Donald Trump comes out swinging for free speech...

...and, of course, the media ignores his promise to protect social media companies from government censors. Why? Because Trump likes speech (does he ever!) but he hates the media.

Reporters spend a lot of time warning Donald Trump is a threat to the Constitution and civil liberties.

They spend less time - okay, let’s be honest, no time - covering him when he promises to protect the First Amendment. As he did at a rally in Wisconsin on Saturday, when he said he would stop the kind of government pressure on social media companies that forced Twitter to censor and ban me three years ago:

I will bring back free speech in America… I will sign an executive order banning any federal employee from colluding to limit speech, and we will fire every federal bureaucrat who is engaged in domestic censorship under the Harris regime.

Given the power of social media companies to shape opinion, and Washington’s influence over them thanks to the law known as Section 230¹, a promise to limit pressure on them is huge. At this moment, it is arguably the most important step any president can take to protect the First Amendment.

—

(Protect the First Amendment. And Unreported Truths. For less than 20 cents a day.)

—

Yet Trump’s pledge received basically no coverage in the mainstream legacy media.

In contrast, his occasional calls for a Constitutional amendment to make burning the American flag illegal regularly produce complaints in the media that Trump doesn’t understand free speech. (I’m not in favor of Trump’s flag-burning proposal. But suggesting an amendment to ban an act the Constitution now protects is the opposite of disrespecting it. It signals Trump’s understanding that neither he nor Congress can ban flag-burning unless the Constitution is changed.)

So why won’t the media give Trump his due on free speech?

In part because legacy media outlets are aggrieved that the rise of social media has stolen their power to set the terms of debate. X in particular can set the news agenda in a way that even the most powerful legacy outlet cannot (as was obvious last fall, when Bill Ackman and X forced a reckoning over the fact that American universities hate free speech - except when it is antisemitic).

But there media’s unwillingness to give Trump credit for his stand against censorship comes out of a more particular animus as well.

And it can be found in the ellipsis in Trump’s statement below:

—

(47 million views? That’s a lot of views.)

—

In between promising to bring back “free speech” and promising to fire any “federal bureaucrat” who worked with a social media company to censor, Trump pointed at the reporters covering his speech in Wisconsin.

“Some are good,” he said. “Most of them are just absolutely terrible human beings.”

Then he complained they wouldn’t accurately report the size of the crowd at the rally. (Can we drop the crowd size thing? But of course we cannot, because Trump is obsessed with it, which means the media is obsessed with it.)

Now. To be clear.

Trump has every right to complain about the reporters who cover him. He’s not threatening them. He’s not trying to get their employers to fire them. He’s not asking their stories be censored. He is permissibly exercising his own First Amendment rights without infringing on theirs.

He is competing in the marketplace of ideas (ish, but if you squint you can see “most of them are just absolutely terrible human beings” as competing in the marketplace of ideas, in the same way that a “Dads Against Daughters Dating” T-shirt is competing in the marketplace of fashion).

—

(Just wait for the shotgun wedding!)

—

What reporters do not seem to recognize is that when they refuse to acknowledge Trump’s stance on this issue, they only undercut their own credibility - both as would-be defenders of free speech and more broadly.

What they do not do is stop people from hearing Trump’s words.

As noted in the caption above, as of this morning, over 47 million people had seen the two-minute excerpt from the rally posted on X. That’s far more than watch every cable news channel combined in an entire week. Which proves, again, why legacy media outlets hate the new platforms so much (and in some cases call for them to be censored).

The principle here is simple. The federal government should not be in the business of telling social media companies what posts or users to carey. Call it jawboning, or pressure, or persuasion backed by the threat of Section 230 “reform,” call it whatever you like: federal employees shouldn’t be doing it.²

Donald Trump understands that principle.

Even if the absolutely terrible reporters covering him don’t.

1. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act gives companies like Google, Facebook, and X near-total immunity against lawsuits from their users, over the content they carry, and over their own algorithms - their programming choices. Without it the companies could not function as they do.

2. Whether the government should or has the right to force the companies to carry all legal speech is a much more complicated question - but one doesn’t have to answer it to agree on the first principle, that the White House shouldn’t demand censorship of specific users or posts.