ArcaMax

President Donald Trump and the GOP have called themselves the party of free speech. But since taking office, the president has been tightening up his definition of freedom like a hangman’s noose.

We could hear it in the White House’s Orwellian decision in February to revoke the Associated Press’ long-held access to the White House, barring it from a news event in the Oval Office because the international news agency would not align its editorial standards with Trump’s executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America.

This is how White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt explained the decision to banish the AP: “We have said … we are going to hold … lies accountable. And it is a fact that the body off the coast is called the Gulf of America, and I’m not sure why news outlets don’t want to call it that.”

Well, maybe she could have asked. AP is a global news organization that reasonably does not want to stir global confusion over the name change.

In January, Trump issued an executive order that renamed the "area formerly known as the Gulf of Mexico." Some digital maps complied with the order. “People using Maps in the U.S. will see ‘Gulf of America,’ and people in Mexico will see ‘Gulf of Mexico,’ ” Google said in a blog post. “Everyone else will see both names.”

Cool. Everybody happy? Not quite. It is “alarming,” said AP, that Team Trump would punish AP for its independent journalism. But it appears to be par for the course in the Trump regime.

Consider its actions against students protesting Israel's war in Gaza. Shortly after Trump took office, the White House issued a fact sheet reiterating Trump's promise of a crackdown: “To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice: come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you. I will also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never before.”

On March 4, Trump threatened on social media to deny federal funding to any university that permitted “illegal protests” and vowed to arrest and/or deport so-called “agitators.”

He didn't take long to follow through. On March 8, immigration agents arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a legal permanent resident of the United States who has been a leader of the Gaza war protests at Columbia University. Immigration officials aim to deport him.

Meanwhile, Trump has threatened universities for a range of grievances ranging from maintaining diversity programs to permitting protests that he deems as antisemitic.

In mid-March the administration told Columbia that the federal government would cancel $400 million in funding to the university unless it overhauled its admissions policies and disciplinary rules. It also demanded, according to the New York Times, that Columbia place its "Middle Eastern studies department under academic receivership for at least five years."

It was a stunning move that some legal scholars call unconstitutional, and that many in academia have termed an existential threat to academic freedom, but the immense leverage Trump is bringing to bear may force Columbia to bend to his wishes.

As Politico reported, 60 colleges are being investigated by the Trump administration for allegations of campus antisemitism, 45 for diversity programs, seven for race-based scholarships and related programs, and a handful of others for transgender participation in athletics.

And Trump has left little doubt that he will continue to wage legal and oratorical warfare against freedoms of the press and speech.

In a contentious speech to his new Justice Department, he suggested actions of the mainstream news media should be considered illegal and subject to investigation.

“I believe that CNN and MS-DNC, who literally write 97.6% bad about me, are political arms of the Democrat Party and in my opinion, they’re really corrupt and they’re illegal, what they do is illegal,” the president said during a contentious speech at the Department of Justice.

Is he serious? One must always raise that question with Trump, given his bombastic oratorical style. It’s best described as a stream-of-consciousness that whipsaws from dystopian warnings to light-hearted storytelling and back to veiled threats. He calls it “the weave.”

“You make a speech, and my speeches last a long time because of the weave, you know, I mean, I weave stories into it,” Trump explained to podcaster Joe Rogan.

“If you don’t — if you just read a teleprompter, nobody’s going to be very excited. You’ve got to weave it out. So you — but you always have to — as you say, you always have to get right back to work. Otherwise, it’s no good. But the weave is very, very important. Very few weavers around. But it’s a big strain on your — you know, it’s a big — it’s a lot of work. It’s a lot of work.”

Actually, for a man who clearly enjoys the sound of his own voice, it doesn't seem like a lot of work. But make no mistake, the real work Trump is about is making sure he gets to police what the rest of us get to say.

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(E-mail Clarence Page at clarence47page@gmail.com.)

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