Donald Trump is setting new boundaries for political speech
Pick your most bracing defence of freedom from the Trump administration: here is the vice-president, J.D. Vance, lecturing Europe for having the arrogance to judge “hateful content” and the fragility to fear speech by foreigners. There is Elon Musk, punning on Nazi names to mock people so prudish as to take offence at his straight-armed salutes. Or, most radical, there is President Donald Trump himself, proclaiming he was erasing “a grave national injustice” by pardoning people who protested against his defeat in 2020 by storming the Capitol while chanting racist slurs and calling for Mike Pence, then vice-president, to be hanged.
Pretty strong stuff. But maybe Mr Trump believes that only through such tough stands could he have “stopped all government censorship and brought back free speech in America”, as he put it in his address to Congress on March 4th. Yet how to square such extremism in defence of liberty with the administration’s attempt to deport a student who helped lead campus protests against Israel and the war in Gaza?
By now you’ve probably heard the story: how Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, revoked the green card of Mahmoud Khalil, who recently completed a graduate degree at Columbia University, without a hearing or even his knowledge; how Mr Khalil, who has apparently not been charged with a crime, was then handcuffed on March 8th on returning home from dinner with his wife, an American citizen who is eight months pregnant, and bundled off to a detention centre in Louisiana; how a New York judge ordered him held there pending further proceedings.
It’s all pretty stunning. It may also prove to be legal, even if the Trump administration never establishes Mr Khalil protested in ways unprotected by the First Amendment or otherwise broke the law. And that would be the most alarming development of all, for what it would show about how much power a president has to constrain speech. Since the Red Scare in the 1950s, American presidents have not tried to use their authority this way, lending at least implicit support to a consensus in favour of a permissive standard for protest and for speech in general. But Mr Trump is invoking tremendous authority over what speech is acceptable. To make matters worse, the standards he is setting are vague, leaving it to each potential future protester to guess what words might bring down the hammer of the state. On Truth Social, Mr Trump called Mr Khalil “a Radical Foreign Pro-Hamas Student” and added “this is the first arrest of many to come” of students “who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity”. The administration has yet to describe at what point Mr Khalil crossed those lines or where anyone else might.
Deporting foreign-born protesters may seem like an America-First speech policy, but this has the hallmarks of being Trump-first. It is one of several steps by Mr Trump that seem likely to serve his politics by constraining freedoms of speech and association, on campus and off, for aliens and citizens. He has threatened to punish universities that permit “illegal” protest, leaving it to them to guess what he means. His administration cancelled $400m in grants to Columbia (where Mrs Lexington is on the staff of an institute), saying it had not done enough to protect Jewish students. The administration said it would scrutinise nine more schools for antisemitism, leaving mysterious the standards by which they would be judged or even why they were chosen.
On March 6th Mr Trump signed an order directing federal agencies to strip contracts and security clearances from Perkins Coie LLP, a law firm, accusing it of “dishonest and dangerous activity”. The order cited past legal work on causes associated with Democrats. That followed a narrower action against another firm, and Mr Trump warned he would be “going after” others. The crackdown is scaring big firms away from joining in litigation against the administration, according to the Wall Street Journal.
On March 7th Mr Trump signed an executive order to narrow the definition of “public service” under which some workers may have federal student debt forgiven. Mr Trump forbade relief to workers at “activist organisations” that, for example, engage “in a pattern of aiding and abetting illegal discrimination”. That appears to be code for having a diversity, equity and inclusion programme. Mr Trump may have good arguments against these organisations, as well as against universities that indulged antisemitism and rancid anti-Israel protest while tightly policing other bigotry and speech. But he is not making arguments. He is using his office to diminish perceived ideological opponents and redraw the boundaries of American debate.
A loss for words
Popular support for free speech has been eroding, to judge by a forthcoming study from The Future of Free Speech, a think-tank. Since the previous survey, in 2021, America had the third-largest decline in support for free speech among 33 countries, behind only Japan and Israel. America ranks 9th, after some of the European countries Mr Vance criticised. Jacob Mchangama, the executive director of the think-tank, fears that even if the Supreme Court eventually upholds America’s present standards for speech, the culture that has supported it may change as self-censorship takes hold. Many people, he says, will think it’s not “a great idea to be on the receiving end of the ire of a president who is not above using the law to go after his enemies, real or perceived.”
For his part, Mr Musk, secure in his billions, his federal office and his ownership of X, luxuriates in the right to speech. On March 10th he called Senator Mark Kelly, a former Navy pilot and astronaut, “a traitor” for visiting Ukraine and daring to express support for it. How many Americans would level such an accusation at this president without fear? ■
Subscribers to The Economist can sign up to our new Opinion newsletter, which brings together the best of our leaders, columns, guest essays and reader correspondence.