Trump's Trials - How free speech is changing under Trump

Episode Date: April 7, 2025

Many Americans are worried that their First Amendment right to free speech is fading. NPR's Morning Edition has talked to legal experts, activists, immigration lawyers, scientists, students, teachers and others over several weeks to understand why. This episode, the first installment of their series, "The State of the First Amendment: The Right From Which All Other Rights Flow."Support NPR and hear every episode of Trump's Terms sponsor-free with NPR+. Sign up at plus.npr.org.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

It's Trump's Terms from NPR. I'm Scott Detrick. We're going to be doing all sorts of things nobody ever thought was even possible. It's going to be a very aggressive first hundred days of the new Congress. An unpredictable, transformative next four years. The United States is going to take off like a rocket ship. Each episode, we bring you NPR's coverage of President Trump acting on his own terms. And that means sometimes doing things that no American president has tried before. NPR is covering it all in stories

like the one you are about to hear right after this. -♪ I'm Layla Faulted. We've been talking to Americans across the country who are worried, worried they may be losing a Fundamental right so many are so nervous talking about it that our conversations would start like this Would you be comfortable with us using your full name? I'd rather not can we just use my first initial. I'm definitely worried about getting reported

Others backed out of interviews, afraid of retaliation. But then there are those who are louder and bolder in this moment. President Trump has made a commitment to bring back freedom of speech in our country. And I think conservatives are just in general much more willing to speak their mind. We are going to look at the state of free speech in the United States. Who feels more free to speak? Who feels silenced? And the way this First Amendment right seems to be shifting for a Florida pastor who was spit on for a sermon he recently gave. They just sort of shut down the conversation by saying, I'm putting you on a list. It's

somewhat intimidating. A sixth grade teacher forced to remove an everyone is welcome here sign. I've lost quite a lot of sleep over this matter and have struggled with it deeply. A conservative parental rights group called Moms for Liberty that the Southern Poverty Law Center deems extremist. I think people in the administration really want to see changes that will open up the government more and that's good for all Americans. I have a lot of hope.

And immigration attorneys representing student protesters in danger of deportation. These are test cases. If the government can get away with doing this to these students, it can do it to everybody in this country. Your citizenship won't save you. Your views will be next. Will your views be next? Is President Trump a protector of the First Amendment, or is he the biggest threat to

it since the McCarthy era in the 1940s and 50s, when fear-mongering around Soviet and Communist influence led to the political persecution of academics and leftists? One Communist on the faculty of one university is one communist, two manning. We'll be exploring those questions in the sciences, education, the media, and beyond in this morning edition series, The State of the First Amendment, The Right from Which All Other Rights Flow. Hours after he was sworn in, President Trump brandished a Sharpie at the Capital One Arena in Washington, D.C., and signed a flurry of executive orders. Among them was a directive to the federal government.

Ordering the restoration of freedom of speech and preventing government censorship of free speech going forward. Weeks later, in an address to Congress, Trump touted it as a return to freedom. I've stopped all government censorship and brought back free speech in America. It's back. In anticipation of this moment, social media companies were already backing away from fact-checking. And as Trump celebrated, certain voices re-entered the mainstream. And a warning, what you're about to hear is hate speech.

Around blacks, never relax. The invasion continues. Our country has been sold out to foreigners of the lowest form. Let's make sure to honor all of our transgender mass shooters as the International Transgender Day of Visibility is upon us. Trump's promises to end federal censorship come hand in hand with attacks on the press. And I believe that CNN and MSDNC, who literally write 97.6% bad about me are political arms of the Democrat Party.

And in my opinion, they're really corrupt and they're illegal. What they do is illegal." He's barred the AP from the Oval Office for their refusal to call the Gulf of Mexico only the Gulf of America. NPR, The New York Times, Politico, and NBC were kicked out of their Pentagon offices and others were asked to give up their offices later. And for the first time, the president, rather than the press, is handpicking the pool of reporters that cover his activities.

He's broken other norms as well, often in legally questionable ways. Universities face uncertain futures as they become targets of the Trump administration. This week, they arrested yet another student. Trump retaliating against law firms that have worked on cases against him. In order to understand whether this moment in U.S. history is unprecedented, we turn to two free speech legal scholars. The first, Lee Bollinger. He's the former president of Columbia University and one of the foremost voices on the First Amendment. The Supreme Court has held really definitively and in many cases that in public debate, public discussion of public issues, we will have wide open, robust free speech

that will include very offensive and even very, very deeply dangerous speech, speech that would advocate hate or advocacy of overthrow of the government, violence, all of that is protected until just at the moment where it's about to occur. And Jonathan Turley, also a known legal scholar on the First Amendment, frequent commentator on Fox News, and the author of The Indispensable Right, Free Speech in the Age of Rage. The framers wanted to create a protection around what they saw as a natural right, a right that pre-existed government, a right that makes people fully human.

A right to assemble, a right to practice any religion or no religion, a right to a free press and to freely criticize the government. Now Turley and Bollinger have both spent their lives advocating and trying to protect this basic right, but they see the threats to it in this moment differently. Bollinger sees danger under Trump.

When the government, the White House, excludes reporters or media outlet like AP, that to me is an active threat because you're doing it because of the content, because they're not towing the line to the government position. And when you say, we're not going to give contracts to any corporation that promotes DEI, you're really using the enormous power of the federal government to force people not to talk in certain ways and to think in certain ways. When you go after universities and say that you can no longer do this, have this kind

of academic decision-making, and if you do, we're going to cut off enormous amounts of traditional funding for research. All of that has a chilling effect, it's called, on speech and on independent institutions in the society. Do you think it's possible to lose, like in this moment, that it could be lost? So it's always possible. When I look back over, let's say the last century, there have been every 20, 30 years periods where there was a real, real retreat from the commitment to free speech. I think we are heading in that direction. Now Turley says he thinks this president could be an unexpected advocate.

Ironically, our greatest allies tend to be people who were subject to censorship. Trump is an example of that. I mean, he was banned from social media. Even though I disagreed with some of his statements, I more strongly disagreed with his being banned from being able to express them on social media. His alarm actually grew under President Biden over what he says was collusion between the government, social media companies and academia to shut down conservative speech around polarizing

issues like elections, public health and beyond. You had a level of cooperation, coordination between the government and these other entities, that the effect was that thousands were censored. It's a charge often made by Republicans and Trump allies. Last year, the Supreme Court rejected the claim that social media companies were pressured to take down posts about COVID-19 and the 2020 election. The familiar pattern is that people always start

with a relatively small subset of views that are considered too dangerous to allow, and then it tends to metastasize. He says this quest against missing disinformation got out of hand and ended up silencing people. In your view is there any place where there does need to be limitations? I admit that and perhaps I'm a bit of a dinosaur in the sense I believe that the solution of bad speech is good speech. In history, you can't point to a single censorship system that has ever succeeded, that has ever

stopped one idea or one movement. It has a hundred percent failure rate, and yet we continue to try to replicate it. The thing that actually stops disinformation is information. It is people being able to call out others for false statements. But I also want to talk about what's happening now. There have been many actions by this administration that seem to be chilling speech, college professors warning students not to discuss or post opinions about Israel's war in Gaza

or Russia's war in Ukraine for fear of deportation or arrest. Government websites have taken down thousands of pages featuring information on vaccines, hate crimes, diversity. Are free speech protections broadening right now under President Trump or is censorship shifting? Well, it's too early to tell whether the Trump administration will make free speech truly part of its legacy in the second term.

As someone in the free speech community, we make no assumptions as to our allies in any of these fights. We've had our hearts broken too many times. Where Bollinger and Turley do agree is the case of Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia student protester and green card holder facing deportation, if he and other students are being removed for their choice to protest. These students, including permanent residents, are allowed to protest in favor of Palestine, to criticize Israel. That's part of the core protections that define us as a people.

Before we wrap up, a reminder, you can find more coverage of the Trump administration on the NPR Politics Podcast, where you can hear NPR's political reporters break down the day's biggest political news with new episodes every weekday afternoon. And thanks as always to our NPR Plus supporters who hear every episode of the show without sponsor messages. You can learn more at plus.npr.org. I'm Scott Detrow.

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