Trump’s assault on speech has some continuities with the past. His campaign against individual political dissenters, for instance, recalls the attacks on immigrants during the Palmer raids. The arrest, detention, and attempted deportation of international students such as Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk is the tip of the iceberg: last March Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that he had signed more than three hundred letters revoking the visas of people who had expressed views on foreign policy the Trump administration found unacceptable, signaling to more than a million international students that they can no longer count on having their freedom of speech respected.
But the second Trump administration’s attack on freedom of speech also differs in important ways from earlier attacks. With the exception of certain well-known figures, the great majority of those who suffered during twentieth-century crackdowns on speech were individual antiwar activists, adherents of radical causes, and other political dissenters without substantial resources or stature in American public life. The Trump administration, in contrast, has singled out establishment institutions: elite universities such as Harvard, Columbia, and the University of California; mainstream broadcast media; top law firms that represent the country’s most powerful clients and whose partners earn millions of dollars a year.
It is hard, too, to think of an instance in which the president himself has played such a direct and overt part in an assault on free speech. Even Richard Nixon—who kept an enemies list that included opponents of the war in Vietnam and helped choose the targets for FBI wiretaps without judicial authorization after press reports appeared on America’s “incursion” into Cambodia—undertook such actions covertly. In contrast, Trump personally filed lawsuits against the CBS and ABC television networks and issued executive orders specifying the penalties that he would impose on particular law firms he accused of antagonizing him. Personal animus seems the exclusive basis on which they were selected.
Still more dismayingly, these attacks have been met with strikingly little resistance. The law firms and the broadcast networks that Trump singled out could have readily vindicated their rights in court, yet most chose not to resist. This is less surprising than it might seem. The institutions at the center of Trump’s crackdown are larger and more established than the targets of past attacks on free speech in the US, but that very fact also means that they have large amounts of money at stake. Many—though thankfully not all—seemed to fear putting up a fight because it could cost them dearly. Their failure to resist makes it more likely that Trump will continue on this path.