Trump Wins, the Press Loses

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Since he entered politics, a decade ago, Donald Trump has castigated journalists for their skepticism and independence, calling the media “the enemy of the people,” a “threat to democracy,” “fake,” and “crooked bastards” whom he vows to prosecute. Now that he has secured a second term, he will be free to make good on his promises. Already, during his first term, the Department of Justice conducted surveillance of reporters and charged Julian Assange with espionage; regulators seemingly sought to block a merger of AT&T and TimeWarner as retribution for critical coverage by CNN; the White House arbitrarily denied access to veteran journalists. All of that fostered an environment of media suppression, leading to more than six hundred physical attacks on journalists nationwide in 2020 alone. Trump has welcomed the violence. “To get to me, somebody would have to shoot through the fake news,” he told a crowd in Pennsylvania this week. “I don’t mind that so much.”

Next year, Trump’s assault on the press will become a fusillade of discrete attempts to quash whatever reporting he views as antagonistic. Access to the West Wing will be limited, perhaps by aides only credentialing journalists from conservative outlets—or even closing the White House briefing room outright. More consequential are the plans of Trump and his allies to turn the Department of Justice and the Federal Communications Commission against the media, which will entail a raft of leak investigations, the politicization of broadcast licenses and antitrust litigation, and the potential indictment of journalists for espionage. Reporters covering protests and immigration enforcement will face detention from not just local police, but the Department of Homeland Security. It’s possible that Trump may even seek congressional action to reform libel laws or otherwise criminalize dissent. 

This onslaught against the press will be destabilizing. Rather than wilt under the pressure, the news media needs to use the next two months to prepare for all the potential challenges we will face in 2025. 

In the early weeks of the new administration, the most urgent threat against the press will be the prosecution of reporters covering mass demonstrations. When Trump was inaugurated in 2017, nine journalists were arrested while covering the protest that ensued in Washington, DC, including several who were charged with rioting. That set a tone for the next four years, over which more than two hundred reporters faced criminal charges for covering protests. The vast majority of those charges came in 2020, after the police murder of George Floyd, as journalists scrambled to chronicle the racial-justice protests that seized the nation. According to Kirstin McCudden of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, it was a year of unprecedented attacks, with a “record shattering” six hundred and forty assaults on journalists, and nearly a hundred and fifty arrested.

Expect a return of the massive national demonstrations that characterized that year, particularly if Trump makes good on his campaign promise to execute the “largest deportation program in American history.” The first time around, in 2017, Trump’s executive order preventing the entry of citizens from seven majority-Muslim nations into the United States triggered protests at airports across the country. A year later, demonstrations proliferated in response to his child-separation policy. If and when mass protests are organized against the new administration’s hard-line immigration orders, journalists will be at extreme risk of police assault or arrest for covering the story—particularly the photographers and videographers who need to be within arm’s reach of law enforcement to capture their confrontations with demonstrators. 

Gabe Rottman, from the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, sees particular danger for journalists covering immigration, because of the lack of clear guidelines on handling the press at the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees Border Patrol as well as Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “Elements of DHS don’t operate under the same types of internal constraints that you see at the Justice Department,” he said. “We’re concerned you could see issues related to the border.” As an example, he brought up a 2019 report from NBC’s San Diego affiliate, describing how DHS had compiled a list of ten journalists whom agents were instructed to detain for questioning at local ports of entry. 

The DOJ has historically had a stronger tradition of what Rottman called “internal constraints” on targeting the press. But that may go out the window once a new attorney general is in place. As Kash Patel, a Trump devotee and contender for that role, put it last year, “We will go out and find the conspirators not just in government, but in the media. We’re going to come after you.” 

The most obvious early consequence of the DOJ’s new regime will be pursuit of leak investigations. In Project 2025, the policy blueprint drafted by members of Trump’s first administration, Dustin Carmack, a former chief of staff to Trump’s director of national intelligence, wrote, “The Department of Justice should use all of the tools at its disposal to investigate leaks and should rescind damaging guidance by Attorney General Merrick Garland that limits investigators’ ability to identify records of unauthorized disclosures of classified information to the media.” The Garland guidance, dating to 2021, was issued as something of a trust-building gesture, given that the DOJ under Trump had surveilled at least eight journalists (at the New York Times, Washington Post, and CNN) as part of 334 leak investigations. In the coming years, we can expect that number to rise. And if a reporter won’t talk? Before a crowd in Texas in 2022, Trump suggested that the threat of rape in prison might be enough to compel a journalist to identify an anonymous source: “When this person realizes that he is going to be the bride of another prisoner shortly, he will say, ‘I’d very much like to tell you exactly who that was.’”

Legislation that would create a federal shield protecting reporters from these sorts of abuses—the PRESS Act—was passed unanimously in the House of Representatives in January, but has been waylaid by the Senate Judiciary Committee ever since. That is largely because of Tom Cotton, the Arkansas senator and Trump ally, who has justified his opposition by saying “too many journalists are little more than left-wing activists who are, at best, ambivalent about America and who are cavalier about our security and truth.” That leaves the PRESS Act seemingly destined to die in committee.  

Trump’s Justice Department is likely not only to threaten journalists who defy subpoenas with imprisonment but also to weaponize the precedent set by the case of Assange—the founder of WikiLeaks, who identifies as a member of the press and was charged with espionage in 2019. More traditional reporters may be vulnerable—not only those who follow the Pentagon or the intelligence community, but anyone covering the Trump administration. In the federal cases concerning Trump’s role in the deadly insurrection of January 6, 2021, and his storing of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, his lawyers have argued that all internal White House communications fall under executive privilege. The Espionage Act’s language is ambiguous about what constitutes a state secret, which has led many legal scholars to believe that the table has been set for a federal prosecutor to charge a journalist with espionage merely for reporting on Oval Office deliberations. 

The federal government’s vast regulatory power offers Trump another potential avenue to quell the press. In 2017, the DOJ tried to prevent a merger between AT&T and TimeWarner just months after Trump reportedly yelled, to the director of his National Economic Council, Gary Cohn, “I want that deal blocked!” It’s unclear whether Cohn exerted any pressure on the DOJ; regardless, Trump will soon have more opportunities to use antitrust litigation as a cudgel. Take Skydance Media’s plan to acquire CBS’s parent company, Paramount Global. That deal is currently being reviewed by the FCC, since it involves the transfer of twenty-eight local stations. If that review bleeds into 2025, a Trumpist FCC can seek to block or delay approval in order to exert influence over CBS.

Indeed, a politicized FCC is likely to become a feature of Trump’s second administration, as he has personally vowed to “bring the independent regulatory agencies such as the FCC and the FTC back under presidential authority.” In Project 2025, Brendan Carr, the current ranking Republican of the FCC—and the man now in line to become chair—called for “eliminating many of the heavy-handed FCC regulations,” namely the “media ownership rules” that prevent any one broadcaster from acquiring more than one TV station per market. Removing that rule would allow corporations such as Sinclair Broadcast Group—whose chairman, David Smith, once told Trump “we are here to deliver your message” across the roughly two hundred stations he owns—to further consolidate control of local broadcast media. Suppose the FCC requires Skydance to sell off its CBS stations in order to complete its acquisition of Paramount. Without the existing ownership rules in place, Sinclair will be free to swoop in and buy all of them.     

The FCC under Carr will also have the ability to make good on Trump’s constant refrain that networks—virtually all of which draw his ire—should have their broadcast licenses revoked. After September’s ABC debate, which included a degree of live fact-checking from the moderators, David Muir and Linsey Davis, Trump told Fox News, “They ought to take away their license.” As of now, there is no licensing process for national broadcast networks. But local affiliates do have to prove to the FCC that their programming serves “the public interest, convenience or necessity” in order to maintain their right to the airwaves. The FCC has wide discretion for what “the public interest” actually entails. When Carr was asked by two Democratic congressmen if he agreed that the licenses of ABC stations should be revoked after the debate, he refused to answer. 

Beyond staffing the federal government with loyalists who will restrict the press as much as possible under the law, Trump may also seek more structural reforms. In 2016, he promised “to open up our libel laws so when they write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money.” Since then, he has personally sued the Times and CNN for defamation in cases that were eventually dismissed, as well as ABC and the Pulitzer Prize board, in suits that are still pending. Loosening the federal libel laws that Trump has called a “shame and a disgrace” will require an act of Congress. But, failing that, Trump prevailing in his open defamation cases could prompt other outlets to shy away from publishing harsh criticism. 

When, before the election, I spoke with Heidi Kitrosser, a legal scholar at Northwestern, she posed a rhetorical question: “Does something have to have merit to be destructive? Even if something would eventually be shut down in court, it could still be incredibly destructive.” To her point, Trump filed a bizarre case against CBS last week seeking ten billion dollars in restitution for how 60 Minutes edited an interview with Kamala Harris. Frivolous lawsuits, espionage charges, arbitrary detainment—all of these strategies for constraining the press will be damaging. Perhaps the least palpable consequence of Trump’s return to the White House will be the most widespread: journalists self-censoring or otherwise altering their coverage. That phenomenon, which Timothy Snyder, a history professor at Yale, has called “anticipatory obedience,” is a feature of societies with repressive governments. With Trump returning to office, it is hard not to count ours among them.

If Trump’s first term prompted a wave of forceful resistance to his authoritarian tendencies—including, notably, the Post’s adoption of the slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness” weeks after his inauguration—that is no longer the case. The billionaire owners of both the Post and the Los Angeles Times spiked plans from their editorial boards to endorse Harris, and Gannett likewise declined to offer a presidential endorsement in USA Today or any of its two hundred local newspapers. (That followed previous guidance issued by Gannett against making political endorsements outside of local races; in 2016, after Gannett’s Arizona Republic endorsed Hillary Clinton, the editors received death threats.) Recently, on The Kicker, Martin Baron, who served as the Post’s executive editor from 2013 to 2021, called the last-minute move by Jeff Bezos to pull the paper’s endorsement a “betrayal of the core principles of the Post.” “I fear that this decision,” Barron continued, “communicated that the Post can and would yield to pressure. I have actually no doubt that Donald Trump sees this as evidence that his bullying works.”

Journalists seeking to uncover the inner workings of the second Trump administration will have to face the threat of retribution with resolve, by not shying away from protecting the identity of sources, offering clear-eyed criticism of the president, or engaging in confrontations with immigration officers—even if doing so means enraging the owner of their outlet, greater exposure to civil lawsuits, detention, or jail time. Given how many Trump appointees now staff the federal judiciary, the lack of legal precedent undergirding his strategies for criminalizing reporting provides cold comfort. This is not, perhaps, the job that many members of the political press thought they were signing up for. But it is the one they’ve got. The task now is immense, intimidating, and essential.

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Kyle Paoletta is the author of American Oasis: Finding the Future in the Cities of the Southwest, which will be released by Pantheon in January. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.