Trump opens the door to persecuting the opposition and threatens to shut down critical television stations.

WashingtonThe screams of "Fight, fight, fight!" that Donald Trump brandished After surviving the Butler assassination, they were not only a tool to galvanize his own supporters. They were also a promise of revenge that, a year after the episode, is rampant throughout a much more fractured society, where the president has opened the door to the persecution of the opposition. Whether in universities, scientific research centers, the media, or in the streets. The censorship of Jimmy Kimmel's show for a comment about Charlie Kirk's killer and the announcement that he will classify the anti-fascist movement as a "terrorist organization" are the most recent examples, but they will not be the last.

And in fact, the president himself is not hiding, and this Thursday night he suggested that "the license should be revoked" from American television networks that provide "negative" coverage of his presidency, thus opening the door to direct political censorship. Trump was answering questions from reporters on Air Force One while returning to the United States, who were asking him if he would have the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) intervene against other hosts after having managed to suspend Kimmel's show. Hours earlier, when asked about the same thing, Trump claimed that Kimmel had been fired "for lack of talent." On this second occasion, he did not refer to any specific show, but noted that most mainstream television networks in his country had had "97 percent negative coverage" of him since the election campaign. "They only give me bad press. And they're getting a license. I think maybe they should revoke their licenses," he said.

Kirk's murder has only been one more pretext to leave behind euphemisms in a political and social arena where the ultraconservative movement has always considered the left to be the enemy. Trump's return to the White House was a necessary condition to free the United States from what they call "the agenda." woke". The summer of the campaign, Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation –the think tank ultraconservative behind Project 2025–, explained on Steve Bannon's podcast: "For the first time in history, the conservative movement in that country is as organized as they are [the left]. What we're building here is not just for 2025, it's for the next century of America." He added: "I want to be part of what I call the second American revolution, which will happen bloodlessly if the left allows it."

Trump, consciously or not, is driving this "second American revolution" surrounded by loyalists who don't stop him and also by some of the authors of Project 2025. The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Brendan Carr, who threatened to use the network –"We can do it willingly or by force"–, is one of the authors of the document. Like border czar Thomas Homan, who has cracked down on migrants, and the president's advisor, Stephen Miller, the great ideologue behind the campaign of mass deportations.

Miller spoke this way about the left in the country these days, before Trump announced his intention to designate anti-fascism as terrorism: "We are going to channel all the rage we have about the organized campaign that led to this murder into rooting out and dismantling these terrorist networks... identifying, dismantling, dismantling, and destroying these networks, and making America safe for the American people again." Miller criminalizes a large portion of the citizenry, where it seems there is only room for one American people, which is his own.

Calling a movement as broad as anti-fascism a terrorist movement is not an oversight either. Vagueness and vagueness are part of Trump's administrative language, which he exploits to stretch to the limit and accommodate anything that bothers him. It's the same pattern that has been followed. to try to interfere with academic freedom in universities, accusing them of allowing antisemitism. Under the Trump administration, any public stance critical of the Gaza war can be considered anti-SemiticUnder this broader reworking of the concept, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) reviews the social media accounts of visa applicants. and takes it into account as a criterion for denying them.

The DHS has also been harassing the media online these days, publicly accusing them of spreading hate against immigration agents with their news stories about raids on undocumented immigrants. "We call on the media and the left to stop the hateful rhetoric against President Trump, his supporters, and our brave officers," the department wrote in a press release Wednesday. On Thursday, it shared a story from the Associated Press and accused the department of "attempting to create a climate of fear and discredit law enforcement" to explain the negative impact of Washington's militarization in the attendance of migrant children in school.

In the same way that Trump has been responsible for eroding the two great countervailing powers of the system of checks and balances of American democracy – the legislative and judicial branches – now wants to bring the fourth power to its knees: journalism, which in democracies is known by that name for its oversight work.

The intention to subdue the press under his alternative reality was already proven at the beginning of his term, when he vetoed the Associated Press from pool (the group of journalists who follow the president) from the Oval Office for not accepting the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico as "America's Golf Course," as he had ordered. AP had to ride out the punishment until the judges ruled in their favor.

Even the First Amendment, which protects freedom of expression, has been questioned by Attorney General Pam Bondi. Regarding Kirk's murder, Bondi posted on social media that "hate speech that crosses the line into threats of violence is not protected by the First Amendment; it is a crime." The statements from the Trump establishment have even made their own people shake their heads.

Former Fox host Tucker Carlson said: "We hope that a year from now, the chaos we're seeing in the wake of [Kirk's] assassination is not exploited to introduce hate speech laws in this country. If that were to happen... there would never be a more justified time."

Trump began the purge in two directions: from within, cleaning out the administration's civil service so that it wouldn't hinder him, and from below, targeting undocumented immigrants, the weakest tier of society. Now the repressive campaign that began on day 1 of his term is only following the logical path, from the inside out: the media. And from the bottom up: his citizens.