Alex Brandon/AP Photo
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt speaks with reporters in the James Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House, April 15, 2025.
One of the oddities of America’s slide into dictatorship is that it’s all playing out publicly and being reported on by a still-free press, often to Donald Trump’s embarrassment. If you look at other despotisms, one of the first things the dictator does is to shut down the opposition press.
As Trump tries to destroy one free institution after another—universities, law firms, independent public agencies, trade unions—sooner or later he will come for the press. For the moment, his forays against the press have been petulant and feeble rather than systematic.
He has haphazardly tried to restrict access to the White House press room, which isn’t exactly an inalienable right. His vendetta against the Associated Press began with AP’s refusal to accede to his pathetic demand to use his new name for the Gulf of Mexico.
He made a passing swipe at the broadcast license of CBS, for the temerity of having run an interview on 60 Minutes with Ukrainian President Zelensky that was critical of how the U.S. was handling the Russia-Ukraine war. He has threatened public broadcasting, which is mostly supported by listeners and viewers, with loss of public funds.
This is still pretty small beer. But unless Trump’s other efforts at dictatorship are restrained by the courts, he is very likely to come for the press more systematically, and there are several ways he can do this.
One is by threatening the separate business interests of those who own the media, which would promote self-censorship. We’ve already seen this start to play out with the content instructions of Jeff Bezos to columnists and editorialists at The Washington Post, and the more heavy-handed censorship by Patrick Soon-Shiong, the owner of the L.A. Times.
Even more insidious is the spurious evenhandedness instilled at The New York Times by publisher A.G. Sulzberger and executive editor Joe Kahn. This results in articles on outlandish Trump policies that go out of their way to quote “experts” on both sides, and gauzy features on Trump stooges.
A recent piece on Trump’s FBI chief, Kash Patel, who is patently unqualified and dangerous, was headlined “A Different Kind of F.B.I. Chief: Jet-Setting Patel Loves the Limelight.” The subhead: “Kash Patel’s embrace of the spotlight appears to be a break from the recent past, as his predecessors typically did the job with little fanfare.” Seriously?
The happy surprise here is The Wall Street Journal. Despite the fact that the Journal is owned by Rupert Murdoch, who also owns Trump’s propaganda organ Fox News, the paper covers Trump without fear or favor, both in investigative pieces that often scoop the Times and, more surprisingly, in appalled editorials.
While Trump can perhaps control much domestic policy, despite his fantasies he doesn’t control the whole world.
But Trump, assuming that he is not restrained, has several other means at his disposal. I wrote about one of them in a Prospect piece last year. The progressive infrastructure is heavily dependent on tax-exempt status and foundation funding. That includes research centers, advocacy groups, and many magazines like ours.
Trump’s abrupt efforts to summarily remove the tax exemptions of institutions such as Harvard University were flatly illegal. The law explicitly prohibits a president from instructing the IRS to target a particular institution. Due process is required before an exemption can be lifted. And the rationale cannot be simply political.
But many foundation-funded 501(c)(3) organizations are careless about separating those entities from related (c)(4)s, which are permitted within limits to be partisan. (For the record, the Prospect does not have a (c)(4).) A Trump IRS could also try to change the ground rules and further limit advocacy by (c)(3)s. Trump could intimidate the foundations that fund advocacy groups and media. Foundations themselves have tax-exempt status, and risk-averse foundation trustees would likely overcorrect and reduce a lot of legitimate funding.
I’m not giving away trade secrets here: Trump knows the power he has. He may reportedly try to pull the tax exemption for several environmental groups on Earth Day, today. But this hasn’t yet moved to the nonprofit journalism space yet, and it could.
The press is also vulnerable to a flood of defamation suits that Elon Musk could underwrite single-handedly. For now, the Supreme Court’s 1964 landmark decision in Times v. Sullivan protects the press from losing frivolous libel suits. The decision provided that to win a defamation suit against a press outlet, a plaintiff who is a public figure, broadly defined, has to prove “actual malice” and “reckless disregard for the truth.”
But smaller press outlets could go broke paying legal fees, even if they ultimately won cases. Times v. Sullivan has long been a target of Clarence Thomas. Its terms could be altered by a right-wing Supreme Court majority, and also narrowed by statute.
Another tool, which operates in many countries but not the U.S., would be an Official Secrets Act. In the U.S., if a journalist publishes information that the government considers confidential or classified, the public official who leaked the information is vulnerable to prosecution, but the journalist is not. But with an Official Secrets Act, the journalist could also be prosecuted. Trump wants to keep nearly everything secret.
Public broadcasting is also a sitting duck. NPR has done some of the best reporting on Trump. As noted, if Trump shut down the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, loyal listeners would probably make up the difference. But Trump, in full dictatorial mode, has a more powerful weapon. Radio and TV stations broadcast on public frequencies. A Trumpified FCC could simply reallocate spectrum and toss stations off the air.
AS A MEMBER OF THE PRESS, I’m compelled to add that journalists are one of the few professions specifically listed as protected in the Constitution (along with lobbyists, alas). The freedom of the press can play at least some role in helping the profession defend itself. We must not go quietly and passively like some in the mainstream media.
An open secret is that Trump hates the press but also loves us: loves the attention, loves seeing his name in the headlines, loves using the notion of an independent press to his advantage.
But it’s worth asking the question: How do we prevent any or all of this from happening, and what do we do it if does happen? First and foremost, we can do it by exposing him.
Trump’s other dictatorial forays against universities, law firms, legal immigrants, departments of government, the global trading system, etc., need to be restrained before he gets around to the press. The more he is constrained, the less deep his dictatorship is likely to go.
But if he does mount a full-scale assault on the press, there are defenses. For instance, even the Chinese Communist Party, despite their effort to create a “Great Firewall of China,” had a hard time blocking citizens from accessing the internet. Much of the free press, including public broadcasting, may have to migrate online, where most of the news conversation is already.
So-called legacy media, which is very expensive and more likely to be owned by business moguls with other interests, may well be more vulnerable. Independent media, which is lighter on its feet, may have an easier time adapting. The Prospect is moving to a model that is nearly all reader-financed (you can donate here).
And while Trump can perhaps control much domestic policy, despite his fantasies he doesn’t control the whole world. Some of the best English-language journalism comes from overseas, such as the Financial Times, The Guardian, the BBC, and the CBC. During World War II, London-based media penetrated Nazi censorship. One could imagine an American free press publishing or broadcasting in exile.
Let’s hope it doesn’t come to any of this, but it doesn’t hurt to be prepared.
