It is about prioritizing far-right ideology — and at times celebrating lies and hate speech under the guise of preventing the criminalization of language — while simultaneously trying to silence independent thought, inconvenient truths and voices of dissent.
When Mr. Trump announced that he was changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, for example, it seemed to be an essentially harmless bit of nationalistic chest-puffery, paling in comparison to the real damage he intended to do to national security, public health, the Civil Service and the rule of law. But then he made it clear that compliance was mandatory.
Earlier this month, a reporter for The Associated Press showed up at an Oval Office event, and was barred from entering because the news organization continued referring to the gulf by the internationally recognized name it has had since at least the 16th century. That was an editorial decision that The A.P., just like The Times and many other outlets, has every right to make on its own without government interference.
The White House press office then upped the ante; it is now keeping both A.P. reporters and photographers away from many press events and off Air Force One on presidential trips, making it far more difficult for the nation’s largest wire service to provide essential coverage. The A.P., to its great credit, has sued officials in the administration, saying it was doing so “to vindicate its rights to the editorial independence guaranteed by the United States Constitution and to prevent the executive branch from coercing journalists to report the news using only government-approved language.”
Federal District Judge Trevor McFadden has yet to rule on The A.P.’s request, but made it clear that the White House appeared to be improperly punishing the wire service for its editorial decision. “It seems pretty clearly viewpoint discrimination,” the judge said at a preliminary hearing.
This struggle is obviously about more than the name of a body of water; the White House wants to use coercion to control how it is covered, and even who gets to cover the president. On Tuesday, the press office said it would begin handpicking the news organizations that cover Mr. Trump as part of the press pool, a decision that up to now has been made by a group representing the news outlets themselves. The White House immediately cut Reuters and HuffPost from the pool and added two sycophantic outlets, Newsmax and The Blaze.
“The White House press pool exists to serve the public, not the presidency,” said Bruce Brown, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.
Politicians are allowed to criticize the press — that is free speech, too, and there is nothing new about it — but there is a difference between using language and using muscle. Government officials are supposed to use their considerable regulatory powers for the benefit of the public, not for personal or partisan goals. This administration, however, is mustering the arms of government to suppress speech it doesn’t like and compel words and ideas it prefers. It sees the press not as an institution with an explicit constitutional privilege but as a barrier to overcome, like an inspector general or a freethinking Republican senator. Members of Congress can be targeted for primaries, and inspectors general can be fired; under the same mentality, reporters need to be excluded and their bosses subjected to litigation.
The Trump administration’s intention can be seen clearly by looking at the way it communicates with the public. All federal contracts, job descriptions and social media posts are being scrutinized for any hint of “gender ideology,” according to a memo from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management; federal employees “whose position description involves inculcating or promoting gender ideology” must be placed on leave.
The National Park Service erased the letters “T” and “Q”: from L.G.B.T.Q.+ references on its website describing the Stonewall National Monument in New York City. More than 8,000 federal websites, in fact, have been taken down or altered to remove concepts derided by the MAGA movement. These include thousands of pages about vaccine research and S.T.D. prevention guidelines, efforts to prevent hate crimes, prevention of racial discrimination in drug trials and disbursement of federal grants, and details of environmental policies to slow climate change.
The government won’t even describe its own museum collections as “diverse.” The word was eliminated from an Interior Department website describing federally owned works of art and natural history, though it has one of the broadest and most significant collections in the world.
The open hypocrisy on matters of speech is perhaps best exemplified by the actions of Mr. Musk, even before he became the Trump administration’s designated wrecking ball to crucial institutions of government. Mr. Musk has every right to say what he wants on X, a forum owned by a private company. Describing himself as a “free speech absolutist,” he said he acquired Twitter in 2022 to create “a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner.” He seemed particularly agitated that the platform had earlier dared to distinguish between lies — like those about Covid vaccines and the 2020 election — and verifiable truth.
But nearly immediately he began to demonstrate that the only free speech he championed was his own. Within a couple of months, he had suspended the accounts of journalists who had written critically about his business practices or the flights of his private plane. (So much for the hope he had earlier expressed that “even my worst critics remain on Twitter, because that is what free speech means.”)
Then he began suppressing access to posts with words like “transgender” and “bisexual,” or ideas like Ukraine’s battling against Russian aggression, and made it more difficult for users of his platform to read articles from independent news organizations, including The Times and Reuters. Purveyors of hate speech were invited to return to Twitter, which he later renamed X, and when some critics advocated a boycott of the platform in response, he moved to block them. Mr. Musk even boosted his own pronouncements on X, forcing his posts to appear loudly even on the timelines of those who chose not to follow him.
And when he couldn’t quiet his critics, he sued them. He filed suit against Media Matters for America, a liberal media watchdog group that wrote about advertisements on X appearing next to neo-Nazi content, and then sued a group of prominent businesses, including Unilever and CVS, for what he said was an illegal advertising boycott of his platform. (Last year a federal judge threw out a similar lawsuit Mr. Musk brought against the Center for Countering Digital Hate.)
When the magazine Wired published the names of six inexperienced young men working for Mr. Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, Mr. Musk falsely announced on X that publication of the names constituted a “crime.” And later, illustrating the connection between Mr. Musk’s aims and those of the administration, one of the loyalists that Mr. Trump installed as a federal prosecutor in Washington made an inflammatory announcement that he would use his position within the Justice Department to defend claims that Mr. Musk had raised.
The administration’s desire to control speech and thinking has also extended to Congress, the military and college campuses. Among other recent examples:
- After the office of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, conducted a webinar instructing immigrants of their constitutional rights when challenged by federal officials, Tom Homan, the president’s so-called border czar, said he had asked the Justice Department to investigate whether she crossed a legal red line by suggesting noncompliance with federal immigration officers.
- The Pentagon began pulling books off the shelves of school libraries used by the children of military families if they violated Mr. Trump’s new rules on not speaking about gender or racial equity issues. Among the titles subject to military review are a picture book about Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and a book by the actress Julianne Moore about a young girl coping with her freckles.
- In a fact sheet accompanying an executive order about antisemitism last month, Mr. Trump said he would deport legal immigrants if they joined in “pro-jihadist protests,” and would cancel the student visas of all pro-Hamas sympathizers on college campuses. “We put you on notice,” he wrote. “Come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you.” Supporting terrorism is always wrong, and antisemitism is vile in any form. Even some congressional Democrats cheered the executive order. What the administration is establishing, however, is a much more expansive legal definition of hate speech to include even just strident critiques of the Israeli government policy.
The current administration may argue that these steps are simply payback for an American political left that can be rightly criticized for policing speech in recent years, from trying to shut or shout down conservative speakers to trying to enforce adherence to its own list of acceptable words and phrases like “pregnant people,” the “unhoused,” “incarcerated individuals” and “Latinx.”
But the Trump administration’s early and furious reaction to criticism and pungent speech isn’t just guilty of the same sins, it expands upon them, worryingly, with the powers of the state. If the MAGA movement were really confident that the American public stood firmly behind the new intolerance, then why not welcome serious news reporting, or even the jeers of critics, and let the best ideas win? That, in fact, seemed to be what Mr. Vance was advocating in recent remarks to the Conservative Political Action Conference.
“You do not have shared values if you’re so afraid of your own people that you silence them and shut them up,” he said.
The administration and the broader MAGA movement are demonstrating that they lack the confidence to permit free thinking by the American people. But those people still have the powers granted to them more than 230 years ago by the Bill of Rights to make themselves heard.
Americans have enormous ability and enviable creativity in finding ways to speak out against Mr. Trump’s repressive and hypocritical speech regime, whether on social media or in the public square. The independence of The Associated Press and other organizations to make decisions contrary to government fiat should be defended and championed. Mr. Trump wants to redefine free speech with bans, bullying and fear. It’s never been more necessary to speak up.
