My progressive friends are drawing some comfort from polls showing that Donald Trump’s popularity is dipping. He began this presidency with a higher approval rating than he ever had during his first term, but now Trump is even a lot less popular than Joe Biden was at this point in his term four years ago.
I don’t mean to harsh anybody’s happy buzz, folks, but I wouldn’t get too excited about this. Yes, it’s good if a growing share of Americans recognize the failures of the Trump administration – mainly because that shift in public opinion may motivate the cowardly Republicans of Congress to stand up to the worst impulses of our emotionally troubled president. But let’s note why Trump’s magic seems to be slipping away: It’s because of his handling of the economy – which, certainly, has been terrible – but he is not losing steam because of factors that are actually more important than money.
That is, we ought to be more concerned about Trump’s broad attack on free speech. I wish folks all across the country understood that as the fundamental peril that it is. The Supreme Court has been pretty clear over the years about why free speech matters.
Justice Benjamin Cardozo, one of the most distinguished judges in American history, described free speech as (in his words) “the matrix, the indispensable condition, of nearly every other freedom.” Without the freedom of every person to say and write what they believe, we wouldn’t have the capacity to find what’s true or to speak truth – and that means we couldn’t make thoughtful choices in the voting booth. Our First Amendment freedoms are really the underpinning of American democracy.
But democracy – that is, the shaping of government based on citizens’ views – can limit a tyrannical leader’s manipulation. That’s why Trump is trying to squelch the free press. He has sued TV networks that aired content he didn’t like. His FCC is apparently holding up regulatory approval of a big media deal because of how “60 Minutes” on CBS covered Kamala Harris during the presidential campaign. He is suing the Des Moines Register because it published an apparently flawed public opinion poll in Iowa just before the election. He is punishing news outlets that don’t toe his line – notably, by excluding the Associated Press from some White House coverage because it doesn’t use his decreed new name for the Gulf of Mexico. And he wants to take away all federal funding for public media not because it would save taxpayers much money – that $1.30 a year per citizen that goes to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting ain’t much, you know – but because he doesn’t like the honest news coverage that comes from NPR and PBS and its outlets.
And, most ominously, there’s this: The administration has imprisoned people who have spoken or written in favor of Palestinian rights. These are non-citizens so far – people who were in this country legally, with green card or student visas, and who while they’re here also have First Amendment protection. They’re now sitting in jail cells, without charges or any hearings, because they expressed an opinion in print or in a speech that doesn’t match Trump administration policy. Trump’s forces sent some non-citizens to a notorious prison in El Salvador, and the president then said, in his words, “The homegrowns are next.”
These people didn’t cause any violence. And here's the thing: In America, people can’t be arrested just because they’re advocating something that sounds unsettling, or even threatening. A Supreme Court decision in 1919 set the standard: Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote that speech may not be banned unless it presents “a clear and present danger.”
And what is that? Well, the Supreme Court clarified it in a 1969 case, Brandenburg versus Ohio, ruling that free speech was protected even in the case of a Ku Klux Klan leader who stood up in front of a crowd and demanded vengeance against Black people and Jews. Because he wasn’t inciting the crowd to commit violence at that moment – “imminent lawless action,” in the court’s words – even that hateful speech was protected by the Constitution.
And free speech is really what’s at stake in Trump’s attack on higher education. Trump and his enablers pretend to be targeting antisemitism, but they’re really trying to suppress thought and speech – including teaching in the classroom – that conflicts with the Trumpian world view.
This isn’t just about right and wrong. Suppression of free speech actually is dangerous. Free speech, after all, is a sort of safety valve, giving people a chance to voice their views rather than undertake disruptive behavior. America’s Founders realized, in the words of Justice Brandeis, that “it is hazardous to discourage thought, hope and imagination.”
That’s what’s at stake in the repression that is a key tool of this American administration. I wish that the threat to free speech was the cause of the growing backlash to Trumpism, because then we could more safely assume that our freedom won’t be whittled away. But just now, it’s about the money. And given the turmoil in stock and bond markets, the continued inflation and risk of recession, the threat to America’s standing as the guarantor of global economic stability – given all that, more Americans seem to be souring on Donald Trump.
And for those of us who care about free speech, that’s good news.
Rex Smith, the co-host of The Media Project on WAMC, is the former editor of the Times Union of Albany and The Record in Troy. His weekly digital report, The Upstate American, is published by Substack.
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