Comprehensive New Report Uncovers a Pervasive Pattern Driving the Trump Administration's Year of Attacks Against Free Speech

WASHINGTON — On Monday, Free Press published an authoritative report analyzing the hundreds of incidents involving possible First Amendment violations over the first year of the Trump White House. The report — CHOKEHOLD: Donald Trump’s War on Free Speech & the Need for Systemic Resistance — sheds new light on a pattern driving an administration-wide campaign to silence dissent. 

In compiling, analyzing and cataloging individual incidents, report author and Free Press Senior Counsel Nora Benavidez finds that the sheer volume of these First Amendment assaults has helped ensure that even the most egregious actions quickly fall out of the news cycle and public consciousness. Her analysis pierces the chaos of administration attacks to reveal a methodology involving close coordination among the White House, government agencies and Trump allies in the media to normalize some of the most egregious abuses of our First Amendment rights. 

The CHOKEHOLD report is available here: https://www.freepress.net/attack-on-free-speech 

“Trump’s censorship playbook is responsible for the administration’s central retaliatory ethos and inspires a set of strategies that loyal actors in government use to silence dissent and chill free expression,” says Benavidez. “This playbook is to lie, distort reality for the public and deploy a cadre of henchmen to carry out Trump’s threats of reprisal.” 

To create the report, Free Press examined original reporting on more than 500 actions — including verbal threats, arrests, lawsuits, regulatory actions and military deployments — by Trump, the Trump White House, Trump-appointed federal regulators, the National Guard, law-enforcement agencies and other branches of government. Benavidez then focused exclusively on federal actions that clearly implicate the First Amendment to arrive at five key findings:

1. Trump’s tyrannical playbook has infected the entire administration with an ethos of retaliation, targeting free speech that contradicts him.
2. No one is safe from attack in Trump’s quest to control the message, though the administration targets the press most of all.
3. The modes of attack are erratic, but they are also extensive and relentless.
4. While this speech-chilling campaign is vastly unpopular and often loses in court, its speed and scale are unprecedented in U.S. history.
5. Collective resistance has blunted Trump’s censorship campaign and must be sustained.

CHOKEHOLD also names and analyzes five methods the administration wields in its efforts to repeatedly target free expression and undermine viewpoint diversity. The report groups the targets of these attacks, including members of the media and civil society, as well as workers in government, academia, law and the corporate sector.

“If only one person speaks out against injustice, their speech is notable, but it is also more vulnerable to attack and subversion under this administration,” Benavidez says. “If more people speak out against injustice, the collective drumbeat can more easily withstand government reprisals. Democracies erode little by little; would-be dictators need to scare only some of us and the rest will follow. The very reason we must speak out together is so we can leverage our collective power.”