When Donald Trump returned to power in January 2025, he leaned hard into the right-wing narrative that free speech was under siege from liberal elites, Big Tech platforms and an overreaching Biden administration. He promised in his inaugural address to “immediately stop all government censorship and bring back free speech to America.” Now the conservative architects of the anti-cancel-culture movement are discovering that their hero has become the most aggressive censor in modern American presidential history.
In January, the FBI raided the home of Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson as part of an investigation into a Pentagon contractor who had allegedly leaked classified information, an action legal scholars called “intensely concerning” for its chilling effect on journalism. (On May 4, Natanson was part of a team at the Post that was awarded a Pulitzer for Public Service reporting.) Two months later, Trump posted that media outlets covering a national security story involving war rescue operations in Iran should be “brought up on Charges for TREASON.” In April, he threatened to force CNN to hand over its sources “or go to jail.”
For years, the MAGA faithful raged against the left’s supposed creeping culture of cancellation. Now, the machinery of the federal government is being loosed on the president’s enemies with a thoroughness and a vindictiveness that has begun to unsettle even his most loyal media allies.
For years, the MAGA faithful raged against the left’s supposed creeping culture of cancellation. Now, the machinery of the federal government — using agencies like the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) — is being loosed on the president’s enemies with a thoroughness and a vindictiveness that has begun to unsettle even his most loyal media allies.
You know the project is going sideways when Megyn Kelly starts defending Jimmy Kimmel.
After Trump spent days rage-posting on Truth Social, demanding that ABC and Disney fire the late-night host over a roast joke about Melania Trump — that she had the “glow of an expectant widow,” a quip delivered two days before the April 25 shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, but that Trump’s allies grotesquely linked to the apparent assassination attempt — Kelly, who had spent the prior week calling the joke “sick” and demanding accountability, abruptly reversed course. “It’s very inappropriate,” the former Fox News host said on her SiriusXM podcast. “The president of the United States should not be calling for any private company to fire any employee, especially over free speech.”
The Kimmel affair is a case study in how the Trump administration has weaponized federal regulatory power to settle personal scores. Within days of Trump’s demands, the FCC — whose chairman, Brendan Carr, had already threatened ABC affiliates with “news distortion” investigations — issued what the National Association of Broadcasters called a “nearly unprecedented” order forcing Disney to reapply for spectrum licenses for all eight ABC-owned stations on an accelerated timeline. Carr denied any White House pressure, claiming the action was about diversity, equity and inclusion investigations, not speech.
But ABC is not the only television network facing pressure from the administration. Even after the agency’s own expert staff found no legal basis for it, the FCC revived a complaint in 2025 against CBS over edits to a 2024 “60 Minutes” interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris and held it over the head of CBS’s parent company, Paramount, while a merger requiring FCC approval was pending. In the meantime, Stephen Colbert’s late-night show was canceled and a “media monitor” to screen CBS content was installed. Then, on April 26 Trump sat down with Norah O’Donnell for his own “60 Minutes” interview after the shooting at the Washington Hilton. Much of the president’s remarks — including a rant comparing anti-Trump protesters to the Ku Klux Klan, musings about his Secret Service agents’ looks and a bragging session about his planned White House ballroom — were edited out without objection from the White House. This is the same president who sued CBS for $20 billion over its editing of the Harris interview, extracting a $16 million settlement and forcing the network to agree to publish full transcripts of future presidential interviews as a condition of FCC merger approval.
Conservatives once argued that even the hint of government retaliation against media organizations was intolerable. Now they are being asked to accept that a regulatory probe targeting a network criticized by the president is merely coincidental. The editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, part of Rupert Murdoch’s conservative media empire, isn’t buying it.
In recent months, the newspaper has warned that Trump’s “lawfare against his political opponents is destructive” and cautioned that regulatory inquiries into media companies risk becoming tools of intimidation. When the Trump FTC, under chair Andrew Ferguson, launched an investigation into the media ratings service NewsGuard, alleging it was conspiring to suppress conservative outlets, the Journal’s editorial board drew a bright constitutional line: “The First Amendment protects private actors against censorship by the government.”
But the New York Post, a tabloid seen as being closely aligned with Trump, took the opposite position, complaining that NewsGuard had given it a low credibility score and cheering the FTC’s efforts, framing them as a necessary counterweight to perceived liberal bias. The Murdoch empire, in other words, is now publicly arguing with itself about whether the government should be allowed to kneecap media critics.
The Trump administration has made its preference clear.
According to reporting from the New York Times, the EEOC, an independent civil rights agency, is reportedly being pressured to pursue discrimination cases against the Times on behalf of a white male employee who didn’t receive a promotion. The Times has referred to the case as “a predetermined narrative” and a “blatant weaponization” of a government body.
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On its face, this is a workplace discrimination dispute. In context, it looks like a federal agency targeting a major news organization that has been critical of the president, because censorship in the Trump era involves not just the crude banning of speech, but the strategic raising of its price.
Meanwhile, some in MAGA media have derided the Department of Justice’s indictment of former FBI Director James Comey over an Instagram post of seashells arranged to read “86 47” on a North Carolina beach, which the government claims constitutes a credible threat to kill Trump, the 47th president. Comey says it’s a political slogan — “get rid of 47” — that he photographed because his wife thought it was interesting and deleted as soon as the backlash started. The indictment carries a maximum sentence of ten years. The popular podcaster Joe Rogan, who was in the Oval Office with Trump less than two weeks ago, was critical of the case. “It’s nuts,” he said on his podcast. “You’re going after someone for something that’s just silly. If the guy really was dirty, you should have something on him other than this seashell picture.” Rogan also recently mocked what he called the “ridiculous” backlash against Kimmel, noting that “nobody gave a s—t” about it until after a violent incident suddenly transformed it into a supposed incitement.
Even within the more hardline corners of the movement, there are signs of discomfort. The backlash against a viral TikTok trend that used audio from the assassination of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk illustrates the complexity of the current moment. Conservatives condemned the trend as grotesque and dehumanizing, and the platform moved quickly to remove the content. But the episode also exposed a lingering inconsistency: The same movement that once insisted private companies should be free to moderate content as they see fit now demands intervention when that moderation cuts in the opposite direction.
The conservative voices pushing back against Trump’s censorious campaign of retribution have spent years providing rhetorical cover for his authoritarian instincts, cheering on his attacks on “fake news” and dismissing every warning about democratic backsliding as liberal hysteria. Their discomfort now is real, but it is also belated and partial. Kelly still considers the Kimmel joke “out of line.” Rogan still thinks Trump is broadly doing the right things. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board still ties itself in knots trying to criticize the administration’s “lawfare” while acknowledging that some targets might deserve it.
None of them will say the thing plainly. None of them will acknowledge that this was always where it was going.
The pattern has never been subtle. Trump told Lesley Stahl in 2018, openly and without apparent embarrassment, why he attacks the press: “I do it to discredit you all and demean you all so that when you write negative stories about me no one will believe you.” He has been consistent on this for over a decade. The press corps, however, has often been reluctant to describe this dynamic in plain terms. Stories are framed as discrete controversies — an FCC review here, an EEOC lawsuit there — rather than as components of a broader strategy. But taken together, they form a pattern that is difficult to ignore, even for MAGA media.
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