President Donald Trump has a well-deserved reputation for gaslighting, and several members of his Cabinet have taken great efforts to continue his willful duplicity. Over the course of the past week alone — in the name of academic, scientific and online “freedom” — Trump and his administration’s bigwigs have explicitly threatened free speech in at least a half-dozen different ways.
Over the course of the past week alone, Trump and his administration’s bigwigs have explicitly threatened free speech in at least a half-dozen different ways.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. — who during the 2024 campaign frequently cosplayed as a free speech activist and a victim of censorship — said on a podcast Tuesday that he might bar government scientists from publishing in some of the most venerable and respected, peer-reviewed medical journals. “They’re all corrupt,” Kennedy claimed, citing the fact that they sometimes publish studies that are funded by pharmaceutical companies. Kennedy also said he’d like to create an in-house publication, a nifty way of controlling what government-employed scientists publish. Already, Dr. Kevin Hall, a nutrition scientist at the National Institutes of Health, resigned last month, citing censorship of his work “because of agency concerns that it did not appear to fully support preconceived narratives of my agency’s leadership about ultra-processed food addiction.”
In an interview with CNBC on Wednesday, Education Secretary Linda McMahon was asked about the administration’s intent to cancel all federal grants to Harvard University — upwards of $9 billion in research funding. The secretary’s reply was telling: “Universities should continue to be able to do research as long as they’re abiding by the laws and in sync, I think, with the administration and what the administration is trying to accomplish.”
The free speech tourists of the Trump administration probably know this already — which is why it’s fair to call it gaslighting — but it is not the mission of academic institutions to be “in sync” with any presidential administration. They’re supposed to be bastions of free thought and inquiry, and though many (especially Harvard) haven’t kept to those principles in recent decades, it’s hard to fathom how blackmailing colleges into ideological submission could possibly further anyone’s rights to freedom of expression.
Moreover, McMahon’s justification for sanctions on Harvard — that the university violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by insufficiently policing antisemitism on its campus — is remarkable insincerity.
For starters, just this week the administration promoted Kingsley Wilson — who posted multiple antisemitic conspiracy theories online last year — to Defense Department press secretary. On Thursday, Trump announced his nomination of former far-right podcast host Paul Ingrassia to lead the U.S. Office of Special Counsel. Ingrassia, in 2023, advocated for conservatives to welcome “dissident voices” like antisemitic white nationalist Nick Fuentes into the larger MAGA movement.
And then there’s the matter of President Trump’s executive order earlier this month directing the federal government to stop using a key enforcement mechanism of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that Trump has threatened another lawsuit against CBS in his brazen attempt to shake down Paramount Global for millions of dollars to settle a bogus lawsuit over what he erroneously claims was a deceptively edited “60 Minutes” interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris. The president’s harassment — and Paramount controlling shareholder Shari Redstone’s apparent prioritization of getting federal approval for a business merger over journalistic integrity — have already led to the departures of “60 Minutes” long-time executive producer Bill Owens and CBS News CEO Wendy McMahon. Let’s be very clear: Trump is threatening both costly litigation and government retaliation against a news organization over its interview with a political rival. That’s censorship, plain and simple, because the threats themselves have widespread speech-chilling effects.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Wednesday offered a particularly bold stroke of free speech gaslighting, announcing in a post on X “a new visa restriction policy that will apply to foreign officials and persons who are complicit in censoring Americans.” Rhapsodizing about the glories of free speech out of one side of his mouth while threatening draconian censorship out of the other is a long-standing Trumpian tactic. Basically, Secretary Rubio is threatening to ban anyone who enforces online content moderation laws and policies abroad that affect U.S. citizens. One former State Department official put a rhetorical question to Politico, “If there’s an American Nazi posting stuff in France and France is like, banning pro-Nazi stuff, is Rubio going to say that the owners of that French platform doing content moderation are barred from entry to the United States?” If that weren’t enough free speech gaslighting, this is all happening as the U.S. detains and attempts to expel from the country foreign students for such offenses as writing op-eds critical of Israel for their college newspapers. “Every time I find one of these lunatics I take away their visa,” Rubio said in March. On Wednesday the State Department issued a cable to embassies and consulates advising them to halt student visa interviews “in preparation for an expansion of required social media screening and vetting.” And on Friday, the department announced it would be starting this program with Harvard. Even the lack of a public-facing social media presence would be used by the government as evidence against student applicants, as it “may be reflective of evasiveness and call into question the applicant’s credibility.” Put plainly, the Trump administration is going to scour international students’ social media posts for potential thought crimes against America — or even a lack thereof — in the name of protecting American values. “Free speech is essential to the American way of life — a birthright over which foreign governments have no authority,” Rubio posted Wednesday. Rhapsodizing about the glories of free speech out of one side of his mouth while threatening draconian censorship out of the other is a long-standing Trumpian tactic. And some of Trump’s most senior deputies this week proved adept at matching their boss’s deception and hypocrisy.
Anthony L. Fisher is a senior editor and opinion columnist for MS NOW, often covering free speech, civil liberties and extremism. He was previously the senior opinion editor for The Daily Beast and a politics columnist for Business Insider. 
