By all means, let’s cheer these heartening signs of the backbone and integrity of everyday Americans in the face of once unthinkable attacks on our democracy. But best to remember, too, that what Trump is pursuing here is an attempted criminalization of political speech the likes of which has never happened.
Scroll through the list of members of Congress who have been convicted of crimes over the two hundred and fifty years of American history. There have been plenty of crooks, Democrats and Republicans alike, who took bribes or extorted them. But you’d have to go back to 1798 to find the one disgraceful example of a congressman prosecuted for exercising his constitutional right to free speech: Matthew Lyons, of Connecticut, was convicted and jailed for four months after publishing an editorial critical of President John Adams in violation of the Alien and Sedition Acts, which, thankfully, have long since been repealed and repudiated.
The point is this: not even during the violent rupture of the Civil War or the Red Scare crackdown of the First World War or the worst excesses of McCarthyism did any President attempt what Trump has this week. He failed with one indictment and one grand jury, but he has three more years to go. Can anyone say confidently that he will not succeed when he tries once again to jail his political opponents for speaking out against him, as he seems so intent upon doing?
In the immediate aftermath of news about the attempted indictment, there was a furious reaction from Democratic colleagues of the targeted six. Brian Schatz, the senator from Hawaii, called it “absolutely obscene, disgusting,” and “the stuff of dictatorships.” Chris Murphy, the senator from Connecticut, came out within minutes with a message to those “who have been biding their time and waiting for him to cross the magic red line before speaking up”; with Trump actually moving to arrest senators, Murphy suggested, now “is a good time to get off the fucking sidelines.”
A couple of days later, it’s clear that the sidelines are still filled with those who are not likely to say anything unless and until Trump comes for them, too. On Thursday morning, when I spoke with Jason Crow, a Democratic congressman and military veteran from Colorado who was one of the six targeted members, he told me that, “in the last twenty-four hours since this news broke, zero Republicans have come up to me” or reached out to express their alarm. Instead, House Speaker Mike Johnson, a constitutional lawyer by training who certainly knows better, endorsed the failed indictment and claimed that shooting the video constituted “obstructing law enforcement.” The silence of those who so recently claimed that free speech in America was under attack by left-wing thought police speaks for itself.
Just as worrisome is that this attempted indictment is not some crazy one-off or stupid error on the part of Jeanine Pirro, the President’s Fox News cheerleader turned U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia. It’s the policy now, not the aberration. I think we have failed to appreciate that Trump has undertaken such a sweeping campaign against free speech precisely because it has proceeded so swiftly over the past year on so many fronts: lawsuits against news organizations; arrests of protesters in cities such as Chicago, Portland, and Los Angeles; the expulsion of disfavored journalists from the White House and Pentagon press corps; pressure on media ownership by Trump and other senior executive-branch officials.
