BY MARTIN KICH

What follows is an excerpt from Amanda Sakuma’s detailed summary, for Vox, of President Trump’s lengthy speech at the 2019 CPAC meeting:

 Trump announced plans to issue an executive order for free speech on college campuses

At one point, Trump brought on stage Hayden Williams, a conservative activist who was allegedly punched in the face last week while on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley. Williams, who works with the Leadership Institute in training and recruiting new activists, is not a student himself. But news of his alleged attack and a widely shared video capturing the moment have raised his profile considerably in recent days, used as an example of the hardships that young conservatives think they face in standing up for their beliefs on college campuses.

In response, Trump says he plans to sign an executive order requiring colleges and universities to support free speech, or risk losing their federal grants.

“We reject oppressive speech codes, censorship, political correctness and every other attempt by the hard left to stop people from challenging ridiculous and dangerous ideas. These ideas are dangerous,” Trump said. “Instead we believe in free speech, including online and including on campus.”

 

This is not the first time that President Trump has selectively—and incongruously–proclaimed himself an advocate of free speech. Consider the following excerpt from a short item written by Eric Wemple for the Washington Post in August 2018:

President Trump boasted about sapping public confidence in the media; riffed about pulling the broadcast license of an unhelpful media outlet; spoke of the need to “open up” the country’s libel laws; barred certain media outlets from covering his presidential campaign; dubbed the media the “enemy of the people”; and campaigned so steadily and hatefully against reporters as to nurture an environment of threats.

But now he’s a champion of free expression.

Or at least that’s the impression he manufactured at a Tuesday night rally at the Charleston Civic Center in West Virginia. “We’re also standing up to social media censorship — that’s the new thing, that’s the new thing,” said Trump in an extended rant about Internet expression. “You know, I’d rather have fake news, like CNN,” he continued, to some booing from the crowd.

I would rather have fake news … than have anybody — including liberals, socialists, anything — than have anybody stopped and censored. We gotta live with it. We gotta get used to it, we’re gonna live with fake news — there’s too many sources. Every one of us is like a newspaper. You have Twitter or whatever you have, Facebook. But everyone — you can’t have censorship, you can’t pick one person and say, ‘Well, we don’t like what he’s been saying, he’s out.’ So we’ll live with fake news, I mean I hate to say it. But we have no choice, because that’s by far the better alternative. You can’t have people saying censorship. Because you know what, it can turn around — it can be them next. It can be them next. We believe in the right of Americans to speak their minds.

Bolding added to contextualize the clear inspiration for this remark: This summer, various social media platforms — Facebook, YouTube, Apple, Twitter — took action against the content of Infowars, the organization piloted by conspiracist Alex Jones. (There has been a broader concern, too, that social media sites have a bias against conservative voices.) Tucker Carlson, a strong pro-Trump voice on Fox News, slammed CNN for allegedly advocating for the muting of Jones’s viewpoint on social media sites. “Now, I know we’re supposed to think that Alex Jones is way more radical than, like, Bill Maher, Michelle Wolf or Rosie O’Donnell, but he’s got a point of view and CNN is trying to squelch his point of view,” said Carlson on his July 26 program.

Back in December 2015, Trump appeared on Jones’s show, saying, “Your reputation is amazing. I will not let you down.” So that’s how then-presidential candidate Trump felt about the guy who alleged that the Sandy Hook shooting was a hoax, who promoted the Pizzagate conspiracy and other false-flag allegations and mad things.

The prospect of Jones losing some clicks — that is what turns Trump into a free-expression advocate.

 

Late in 2018, Politico featured an article written by Suzanne Nossel, the CEO of PEN, titled “Trump’s Attacks on the Press Are Illegal. We’re Suing.” Here is an excerpt from what a very substantial and substantive argument:

President Donald J. Trump’s frequent threats and hostile acts directed toward journalists and the media are not only offensive and unbecoming of a democratic leader; they are also illegal. In the Trump era, nasty rhetoric, insults and even threats of violence have become an occupational hazard for political reporters and commentators. To  be  sure, a good portion of President Trump’s verbal attacks on journalists and news organizations might be considered fair game in this bare- knuckled political moment. The president has free-speech rights just like the rest of us, and deeming the news media “the enemy of the American people” and dismissing accurate reports as “fake news” are permissible under the First Amendment.

But the First Amendment does not protect all speech. Although the president can launch verbal tirades against the press, he cannot use the powers of his office to suppress or punish speech he doesn’t like. When President Trump proposes government retribution against news outlets and reporters, his statements cross the line. Worse still, in several cases it appears that the bureaucracy he controls has acted on his demands, making other threats he issues to use his governmental powers more credible. Using the force of the presidency to punish or suppress legally protected speech strikes at the heart of the First Amendment, contravening the Constitution. Presidents are free to mock, needle, evade and even demean the press, but not to use the power of government to stifle it.

 

Amanda Sakuma’s article is available at: https://www.vox.com/2019/3/2/18247712/trump-cpac-bizarre-rant.

Eric Wemple’s article is available at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2018/08/22/now-trump-is-a-free-expression-advocate/?utm_term=.5fdb7ea95002.

Suzanne Nossel’s complete article is available at: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/10/16/trumps-attacks-on-the-press-are-illegal-were-suing-221312.