Nobody should claim Trump believes in free speech. He does not. And nobody is more petty, when it comes to him reacting to speech that does not conform to “Donald Trump Reality”, than the current president. If you disagree with him, on anything whatsoever, and the disagreement makes news, he will do everything to crush you right out of existence. You must agree with everything the president says, claims, recommends, describes as the truth, or you will be held up to public ridicule, declared “the enemy within”, and isolated as un-American.
Most every Trump accusation is really a Trump confession. So his attacks on the free speech of his fellow citizens is his way of saying: “you will use the words I use, or you will pay for not agreeing with every thing I say and claim”. There is very little, if anything, that a Trump supporter/Trump apologist can say that would lead to any conclusion other than: free speech in the United States is conditional, whenever the free speech involves discussing Trump. Agree with him, or be held up by Trump as “the enemy within”.
I’m pretty sure Trump’s idea of what speech Americans are free to use, is not really a freedom at all, in his authoritarian, Strongman world view. Trump is about dividing the world among authoritarian Strongmen. He wants nothing whatsoever to do with the freedom to think on one’s own: you will think the way Donald Trump thinks, or he will stamp his feet, and hold you up as “an enemy of the United States”.
And the bottom line to this approach: it has nothing to do with free speech. In fact, it borders on expunging freedom to THINK as one wishes…Wonder what else in the First Amendment Trump will abrogate?
Trump apologists MUST agree with Trump. Ironic that Trump apologists have the balls to tell us what the Truth is, when they have actually given up the right to think on their own two feet. They will give up many freedoms if Trump demands they do so. And this is how it works in the United States? No, this is how it works in “Cannot contradict our leader Donald Trump’s America”.
Trump is punishing Americans who don’t say the words he likes best. That’s not how it works in America.
www.theatlantic.com
“The president of the United States is demanding that American citizens use only the words that please him, and he is punishing those who refuse to do so. This is the essence of his attacks against the Associated Press, which he has barred from the White House for referring to the Gulf of Mexico as “the Gulf of Mexico.” He is now demanding that the news agency acquiesce to his renaming of the body of water. “We’re going to keep them out until such time as they agree that it’s the Gulf of America,” Donald Trump said to reporters earlier this week.
This is not how it works in the United States of America. In our nation, free speech is a God-given right. It is not something that Trump, Elon Musk, or anyone else can grant or take away. Americans are born with the right to speak freely, and to publish freely. In America, as I have
written previously, we are free to criticize the government, which is accountable to the people, not the other way around”.
The former president is not just going after journalists. He is targeting all Americans.
www.theatlantic.com