Donald Trump Is No Warrior for Free Speech
And his executive order on free speech isn’t what it claims to be.
OVER THE COURSE OF DONALD TRUMP’S re-election campaign, he cast himself as a warrior for free speech—so no surprise that among the first executive orders of his second term was one titled “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship.” Its preamble slams the Biden administration for supposedly having “censor[ed] Americans’ speech on online platforms.” It asserts that “government censorship of speech is intolerable in a free society” and proclaims its intent to “secure the right of the American people to engage in constitutionally protected speech” free from interference by federal employees or federal programs.
The executive order has drawn praise not only from Trump cultists but from some outside the MAGA camp, including NetChoice, a trade organization that represents Amazon, Google, Meta, and other major tech companies. Reason’s Robby Soave has chided disinformation experts critical of the order. And Martin Gurri, writing in the Free Press, casts the executive order as a “good beginning” to a monumental task: “the resumption of the great American debate, of speech that is unencumbered and unafraid, of a Jeffersonian open society” after four years of being stifled by “the Biden cabal.”
What a thrilling new birth of freedom! But wait—what about Trump’s lawsuits against media organizations that have angered him? For instance, his suit against CBS for running a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris that he groundlessly claims was edited in a too-flattering way. Or his suit against the Des Moines Register for publishing a poll shortly before the election that showed Harris leading in Iowa. How does this truculent litigation fit into the exuberantly Jeffersonian picture of Trump as free speech warrior?
The anti-censorship executive order could still have merit even if Trump is a hypocrite; we’ll get to that in a moment. But the idea that the second Trump administration will usher in a new golden age for free speech in America is as bizarre as the idea that Biden’s America was a dreary intellectual gulag where debate was muzzled and only officially approved speech was allowed. Yes, progressive speech suppression and debate-muzzling has been a real problem in the last decade, and liberal attempts to dismiss concerns about it as a “moral panic” are misguided. But it’s downright deluded to tout Trump as a remedy to these problems.
LET’S START WITH THE EXECUTIVE ORDER—a major component of which is the Trumpian quest for revenge against the Biden administration. The order’s first section asserts that “over the last 4 years, the previous administration trampled free speech rights . . . often by exerting substantial coercive pressure on third parties, such as social media companies, to moderate, deplatform, or otherwise suppress speech that the Federal Government did not approve.”
This charge seems to refer exclusively to speech related to COVID-19—that is, to federal health officials asking social media companies to remove COVID misinformation. Recently on Joe Rogan’s podcast, newly MAGA-friendly Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that “people from the Biden administration would call up our team, and, like, scream at them and curse,” though he acknowledged that he wasn’t involved in any of these conversations and that none of them were recorded.
Zuckerberg has also acknowledged that it was ultimately Facebook’s decision whether to remove the content in question. Notably, last June, in a 7–2 ruling in Murthy v. Missouri, the Supreme Court rejected claims of First Amendment violations by the Biden administration with regard to social media moderation. Defenders of the “censorship” narrative claim that the decision didn’t address the merits of the case but simply held that the plaintiffs lacked standing to sue. Yet the opinion, penned by Trump appointee Amy Coney Barrett, did touch on merit: The plaintiffs, Barrett wrote, couldn’t show that their speech was suppressed due to interventions from administration officials in part because “the platforms began to suppress the plaintiffs’ COVID–19 content” before these interventions.
In fact, all the major platforms adopted fairly strict policies against COVID-19 disinformation in spring 2020—that is, under the first Trump administration and months before Joe Biden’s election victory. Thus, a video promoting the “documentary” Plandemic, which claimed that COVID was deliberately engineered and spread by vaccine-profiteering billionaires, was removed from Facebook, YouTube, and other platforms in May 2020; the full-length film was taken down in August of that year.
It is still possible that Biden health officials’ interactions with social media staffers was too heavy-handed. You can decide that for yourself: Read through the details of the exchanges between the Biden White House and Facebook officials that were published in a May 2024 report from the Republican staff of Rep. Jim Jordan’s “weaponization of government” subcommittee. You’ll see how two Biden administration staffers, Andy Slavitt and Rob Flaherty, had many emails and phone calls in 2021 with Facebook officials trying to understand the company’s policies relating to the circulation of false information about COVID. According to the Facebook officials, the two Biden staffers repeatedly “urged” the company to remove or suppress misleading or false health information. And yes, sometimes the conversations became heated and profane. But there is no evidence that the Biden staffers ordered Facebook to take any specific action, or even threatened the company.1 It seems like an inappropriately close relationship between, on the one hand, government officials frustrated by the challenges of getting reliable information before the public during a global health crisis, and on the other hand, representatives of a tech company struggling to balance conflicting obligations to freedom and truth. All this is troubling even if it didn’t cross constitutional lines.
Trump’s new executive order seeks to deal with such situations in the future by mandating that “no Federal Government officer, employee, or agent” may engage in or facilitate “any conduct that would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen.” Setting aside the fact that the Biden staffers dealing with Facebook apparently did not violate any Americans’ constitutional rights, this order seems much too broad and could conceivably endanger public safety. Would the FBI be barred from asking Meta to remove a post falsely claiming that terrorists have poisoned the water supply in several major American cities, or revealing information that jeopardizes an ongoing investigation? (Neither of those would fall into the unprotected speech category unless they involved defamation, extortion, or criminal conspiracy.)
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) has proposed a requirement for federal employees to disclose “any communications sent in their official capacity to social media companies about content on their platforms.” That makes eminent sense, with temporary exceptions for emergencies. (Federal employees are already required by law to preserve the records of such communications, and many of those records would be accessible to the public via Freedom of Information Act requests; FIRE’s proposal would be a reasonable step toward further transparency.) But Trump’s executive order is not about a sensible balance; it is, first and foremost, about a vendetta. Its mandate to “identify and take appropriate action to correct past misconduct by the Federal Government related to censorship of protected speech” hints at a (yet another) purge of federal employees.
Meanwhile, Trump will be receiving a $25 million settlement from Meta for exercising its First Amendment rights as a private platform to ban him for incitement of violence in January 2021. And one could note that Zuckerberg’s claims of Biden administration censorship—like his other Trump-pleasing moves—come in the context not only of obvious motives to seek favors from the new administration but of Trump’s threats during his 2024 campaign to put “Zuckerbucks” behind bars for supposed election fraud by donating to an election board in Georgia in 2020. How very Jeffersonian.
THE “RESTORING FREEDOM OF SPEECH” executive order also takes a crudely partisan approach the issue of misinformation and disinformation, suggesting that any efforts to combat them are simply attempts to impose “the Government’s preferred narrative” on public debate.
Yes, of course government policing of information—even misinformation and disinformation—should concern us, even in minimally coercive form. But the fact is also that disinformation, some or even much of it the product of hostile foreign powers, is a real danger to liberal democracy—as staunch proponents of free speech such as author Jonathan Rauch have recognized for some time. How to counter and curb disinformation without abridging and trampling basic speech rights is a difficult challenge. Brushing it aside by caricaturing all such concerns as an attempt to stamp out “wrongthink” helps no one except purveyors of falsehood.
It should be straightforwardly acknowledged that left-wing efforts to police speech and debate in the name of social justice, especially over the past ten years, are a reality and have contributed to our current mess, both by compromising the pursuit of truth and by creating a backlash. (Rauch, incidentally, wrote about the danger of such efforts more than thirty years ago.) While these efforts have generally involved social rather than governmental coercion, they have also included federal moves under the Obama administration to restrict campus speech under a troublingly broad definition of sexual and gender-based harassment. That aside, societal pressures and the actions of private institutions can also create a chilly climate for speech.
At the same time, attempts to portray the Biden administration as a time when the government and its minions waged a relentless war on public debate are absurd. For one thing, it was the first Trump administration that coincided with the peak of the illiberal left, particularly the racial “reckoning” of the summer of 2020. What’s more, the left-wing illiberalism quickly received pushback from various quarters.
To say that Trump doesn’t come to this issue as a champion for pluralism is to state the obvious. Andy Craig, a fellow with the libertarian Institute for Humane Studies, points out that not only Trump but Elon Musk and other Trump associates have been waging a “vicious campaign” against speech and press through retaliatory “lawfare.”2 It goes without saying that Trump’s presidential authority makes these efforts much more intimidating.
And Trump’s actions since signing the executive order on “Restoring Freedom of Speech” do nothing to allay such concerns. He has retaliated against former officials from his first administration who have criticized him by taking away their security clearances and security details, incurring cautious dissent even from loyalists like Sen. Tom Cotton. His executive orders targeting “diversity, equity, and inclusion” and “gender ideology” have raised concerns about curbs on the exploration of disfavored “ideas and perspectives” even among groups that support many elements of these orders. And one may share concerns about the application of progressive ideas about racism in public schools while also seeing that Trump’s new executive order seeking to root out “critical race theory” and “gender ideology” in public education could easily become a vehicle for a new orthodoxy.
“Free speech for me but not for thee” is a pithy saying that has long summed up an all-too-prevalent attitude toward speech across the political spectrum. There may be no more perfect embodiment of this maxim than Donald Trump.
The closest that Jordan’s “weaponization committee” staffers could come to finding a threat from the Biden administration to Facebook was this line in a March 15, 2021 email from Slavitt to someone at the company: “Internally we have been considering our options on what to do about it.” If that was intended as a threat, even the Jordan staffers were forced to concede it was a “vague” one.
Relatedly, the news organization Who What Why revealed this week that another faux free speech warrior from the Trump circle, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has been trying to use litigation to silence a blogger who covered his association with far-right elements in Germany in 2020 during protests against COVID-related public health measures.