President Donald Trump is simply not going to stand for the media reporting anything he doesn’t like, and he’s going to use every tool in his toolbox to make that happen. If that means prosecuting media outlets, he’s down. If it means suing them, he’s all in. And if it means gutting nonpartisan government media, he’ll do it.
On Tuesday, Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem threw a little temper tantrum about CNN’s coverage of the ICEBlock app.
Yes, Noem threatened to get the Department of Justice to prosecute CNN for running a segment about an iPhone app. You’d think that CNN had presented a detailed tutorial on how to use ICEBlock to ambush Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, but the coverage is nothing more than an explainer on the app’s inventor and what the app does.
According to Joshua Aaron, the app’s creator, ICEBlock is an “early warning system” to track ICE agents nearby. Users can report the location of agents with notes on how to identify them, and any user within a 5-mile radius will get notified—not unlike the Google Maps feature where you can report that there are police ahead.
It should go without saying, but it is not illegal to determine where ICE agents are and to tell other people. And it certainly isn’t illegal to use an app that does that. Noem’s confusion may be understandable, though, since she thinks of them as her own personal masked secret police.
Ever eager to help Trump weaponize the DOJ, Attorney General Pam Bondi already did a media hit against CNN on Fox News Monday. The app, she claimed, is “giving a message to criminals where our federal officers are, and he cannot do that, and we are looking at it, we are looking into him, and he better watch out.”
Always a legal genius, Bondi went on to say that ICEBlock is “not protected speech.”
That is absolutely not the case. It’s legal to publicize the whereabouts and actions of law enforcement and even to record police. Well, at least until the Supreme Court carves out a special exception for Trump, as it’s wont to do.
After Noem’s threats, Trump had to get in on the action, but he’s actually mad about something entirely different.
“And they may very well be prosecuted also for having given false reports on the attack in Iran. They were given totally false reports. It was totally obliterated,” he said. “So they may very well be prosecuted for that. What they did there, we think, is totally illegal.”
This is the same thing that Trump was mad about a few days ago. But back then, he was threatening the media in his personal capacity—because we now live in a world where the president is allowed to routinely sue media outlets he doesn’t like.
Despite being president, Trump has still made time to pursue his personal grievances against the media. CBS is close to paying him off over his nonsense lawsuit in which he claims that the network deceptively edited a segment featuring Vice President Kamala Harris.
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In other words, CBS is going to pay Trump—the person—millions and millions of dollars so that Trump—the president—will tell the Federal Communications Commission to approve a merger between CBS’ parent company, Paramount, and Skydance Media. It’s the same thing that ABC News did before Trump even took office.
Last week, Trump had his personal attorney, Alejandro Brito—who also handled the ABC suit—send letters to CNN and The New York Times threatening to sue over reporting on a preliminary intelligence report that said that Trump’s drone strikes had only knocked Iran’s nuclear program back a few months.
In his letter to the Times, Brito said that the reporting “undermined the credibility and integrity of President Trump in the eyes of the public and the professional community.”
Apparently, reporting anything at odds with Trump’s assertions is now considered defamation of Trump, allowing him to sue. But it’s also now considered a crime, so Trump, as president, can get the DOJ to prosecute. And just to round things out, Trump’s already had his administration destroy the nonpartisan Voice of America for being “radical.”
The DOJ is supposed to be independent of the president, not a vehicle for Trump to use for retaliatory prosecution. The president shouldn’t be able to pursue his personal civil grievances against the same media outlets that he threatens with prosecution. But it’s happening because norms have not held, and checks and balances fell apart.
Trump’s attacks on the media are an assault on the First Amendment and other core democratic principles. In other words, it’s business as usual for Trump.
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