Trump's open war on the media

WashingtonDonald Trump is wasting no time capitalizing on the murder of far-right activist Charlie Kirk and leave the euphemisms behind. Now that Trumpism has internalized and validated the cancel culture it had long criticized, the American president has dropped the disguised pressure and has opened fire directly on the media. Raising the image of his new political martyr, Trump feels unpunished for threatening to revoke television licenses if they criticize him.

The warning came on Thursday, when he was asked if the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) would intervene in other networks after requesting the suspension of comedian Jimmy KimmelTrump threatened to revoke the licenses of television stations that provided "negative" coverage of his presidency. Initially, Kimmel was suspended for a comment about Kirk's killer, not for criticizing Trump. But the president no longer cares about consistency. He no longer needs to continue to disguise his narrative.

Kimmel's suspension has put the spotlight on a harassment campaign that the president has been leading since before entering the White House. One need only recall the lawsuits against CBS and ABC. The first was in October 2024, before he won the election, and the second in December, just after his election victory. In both cases, the companies decided to bury the legal dispute by paying off the lawsuit. At that point, some alarm bells were already ringing about the future predicted by those two cases. On Friday the judge dismissed another lawsuit against the New York Times.

Vetoes in the press room

From the White House, the Trump administration has used press accreditations as a tool to pressure the media. In the first months of his term, he banned the Associated Press (AP) from pool –the group of journalists who follow the president– from the Oval Office for not abiding by the "Golf of America" ​​nomenclature he had dictated for the Gulf of Mexico. AP was unable to regain its position until, months later, a court ruled in his favor. Forcing the media to go through costly litigation is another attrition tactic against the press.

The punishment for not conforming to their new reality also served as a warning to the rest of the media, which in recent months have had to face increasingly frontal attacks from all members of the cabinet—not just Trump—while the halls of the White House have become increasingly crowded. of influencers government-aligned. The new media, as they have been dubbed. In the press room, political journalists share space with correspondents from Steve Bannon's podcast, Bannon's War Room, or streaming television's Real America's Voice (RAV). Even Turning Point USA (TPUSA), the platform founded by Kirk, has a guest.

Each of the questions these new mediaBeyond providing feedback to the Trump administration's official narrative, they occupy space for questions intended to scrutinize the government's actions. The result is that public scrutiny of press conferences is increasingly diluted amidst the propaganda. And White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt also directly confronts and attacks journalists who ask her uncomfortable questions.

All of this turns out to be a trend that Trump has normalized. Before returning to the presidency, the president limited himself to criticizing and insulting the media, but now he's also threatening them. Just this Tuesday, he silenced an Australian journalist who had asked him about conflicts of interest between his businesses and his public office. "You're doing damage in Australia right now. And they want to get along with me. Your leader will be coming to see me soon, and I'll talk to him about you. You used a very bad tone; you could be nicer," he warned.

Emboldened, he also threatened another ABC reporter who had asked him on what legal grounds he intended to prosecute "hate speech": "We will probably go after people like you because you treat me very unfairly and you have a lot of hate in your heart."

A television animal

The president's relationship with the media has always been turbulent and toxic. For years, the tycoon relied on television and the tabloid press to build his reputation as a businessman, which he would later exploit to reach the White House. Trump has repeatedly proven himself a television animal who knows how to read the internal workings of the media. The Republican knows that his histrionic style and incendiary statements earn him headlines and news coverage. But at the same time, Trump detests the media for how they scrutinized his first term.

This dependence became poisoned and weakened, and an entire alternative media ecosystem emerged amid the rise of the ultraconservative movement. Toward the end of Trump's first term, and especially during his interregnum, the American far right built a system of alternative media sympathetic to the cause. Influencers With millions of followers like the late Kirk, they played a decisive role in Trump's victory in the last election. Not to mention Elon Musk's drugged algorithm, which in the final stretch of the election gave greater visibility to polarizing speeches and conspiracy theories about possible electoral fraud.

The war on the media, however, is not only against domestic media. The Department of Homeland Security is working to pass a new rule that seeks to shorten correspondent visas to a maximum duration of 240 days, with the possibility of requesting multiple extensions of the same period. This makes it easier for the administration to silence uncomfortable questions.