The White House’s attacks on the media are starting to look remarkably similar to those waged in other countries that have embraced autocratic leaders in recent years.
President Donald Trump looks on during a joint press conference in the East Room at the White House on February 27, 2025.
(Andrew Harnik / Getty Images)
On Tuesday, days after Trump and Vance attempted their public beat-down of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and a day after the US stopped sharing intelligence information with Ukraine, two extraordinary events occurred in Europe.
First, French President Emmanual Macron took to the airwaves to discuss how recent events have shown that Europe can no longer count on having the United States by its side in its simmering conflict with Russia—and he announced an emergency meeting in Paris of European army chiefs of staff. He would, he said, be open to a discussion about providing a French nuclear umbrella to fellow European nations.
Hours later, four former UK ambassadors to the United States testified to a parliamentary committee on international relations about a “seismic shift” in the US-UK special relationship. They posited that, under Trump, intelligence sharing between the two countries would become more difficult, and they declared that America now seemed intent on adhering to what one of them termed a “worldview of land grabs…might is right.” The quartet lambasted Trump for bullying Ukraine and warned that there was now such a vast divergence of political and moral philosophies between the US and the UK that it was unlikely that the United States would long adhere to the close bonds forged over the past century.
Former ambassador Nigel Sheinwald bluntly stated, “On more or less any big foreign policy issue that we’re dealing with today, we don’t agree with the United States and have more alignment with our European partners.” Sir David Manning, another ex-ambassador, said that the unthinkable was now a real possibility—that the US would no longer honor Article 5, the mutual defense clause at the heart of the NATO alliance.
And then on Wednesday, Europe initiated an enormous €800 billion rearmament program, in emergency response to the rapidly shifting global situation.
That America’s closest allies are now speaking publicly about the risk of rupture—and dramatically reshaping policy in the shadow of this rupture—speaks volumes to the global chaos that Trump is unleashing. Trump is shattering international partnerships that had been carefully nurtured by past presidents over many decades, be it his U-turn in America’s Ukraine policy; declaration of a trade war against Mexico, Canada, and China, with the European Union, India, and other trading partners likely to themselves be hit with tariffs come April 2; or evisceration of USAID projects that have saved tens of millions of lives over the years.
The damage, of course, isn’t just overseas. At least in part, Europe—whose leaders were recently lectured by the AfD-courting Vice President Vance for alleged infringements on free speech rights—is looking at America and seeing a country founded on the principle of free speech that is now willing to use the vast intimidatory powers of the federal government to clamp down on points of view, both in the US and overseas, that it disagrees with.
Stateside, in addition to the chain-saw massacre being inflicted on federal employees, Trump’s team is also taking a hatchet to the First Amendment, waging a war against the media and against universities that is starting to look remarkably similar to wars in Hungary, Russia, Turkey, and other countries that have embraced autocratic leaders in recent years.
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The game plan is quite simple: To start with, use the legal system as aggressively as possible to sue the media. Even when you don’t have a good legal case, make it too painful and expensive for the targeted media to stand their ground. Look no further than Trump’s outrageous $10 billion lawsuit against CBS for how they handled their pre-election interview with Vice President Kamala Harris, as well as his lawsuit against ABC News for commentator George Stephanopoulos’s description of the sexual charges against him in the E. Jeanne Carroll case.
In the former, CBS has agreed to provide unedited transcripts of the interview to Trump’s team. In the latter, ABC’s parent company ponied up $15 million and a note of regret in order to make the case go away. Not surprisingly, Trump took this as validation of his litigious strategy, and it now seems likely that news outlets deemed hostile to Trump and his agenda will face a relentless onslaught of litigation over the coming years.
At the same time, Trump’s regime is going after the media’s right of access to important venues and events. The first foray here came a couple weeks ago, when the Associated Press was summarily barred from White House gatherings because the news service, which caters to an international audience, has not surrendered to Trump, who is demanding that it call the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.” The AP has sued to regain its access, saying that the White House is in violation of its First Amendment rights, but to date the courts haven’t ordered that AP journalists be let back in.
A few days after banning the AP, the White House went a giant step further, announcing that it was taking control over the White House press pool and thus claiming veto power over which news outlets would and wouldn’t be let into events covered by the pool of journalists.
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Traditionally, the press pool members themselves have chosen which outlets would be invited onto the pool each day. It’s unheard of for the White House to select which journalists it will allow to cover events. But that is what is happening in 2025, in the United States of America.
Adding to the mayhem, the administration has begun giving private “policy briefings” to select far-right networks, such as the One America News Network, and far-right social media influencers.
In all but name, therefore, the country now has a state media operating as 24/7 propaganda for the MAGA movement—doing for Trump in government what they did for him in opposition, providing an entirely pliant mouthpiece for whatever cockamamie policies he conjures up each day. And the efforts to manipulate coverage don’t end there.
Trump has chosen ex-Arizona gubernatorial and senate hopeful, and MAGA ultra-loyalist, Kari Lake to be a special adviser to the US Agency for Global Media. Originally, she had been slated to head up Voice of America, which grew up during the Cold War as a way to project America’s voice and values—including those protecting freedom of speech and of the press—into far-off parts of the world, and which exists as a subunit within USAGM. Voice of America, however, is apparently now on DOGE’s chopping block. Even if it does survive, USAGM has moved to purge it of any sense of independence; several journalists have been investigated for pieces deemed critical of Trump’s policies; several stories deemed critical have been killed; and last week a senior journalist was placed on leave for social media postings deemed to be hostile to the new regime.
I could go on: There is the endlessly outrageous, and hypocritical, effort by Musk to block the X accounts of people he decides are hostile to him and his values, including those who have reported on members of his DOGE team. There are the letters that have been sent to universities, along with Trump social media posts, demanding they dissolve all clubs and all scholarships deemed in any way to promote diversity, or they will face a complete blockade of federal funds. There are Trump’s posts warning students who engage in protest that he will seek to have them arrested, expelled from university, and, if they are here on student visas, deported. There are his posts demanding that newspapers fire columnists he disapproves of.
Some of these actions have gotten a lot of attention, but many of them have been lost amidst the cacophony of Musk’s and Trump’s frenetic actions.
They are all worth paying attention to. Taken together, what we are seeing is an attack on the free press, and the ideals of free speech in academia and beyond. It is redolent of the chilling impact of McCarthyism in the late 1940s and early 1950s, of the Red Scares in the post–World War II period, of the attacks on the free press launched during World War I, and of the brute-force efforts in the Deep South in the decades after the civil war to run denizens of the Black press out of town and out of state, to physically destroy their printing presses, and to threaten their reporters and columnists, including the fearless Ida B. Wells, with lynchings when their writings got too critical of the status quo.
It all stands in fierce, vile, counterpose to America’s best values and traditions. And it is consolidating the sense amongst America’s traditional allies that the country is careening down a dark path that will take it far from the democratic landscape it has previously inhabited.
Donald Trump’s cruel and chaotic second term is just getting started. In his first month back in office, Trump and his lackey Elon Musk (or is it the other way around?) have proven that nothing is safe from sacrifice at the altar of unchecked power and riches.
Only robust independent journalism can cut through the noise and offer clear-eyed reporting and analysis based on principle and conscience. That’s what The Nation has done for 160 years and that’s what we’re doing now.
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Onward,
Katrina vanden Heuvel
Editorial Director and Publisher, The Nation
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