Trump’s battle against free speech isn’t the first time it’s happened | Opinion
With the Trump administration trying to indict members of Congress for a political video and actually prosecuting members of the media, the First Amendment is under assault like never before. What Donald Trump has done is a five-alarm fire for free speech.
The fact that Trump rode into office telling his followers he would protect free speech, his betrayal of First Amendment values is all the more galling. It is only the latest promise to drip into the ocean of lies that have poured out of our president for the last decade.
Democrats and their progressive allies are nobly leading the defense of what is among the founders’ most unique and enduring bequests to every American. I have confidence that in the end, the Democrats and a mostly principled Supreme Court will crush Trump’s un-American assault on something I hold sacred, though not before a lot of blood and ink is spilled.
But boy does the Democrats’ First Amendment clarion call ring hollow. You see, the First Amendment has been under assault my whole life. Democrats and allied progressive forces have been leading the charge to crush freedom of expression under an avalanche of rules, regulations, laws and codes. Every institution they control has been part of a fanatical effort to silence people whose views they don’t like. People like me.
Donald Trump was not the first person to use a law to try to shut down a political video he didn’t like, the Democrats were. It wasn’t about the perfidy of Trump, but the lying smarminess of Hillary Clinton.
Donald Trump wasn’t the first person to try to put someone in jail for First Amendment crimes. Joe Biden crowed about it when he did it with a law Democrats in Congress passed when they controlled both houses of Congress. Liberal-leaning sectors of the press in such an uproar today had little to say about it. Outrage was, shall we say, sparse.
It wasn’t fascist Donald Trump who erected a Ministry of Truth controlled by the White House to silence millions of everyday Americans who had critical things to say about him. It was Joe Biden.
Freedom of speech is critical for all Americans, not just those of us in the press. It assures that even small minorities have a voice. It lets people work together to change politics and policies. It lets formerly minority views — like, say, gays should be able to marry — turn from fantasies into law. Free speech values are every bit as much of a bulwark against tyranny as the right to vote and to own a gun.
To be honest, I am tired of defending free expression and freedom of association from liberals’ attacks. I have been at it for a long, long time. The first time was when my public high school tried to form a ban a bible club. We won at the Supreme Court 8-1, but it took so long the students who first raised the issue had already graduated.
It is nice that Democrats and their liberal friends have now gotten on board with this free speech stuff, but before they pat themselves on the back too hard, there needs to be some deep reflection on their role in undermining the very fundamental laws and values on which they now depend for their defense.
Exposure to the Democrats’ speech policing starts when we are very young. In the most tightly controlled Democratic precincts of America, students and teachers must use a trans person’s declared pronouns or face consequences. It isn’t just what you may not say, but what you must say. Think about that power in Trump’s hands.
Students must not use “hate speech” defined ever more broadly to silence anyone who doesn’t get with the program on matters of race, ethnicity, sex, history or any other sacred element of the progressive creed. By the time students hit college, the speech codes spread from the bluest part of the map to stain even some of the reddest.
In the work world, employees of big firms faced training in microaggressions so they would not say wrong-think like “America is a melting pot” or ask wrong-questions like “Where are you from?” Saying anything that makes the anointed uncomfortable is not OK to progressives in HR. What would HR do with its power in a world controlled by Trump acolytes?
Under Biden, people who prayed too close to an abortion clinic or who too aggressively offered alternatives to killing a baby went to jail. Now journalists who follow protestors into church are in trouble. (It is the same law.)
During the 2020 election and COVID times, the free-speech fever reached new heights. Former intelligence officials buffaloed social media companies into suppressing a true story about Joe Biden’s son’s shady international business dealings while Dad was in office. What stories would Trump officials like to suppress?
Success at that attack on “disinformation” led to a new Biden White House initiative on “misinformation” that led social media companies to stifle speech the White House and other expert sources told them was untrue even when it later turned out to be, you know, true. It was called the “Disinformation Governance Board.”
Things got so bad under Democrats that even an employee of the American Civil Liberties Union could say with a straight face (and no fear for his employment) that he wanted to ban a book.
My Democratic and progressive friends, I am glad to have you in the trenches with me as we fight the Trump administration’s war on speech that our petty billionaire tyrant doesn’t like. There is nothing more important, except perhaps stopping him from stealing the next election.
But I hope that the next time you are in power, you remember why freedom of speech is so important. Important enough that we all should agree to tolerate speech, especially the stuff that we really, really don’t like. Even things we don’t think are true.
David Mastio is a national columnist for The Kansas City Star and McClatchy.
This story was originally published February 14, 2026 at 5:07 AM with the headline "Trump’s battle against free speech isn’t the first time it’s happened | Opinion."
