On Trump’s first day back in office, he signed an executive order that reaffirmed the United States’ commitment to the First Amendment after four years of online platforms *checks notes* telling Facebook moms that vaccines don’t cause autism?

You know, I was very disturbed by censorship online. How dare the man tell me I’m not more qualified than certified professionals! Just because I didn’t earn my medical degree and get all of my medical knowledge from alpha male Instagram reels, doesn’t mean I’m any less qualified to give medical advice!

For years, the U.S. was in a free speech crisis because it was slightly harder for conspiracy nuts to spread their delusions.

In response to these unacceptable attacks on freedom of speech, Trump has been hard at work to combat these troubling trends that have systematically stripped us of our right to call random strangers online racial slurs.

In response to this reign of terror over speech, he has called critical coverage of him from certain outlets “illegal,” barred journalists from the Oval Office, and defunded universities that dare to disagree with him. 

All in the name of freedom, I promise.

Ever since his first term in office, Trump has had a precarious relationship with the First Amendment. He treats freedom of speech like Gollum in Lord of the Rings treats the One Ring. He treats it like his “precious,” but refuses to give it to others.

Mind you, nearly every president has a terrible relationship with the press. Even Obama had a troubled relationship with the media. As journalists, it’s our job to hold power accountable, creating a messy relationship with the executive power. 

What sets Trump apart from other presidents is his substantive actions and threats against people and institutions that exercise their constitutional right to free speech.

For example, The Associated Press was banned from the White House press pool. This must have happened because of some major infraction, right? For an entire major outlet to be barred from the Oval Office, they surely did something truly egregious. 

So what was the crime they committed? They used the term “Gulf of Mexico” instead of “Gulf of America.”

You can’t make this up, the man who will go on tirades about trans people is now getting butthurt because people are dead-naming the Gulf of “America,” despite its internationally recognized title still being the Gulf of Mexico. 

It’s silly, childish, and unbecoming of the most powerful man on earth, and most importantly, a blatant violation of freedom of speech as he and other republicans have laid out.

So tell me, Donald, why do you get your britches in a twist over people being banned for posting misinformation, while also banning reporters from the White House for not sucking up to your vanity project?

This is just a tiny microchosm that shows that Trump doesn’t give a damn about free speech. He only cares about the speech that agrees with him.

I don’t blame you if you haven’t heard about this, because all the rage has been tariffs over the last month, but as all of this economic chaos has been happening, our freedom of speech is being stripped and violated.

From day one, this administration has laid siege to constitutionally protected speech across a variety of sectors, in particular immigration and education.

On March 25, ICE agents abducted a Ph.D. student at Tufts University, ​​Rümeysa Öztürk. Since then, she has been detained, with no afforded due process, and as of April 19, a district judge has ordered that she be brought back to Vermont to determine whether she was illegally detained.

A spokesperson from the Department of Homeland Security in March said, without evidence, that she is connected to Hamas. The only indicator of said “support” was a pro-Palestine editorial she co-wrote for the Tufts University student newspaper.

Additionally, Mohsen Mahdawi has been a legal permanent resident with a green card since 2014. He was studying at Columbia University and is also a pro-Palestine activist. He was detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) but has not been charged with a crime.

Mind you, he is a self-described Buddhist advocating for peace. Yes, ICE is now scared that Buddhists advocating for peace are terrorist sympathizers. 

Mind you, the Supreme Court has ruled time and again that anyone in this country, INCLUDING non-citizens, is entitled to constitutional protections. In cases like Bridges v. Wixon and Zadvydas v. Davis, the Court affirmed that noncitizens inside the U.S. — including those on visas — are protected by the First and Fifth Amendments regardless of their ideologies.

So, even IF both students agreed with Hamas, it doesn’t matter, because they are legally allowed to do so.

Last month, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that approximately 300 student visas were revoked to combat anti-Semitism on college campuses, including several from Lehigh University. Still, this vague and euphemistic language only hides the sinister goals of this administration to punish and silence students by making examples out of the most vulnerable among us.

The Trump administration is targeting higher education institutions that aren’t bending to its every whim and demand, as well as students.

In particular, Harvard has become a prominent target of the Trump administration. 

Trump is pulling over $2 billion in funding, revoking its tax-exempt status, and threatening to block enrollment of international students, because the school isn’t bending to the administration’s demands. 

These demands include Harvard submitting detailed records on each international student, sharing hiring data, and bringing in outside parties to ensure “ideological diversity.” Yes, that is correct, the administration that so vehemently opposes DEI wants schools to have affirmative action, but for conservatives. Nothing screams academic freedom like forcing private schools to submit their syllabi to the federal government.

Harvard is the most prominent example of Trump’s larger crusade to purge “woke ideology” from college campuses. Schools like Columbia University have also been targeted, and the school bent to the administration’s demands to avoid a $400 million funding cut.

During the Red Scare in the 1950s, Senator Joseph McCarthy made a career of accusing academics, public officials, and celebrities of being communists. Professors were forced to testify in congressional committees, and curricula were scrubbed clean of anything resembling Marxism. 

Sound familiar? 

If you swap the word “communist” with “woke,” you essentially have the current battle over higher education, same blueprint, different decade. 

This crusade against wokeism is modern-day McCarthyism, and is being used as a bludgeoning tool to muzzle dissent, punish critical thinking, and attempt to turn schools into the indoctrination zones he accuses them of being. 

As much as this administration puffs its chest and tries to project strength, these actions only project weakness. 

If you’re ideology is so weak that it crumbles when a student reads The Communist Manifesto, maybe it’s not the “woke indoctrination” that’s the issue. If your movement crumbles at the thought of a sociology professor pointing out systemic inequality exists, then maybe your ideas weren’t very strong to begin with. If you need to instill ideological affirmative action, maybe you have to take a look at yourself rather than the professors just trying to do their jobs.

Real strength isn’t silencing and violently suppressing dissent; it’s inviting it. It’s engaging in the debate rather than threatening to defund whoever disagrees. 

Trump’s attacks on First Amendment rights are not reflective of strength. They are reflective of his and the current Republican coalition’s fear of being challenged and losing control.

If you need to make “safe spaces” for conservative professors, take a look at yourself before blaming everyone around you and childishly flipping the chessboard. 

If you believed in the power of your ideas, then you wouldn’t need to bulldoze academic institutions to keep them alive. You wouldn’t need to silence and bully dissent, and deport students.

If you want to see censorship, it’s not being banned on Twitter because you compared Anthony Fauci to Hitler; it’s journalists being shut out of the White House for not complying with Trump’s nationalist vanity projects.

If you want to see political persecution, it’s not your Aunt Shannon being cancelled on Facebook for posting #freetigerking, it’s students being ruthlessly kidnapped off the street for lawfully advocating for peace.

If you want to see a threat to our liberty, it’s not facing the social consequences of your own words, it’s the government systemically targeting educational institutions that dare to question. 

These threats to free speech threaten everyone regardless of ideology. If we don’t fight for the right to question, challenge, and speak, then we might not have it.

So, spare me the crocodile tears over your cousin’s banned Facebook account. The only “Gulf of America” I see is the one between your shallow fantasies of free speech and the rights this administration is stripping away.