During the 2024 campaign, after years of attacking the media as “enemies of the people,” Donald Trump presented himself as not a scourge of free speech but as its champion, promising to be a President who would reclaim this most fundamental right from the “left-wing censorship regime.” In his second Inaugural Address, on January 20, 2025, he pledged to reverse “years and years of illegal and unconstitutional federal efforts to restrict free expression,” promising to sign an executive order that same day “to immediately stop all government censorship and bring back free speech to America.” After pausing for a standing ovation led by his new Vice-President, the self-styled free-speech warrior J. D. Vance, Trump added, “Never again will the immense power of the state be weaponized to persecute political opponents. Something I know something about. We will not allow that to happen, it will not happen again. Under my leadership we will restore fair, equal, and impartial justice under the constitutional rule of law.”

There are many brazen falsehoods that have shaped Trump’s second term thus far, but this might be the most offensive lie of them all—because it is this President’s systematic campaign to stamp out dissent and punish those who disagree with him that will be remembered as among the most singularly un-American aspects of his disruptive tenure. Donald Trump relies on the First Amendment when he belittles, denigrates, humiliates, and slurs his opponents. The First Amendment protected him when he lied during the campaign about Haitian immigrants eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio, and the First Amendment protected him last week when he reposted a racist video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes. But it is now clear that he sees the Constitution as something that applies only to those who agree with him. For everyone else, this is not the free-speech Presidency he promised but a free-speech crackdown without modern precedent.

On Tuesday evening, it was revealed that Trump’s Justice Department had sought to indict six members of Congress for the alleged crime of recording a video with a message for U.S. troops—that members of the military are not required to obey illegal orders—which enraged the President. In much of Washington, this development was greeted with horror, but also with a sigh of relief, because the grand jurors in D.C. who had been presented with the bogus criminal case took the extraordinarily unusual step of rejecting the proposed indictment against the “Seditious Six,” as Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth called them. On Thursday, a federal judge issued a temporary injunction against another effort by the Trump Administration to punish one of the six lawmakers, Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, a retired Navy captain whom Hegseth had moved to censure and retroactively demote. In a scathing decision, Richard Leon, a George W. Bush appointee, ruled that the Defense Department had “trampled on Senator Kelly’s First Amendment freedoms” and denounced its arguments as “horsefeathers!”

By all means, let’s cheer these heartening signs of the backbone and integrity of everyday Americans in the face of once unthinkable attacks on our democracy. But best to remember, too, that what Trump is pursuing here is an attempted criminalization of political speech the likes of which has never happened.

Scroll through the list of members of Congress who have been convicted of crimes over the two hundred and fifty years of American history. There have been plenty of crooks, Democrats and Republicans alike, who took bribes or extorted them. But you’d have to go back to 1798 to find the one disgraceful example of a congressman prosecuted for exercising his constitutional right to free speech: Matthew Lyons, of Connecticut, was convicted and jailed for four months after publishing an editorial critical of President John Adams in violation of the Alien and Sedition Acts, which, thankfully, have long since been repealed and repudiated.

The point is this: not even during the violent rupture of the Civil War or the Red Scare crackdown of the First World War or the worst excesses of McCarthyism did any President attempt what Trump has this week. He failed with one indictment and one grand jury, but he has three more years to go. Can anyone say confidently that he will not succeed when he tries once again to jail his political opponents for speaking out against him, as he seems so intent upon doing?

In the immediate aftermath of news about the attempted indictment, there was a furious reaction from Democratic colleagues of the targeted six. Brian Schatz, the senator from Hawaii, called it “absolutely obscene, disgusting,” and “the stuff of dictatorships.” Chris Murphy, the senator from Connecticut, came out within minutes with a message to those “who have been biding their time and waiting for him to cross the magic red line before speaking up”; with Trump actually moving to arrest senators, Murphy suggested, now “is a good time to get off the fucking sidelines.”

A couple of days later, it’s clear that the sidelines are still filled with those who are not likely to say anything unless and until Trump comes for them, too. On Thursday morning, when I spoke with Jason Crow, a Democratic congressman and military veteran from Colorado who was one of the six targeted members, he told me that, “in the last twenty-four hours since this news broke, zero Republicans have come up to me” or reached out to express their alarm. Instead, House Speaker Mike Johnson, a constitutional lawyer by training who certainly knows better, endorsed the failed indictment and claimed that shooting the video constituted “obstructing law enforcement.” The silence of those who so recently claimed that free speech in America was under attack by left-wing thought police speaks for itself.

Just as worrisome is that this attempted indictment is not some crazy one-off or stupid error on the part of Jeanine Pirro, the President’s Fox News cheerleader turned U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia. It’s the policy now, not the aberration. I think we have failed to appreciate that Trump has undertaken such a sweeping campaign against free speech precisely because it has proceeded so swiftly over the past year on so many fronts: lawsuits against news organizations; arrests of protesters in cities such as Chicago, Portland, and Los Angeles; the expulsion of disfavored journalists from the White House and Pentagon press corps; pressure on media ownership by Trump and other senior executive-branch officials.

Examples are so numerous, I stopped when the list I jotted down went into the dozens: Trump suing the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the BBC for coverage he didn’t like and demanding billions of dollars in damages; the F.B.I. raid a few weeks ago on a Washington Post reporter’s home on the basis of a search warrant obtained without informing the judge of the relevant media law; the Federal Communications Commission, at Trump’s behest, pushing for the comedians Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyers, and others to be taken off the air; censoring exhibits at the Smithsonian and various national parks; the expulsion of the Associated Press from the White House press pool because it refused to go along with Trump’s decision to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America.” When Trump’s former friend Chris Christie said something the President didn’t like on ABC, Trump said that a federal investigation into the 2013 Bridgegate scandal should be reopened. When the Times published a poll that Trump didn’t like, he threatened to sue; when the paper published a story questioning his age and health, he said it was sedition. In recent weeks, Trump has intervened to try to get new ownership for CNN that would be more politically favorable to him and pushed for a TV-station merger because he hopes it will combat “the Fake News National TV Networks.”

Consider what has happened in Minnesota over the past month. Not even two weeks ago, two reporters—the former CNN anchor Don Lemon and a local Minneapolis journalist, Georgia Fort—were arrested and charged in federal court after covering an anti-ICE protest at a local church. This is the literal criminalization of journalism. Countless regular Minnesotans have been harassed, pepper-sprayed, physically attacked, or taken into custody for protesting the ICE raids in their state as well. We’ve all seen the shockingly violent videos. Alex Pretti was killed while filming the masked, armed federal agents who would soon shoot him to death. And yet he and other protesters were demonized as “domestic terrorists” by senior officials in the federal government. When Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz, and the mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey, urged their constituents to resist peacefully, the Trump Administration launched a criminal investigation into them, for allegedly obstructing federal law-enforcement officers.

Minnesota, in other words, is not just a story about the excesses of Trump’s immigration crackdown but what appears to be an effort to strip an entire city of its right to speak out against the abuse of governmental power. The First Amendment was designed for precisely such a moment.

At a time like this, even small victories are worth celebrating. So, huzzah for Judge Leon, hurray for the anonymous grand jurors keeping our Congress safe for democracy, and a special shout-out to the people of Minneapolis, whose courage and determined opposition to the atrocities being inflicted on their city forced the Trump Administration on Thursday morning to announce the end of its Operation Metro Surge. It’s one war, many fronts. But there’s nothing more worth fighting for. Trump himself, disingenuous liar that he is, was right when said this: “If we don’t have free speech, then we just don’t have a free country. It’s as simple as that.” ♦