Intimidating Americans

Search:

The Free-Speech Phonies

www.theatlantic.com › newsletters › archive › 2025 › 02 › trump-musk-press-freedom › 681777

This story seems to be about:

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

“It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS,” then–CBS President and CEO Leslie Moonves cackled in February 2016, as Donald Trump’s presidential campaign churned forward. “The money’s rolling in and this is fun … It’s a terrible thing to say. But, bring it on, Donald. Go ahead. Keep going.”

Moonves appeared merely ghoulish then. He now looks both ghoulish and wrong. Trump has not been good for CBS, and the steps and statements he’s made since returning to the White House show that his campaign promises to restore and defend free speech were balderdash. His goal is to protect the speech that he likes and suppress what he doesn’t.

On Sunday, Unelected Bureaucrat in Chief Elon Musk attacked CBS’s flagship program. “60 Minutes are the biggest liars in the world! They engaged in deliberate deception to interfere with the last election,” he posted on X. “They deserve a long prison sentence.” This would seem less threatening if Musk weren’t running roughshod over the federal government, or if the president disagreed. But earlier this month, Trump said that “CBS should lose its license” and 60 Minutes should be “terminated.”

The source of their anger is an interview that the program conducted with Kamala Harris—remember her?—during the presidential campaign last year. Trump alleges that 60 Minutes improperly edited the interview. CBS denies any wrongdoing and declined to comment on Musk’s post. CBS said in a filing this week that it intended to seek information on Trump’s finances if the lawsuit proceeds. Even so, CBS’s parent company, Paramount, is considering whether to pay a multimillion-dollar settlement with Trump to resolve a suit seeking $20 billion in damages. Interpreting such a move as anything other than paying off Trump to leave CBS alone is very difficult—in other words, it’s a protection racket. Indeed, The Wall Street Journal reports that executives are concerned they could be sued for bribery if they settle. (Moonves is long gone; he was forced out in 2018 over a series of accusations of sexual assault and harassment. He denies any wrongdoing.)

Trump initially filed his suit last October and has since amended it. The crux of the claim is that CBS aired two different snippets from the same Harris answer about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Like many past lawsuits from Trump, this one reads more like a political memo than a legal brief. He claims, without any evidence, that CBS edited the interview to help Harris’s electoral prospects. (Like other MAGA lawsuits, it was filed in a specific Texas court so as to draw Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee who has delivered sweeping fringe rulings in the past.) The suit doesn’t make a great deal of sense. If CBS was trying to hide something Harris said, why did it broadcast the clip?

The Federal Communications Commission initially rejected a complaint about the interview, but Brendan Carr—Trump’s newly appointed FCC chair—reopened it and demanded that CBS release the transcript of the interview. CBS did so, and to my read, the transcript establishes that CBS’s use of the clips was not manipulative. (Judicious editing is essential. I’ve interviewed many politicians, and much of what they say is incurably dull, nonsensical, or both, sometimes by design.)

The charge of “election interference” doesn’t make any sense, either—especially coming from Musk, who both is the owner of a major media platform and spent nearly $300 million to back Trump and other Republican candidates. The position of the Trump GOP appears to be that spending any amount of money on politics is free speech, but press outlets covering the campaign are interfering with it.

The bombardment of CBS is part of a wide-ranging assault on free speech. Last week, the White House barred an Associated Press reporter from the Oval Office because editors there have opted not to adopt Trump’s renaming of the body of water long known as the Gulf of Mexico. In December, ABC settled a defamation suit with Trump even though almost no media lawyers thought the network would have lost; critics charged that ABC was trying to curry favor with the president-elect. (ABC did not respond to a request for comment.)

Carr, the FCC chair, recently wrote a letter to NPR and PBS suggesting that by airing sponsors’ names, they may have violated rules against noncommercial stations accepting advertising, although the FCC has not objected to this practice in the past. He noted that the answer could help Congress in deciding whether to defund NPR and PBS. That’s a tight vise grip: Don’t take funding or we might take your funding.

Not all criticism of the press is media suppression. Politicians are free to criticize the press, just as all Americans are free to criticize their elected officials. And besides, if political leaders aren’t upset about at least some of the coverage they’re receiving, journalists probably aren’t holding them to account. At times during the Trump era, some members of the media have overreacted to flimsy provocations, like Trump’s posting a silly GIF that superimposed the CNN logo over someone being body slammed. Vice President J. D. Vance snarkily replied to the journalist Mehdi Hasan on Monday, “Yes dummy. I think there’s a difference between not giving a reporter a seat in the WH press briefing room and jailing people for dissenting views. The latter is a threat to free speech, the former is not. Hope that helps!”

Even if you’re willing to grant Vance’s premise that banishing the AP is no big deal—I am not—there’s a lot of territory between that and jailing people, and that’s the ground that Trump is occupying: using the power of the government to intimidate. Paramount, for example, is currently awaiting FCC approval for a merger with Skydance Media. A Paramount Global spokesperson told me the lawsuit is “separate from, and unrelated to” the merger, but the company’s leaders would be reasonable to be afraid that Trump might block the deal if they don’t cooperate. During his first term, Trump tried to block the acquisition of CNN’s parent company. Speaking about the AP’s banishment, one journalist told CNN’s Brian Stelter, “Everyone assumes they’re next.”

Threats to the press are not new for Trump, who has been critical of press freedom for years. But during his most recent campaign, he criticized “wokeness” and argued that he would be a voice for free speech by pushing back on what he characterized as attacks on constitutional rights from, for example, social-media companies that blocked or throttled content (such as suspending his accounts after January 6). On the first day of his new term, Trump signed an executive order purportedly “restoring freedom of speech and ending federal censorship.” Musk purchased Twitter in 2022 and announced that he was a “free speech absolutist,” but quickly disproved that, suspending reporters who criticized him and cooperating with foreign governments to suppress speech.

A news outlet that is afraid of the government is an outlet whose speech is only partly free. When media companies are afraid that the president will use regulators to punish their business, owners are anxious to protect non-media commercial interests. When journalists are wary of becoming targets for petty retribution, they may pull punches or shape coverage in ways that do not—and are not intended to—serve the public interest. Jeff Bezos’s decision to spike a Washington Post endorsement of Kamala Harris and Patrick Soon-Shiong’s attacks on his own newspaper, the Los Angeles Times, both look a lot like this, though the two owners insist otherwise.

Over the past few years, Trump, Vance, and others complained loudly about the government studying mis- and disinformation or pointing out instances of disinformation to social-media companies. They charged that this was censorship because even if the government wasn’t requiring those companies to do anything, its power made this an implied threat. Now that they are in office, they’ve had a change of heart. They’re perfectly happy for the government to try to tell private companies what opinions are acceptable and which ones aren’t. They never believed in anyone’s free speech except their own.

Today’s News

The Senate confirmed Kash Patel as FBI director in a 51–49 vote. Republican Senator Mitch McConnell announced that he would not be seeking reelection.

The Trump administration removed protections for hundreds of thousands of Haitians in America, which puts them on track to be targeted for deportation this summer.

Dispatches

Time-Travel Thursdays: “The first time I watched an opera on a screen was in the Dallas Cowboys football stadium,” Kat Hu writes. “As persistent as the desire to televise opera is the debate over whether—and how—to do it.”

Explore all of our newsletters here.

A Terrible Milestone in the American Presidency

found 20 Feb The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › newsletters › archive › 2025 › 02 › trump-putin-ukraine-conflict-history › 681743

This story seems to be about:

This week, Donald Trump falsely accused Ukraine of starting a war against a much larger neighbor, inviting invasion and mass death. At this point, Trump—who has a history of trusting Russian President Vladimir Putin more than he trusts the Americans who are sworn to defend the United States—may even believe it. Casting Ukraine as the aggressor (and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as a “dictator,” which Trump did today) makes political sense for Trump, who is innately deferential to Putin, and likely views the conflict as a distraction from his own personal and political agendas. The U.S. president has now chosen to throw America to Putin’s side and is more than willing to see this war end on Russian terms.

Repeating lies, however, does not make them true.

Russia, and specifically Putin, launched this war in 2014 and widened it in 2022. The information and media ecosystem around Trump and the Republican Party has tried for years to submerge the Russian war against Ukraine in a sump of moral relativism, because many in the GOP admire Putin as some sort of Christian strongman. But Putin is making war on a country that is mostly composed of his fellow Orthodox Christians, solely based on his own grandiose fantasies.

The most important thing to understand about the recent history of Russian aggression against its neighbors, and especially against Ukraine, is that Putin is not a product of “Russia” or even of Russian nationalism. He is, in every way, a son of the Soviet Union. He is a man of “the system,” the kind of person who, after the fall of the U.S.S.R., was sometimes called a sovok, which translates roughly into “Soviet guy”—someone who never left the mindset of the old regime. (This is a man who, for example, changed the post-Soviet Russian national anthem back to the old Soviet musical score, with updated words.)

Some in the West want to believe that Putin is merely a traditional player of the game of power politics. This is nonsense: He is a poor strategist precisely because he is so driven by emotion and aggression. His worldview is a toxic amalgam of Russian historical romanticism and Soviet nostalgia; he clearly misses being part of an empire that dared to confront the West and could make the rest of the world tremble with a word from Red Square. (This Sovietism is one reason for his bone-deep hatred of NATO.) He sees himself as the heir to Peter the Great and Stalin, because the greatest days of his life were the mid-1970s, when he was in his 20s and the Soviet Union he served so faithfully looked to be ascendant over the declining United States.

Putin’s Soviet nostalgia prevents him from seeing the other nations that emerged from the wreckage of the Soviet collapse as actual countries. He knows that their borders were drawn by Stalinist mapmakers in Moscow (as were those of the current Russian Federation, a fact that Putin ignores most of the time), and he resents that these new states fled from the Kremlin’s control as soon as they were able to leave. He is especially stung by the emergence of an independent Ukraine; back in 2008, he made a point of telling President George W. Bush that Ukraine was not a real country.

For years, Putin claimed that he had no interest in reconstituting the U.S.S.R. or the Russian Empire. He may have been lying, or he may have changed his mind over time. But when Ukrainians deposed a pro-Russian leader in 2014 and drove him out of the country, Putin lashed out in fury, ordering the seizure of Crimea, a Russian-majority area that was historically part of Russia but was transferred to Ukraine during the Soviet period. This was the true beginning of the Russian-Ukrainian war.

The Russians camped on these territories for years, “freezing” the conflict in place while Ukraine and the West tried carrots and sticks, eventually realizing that Putin was never going to cede any of the ground he’d stolen. The situation might have remained in stasis forever had Putin not decided to try to seize the entire Ukrainian nation of some 40 million people and almost a quarter of a million square miles.

Why did Putin throw the dice on such a stupid and reckless gamble? Trump and many of his supporters answer this question with chaff bursts of nonsense about how the Russians felt legitimately threatened by Western influence in Ukraine, and specifically that Ukraine brought this nightmare on itself by seeking to join NATO. The Russians, for their part, have made similar arguments. NATO membership has for years been an aspirational goal for Ukraine, one that NATO politely supported—but without ever moving to make it happen. (Once Putin invaded, NATO and Ukraine sped up talks, in another example of the Russian president bringing about events he claimed to be stopping.)

Putin himself tends to complicate life for his propagandists by departing from the rationalizations offered by the Kremlin’s useful idiots. Trump and other Western apologists would have an easier time of explaining away the war if the man who started it would only get on the same page as them; instead, Putin has said, many times, that Ukraine is Russian territory, that it has always been and will always be part of Russia, that it is full of Nazis, and that it must be cleansed and returned to Moscow’s control.

One possibility here is that Putin may have dreamed up a quick war of conquest while in COVID isolation, where only a tight circle of sycophants could regularly see him. These would include his defense and intelligence chiefs, along with a small coterie of Russian clerics who have for years been trying to convince Putin that he has a divine mission to restore the “Russian world” to its former greatness, a project that dovetails nicely with his constant anger about the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

In any case, the Russian president’s decision to go to war was his own, a plot cooked up in the Kremlin rather than being the unforeseeable result of some kind of ongoing geopolitical crisis. Here, Putin was the victim of his own form of autocratic government: No one around him had the courage (or perhaps even the proper information) to warn him that his military was in rough shape, that the Ukrainians had improved as fighters since the seizure of Crimea, and that the West would not sit by the way it did in 2014. Western experts got some of this wrong too—back in 2022, I was very worried that Russia might win the war quickly—but Putin was apparently fed a farrago of reassuring lies about how Russian troops would be greeted as liberators.

All anyone needs to know about “who started it” is in the conflict’s timeline: In 2014, Putin vented his rage at Ukrainians for actually choosing their own form of government by seizing large swaths of eastern Ukraine—thus ensuring that the remainder of the country would become more united, pro-Western, and anti-Russian than ever before. Eight years later, the Russian dictator came to believe that Ukraine was ready to fall into his hands, and he embarked on a war of conquest. When Ukraine held together in the face of the 2022 Russian invasion and began to inflict severe casualties on the Russians, Putin resorted to war crimes, butchering innocent people, kidnapping Ukrainian children, and attacking civilian targets as a way of punishing Ukraine for its insolence.

This is the reality of the Ukraine war. Some Republicans, such as former Vice President Mike Pence and Senator Roger Wicker, the chair of the Armed Services Committee, know all this, and have told the truth. If only Donald Trump knew it too.

Today’s News

The Trump administration rescinded federal approval of New York’s congestion-pricing program, which went into effect last month. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that Trump lives in a Russian-constructed “disinformation space.” In response, Trump called Zelensky “a Dictator without Elections.” A federal judge held a hearing about U.S. prosecutors’ attempt to dismiss the corruption charges against New York City’s mayor, Eric Adams.

Dispatches

The Weekly Planet: Trump could start a new pipeline fight, Zoë Schlanger writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.