Jail Political Enemies

Trump Is Threatening to Jail Political Enemies. So Are Democrats.

There’s a bipartisan backlash against press freedom.

Jeremy Schulman

In December, Trump adviser Kash Patel set off alarm bells when he said that if the former president returns to the Oval Office, his new administration might prosecute media figures and others “who lied about American citizens.”

“We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media,” Patel told Steve Bannon. “Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections—we’re going to come after you. Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out. But yeah, we’re putting you all on notice.”

Patel prefaced this menacing promise by insisting that a future Trump Justice Department would “follow the facts and the law.” But that was hardly reassuring. As legal scholar Jacob Mchangama explained in his 2022 tome, Free Speech: A History From Socrates to Social Media, the use of government power to punish journalists and dissidents for spreading fake news and “seditious libel” has for centuries been a favorite tool of tyrants.

The modern United States has generally been unique in this respect. With some glaring exceptions, American courts no longer allow law enforcement to target citizens for expressing disfavored views. For years, Americans have been widely supportive of the protections afforded by their country’s “free speech exceptionalism.” But as Mchangama warns, recent survey data suggests that the country’s remarkable “consensus around free speech” appeared to “break down during the presidency of Donald Trump.”

Trump has long called for prosecutions against those he sees as political enemies. And in 2018, as president, he infamously threatened to take some sort of legal action against NBC over “unfair news coverage” and unflattering satire on Saturday Night Live.

Recently, Trump has escalated such rhetoric against one particular media mogul he dislikes. According to Politico, a forthcoming coffee table book by Trump takes aim at Mark Zuckerberg, the head of Facebook, who in 2020 privately funded improvements to election administration around the country—an initiative that Trump allies have baselessly suggested was part of a grand plot to steal the election. “We are watching him closely,” Trump reportedly says in the new book, “and if he does anything illegal this time he will spend the rest of his life in prison—as will others who cheat in the 2024 Presidential Election.”

Unfortunately, Republicans don’t have a monopoly on schemes to jail their enemies in the media. In a column for the Guardian Friday, Robert Reich—who served as Labor secretary under President Bill Clinton and is now something of a progressive policy celebrity—argued that “regulators around the world should threaten” to arrest Elon Musk “if he doesn’t stop disseminating lies and hate on X.” Reich’s demand for censorial prosecutions of a high-profile Trump supporter was made all the more appalling by the fact that it was published in a paper founded two centuries ago in the wake of a violent crackdown against freedom of speech and the press.

Unlike Trump, Reich isn’t likely to acquire actual prosecutorial powers anytime soon. The same cannot be said about the presidential candidate Reich supports. At the Democratic National Convention last month, the party debuted a cringy Law & Order parody video. “For the first time in history, we have a convicted felon running for president,” the narrator intoned. “And to take on this case, we need a president who has spent her life prosecuting perpetrators like Donald Trump.”

Pushing for ideological prosecutions, it seems, is quickly becoming a bipartisan problem.