Former President Donald Trump speaks on May 28, 2022 in Casper, Wyoming. The rally is being held to support Harriet Hageman, Rep. Liz Cheneys primary challenger in Wyoming.
Chet Strange | Getty Images
Former President Donald Trump on Thursday announced a series of aggressive and bold proposals to undo what he characterised because the suppression of free speech in america if he’s elected president in 2024.
Trump, who lost his White House reelection bid in 2020, promised in a videotaped address that he would goal government agencies and employees, universities and tech firms with a series of executive orders and policies aimed toward their purported censorship of speech and concepts.
Amongst other things, Trump vowed to “ban federal money from getting used to label domestic speech as ‘mis-‘ or ‘dis-information,'” including federal subsidies and student loan support for universities.
“The censorship cartel have to be dismantled and destroyed and it must occur immediately,” said the Republican, who’s liable to linguistic hyperbole and over-promising when announcing plans.
“Once I’m president, this whole rotten system of censorship and data control will likely be ripped out of the system at large. There won’t be anything left,” he said.
Trump and other right-wing figures have for years claimed they’re the victims of efforts to limit their speech by purported “deep-state” actors, mainstream media outlets and social media firms.
Those claims gained added fuel in recent weeks with the discharge earlier this month of what Twitter CEO Elon Musk called the “Twitter files” to support claims that the corporate’s prior management handled content moderation in a way that was biased against conservatives. Twitter released the inner communications to a handful of conservative writers, who published a series of tweets detailing the social media company’s decision before the 2020 election to temporarily suppress a Recent York Post story concerning the contents of a laptop owned by Hunter Biden, son of President Joe Biden.
Musk has even gone to date as to say that Twitter, which he bought in October, interfered with U.S. elections. Twitter didn’t reply to requests for the records from CNBC and The Recent York Times.
Some studies have found that, despite claims of a liberal-leaning Twitter censoring conservatives, the social media platform elevated conservative news and voices over liberal content.
Trump said that “inside hours of my inauguration” he would sign an executive order banning federal agencies “from colluding” with others to censor or otherwise limit lawful speech by individuals.
He also said he would begin a process to discover and fire “every federal bureaucrat who has engaged in domestic censorship.”
And he said he would order the Department of Justice “to analyze all parties involved in the brand new online censorship regime, which is completely destructive and terrible, and to aggressively prosecute any and all crimes identified.”
“These include possible violations of federal civil rights law, campaign finance laws, federal election law, securities law and antitrust laws, the Hatch Act, and a number of other potential criminal civil regulatory and constitutional offenses,” he said.
Stephen Farnsworth, professor of political science at University of Mary Washington, dismissed Trump’s proposals as “something to generate energy amongst his supporters” after a soggy campaign kickoff.
“This will not be a plan that might ever succeed legislatively or judicially if it got here to that,” Farnsworth said in an interview. He said Trump was “trying to alter the narrative” after a lot of his handpicked candidates lost high-profile races within the recent midterm elections.
“The previous president’s fast and loose reference to the reality makes him a poor selection to dictate the terms of discourse within the country,” Farnsworth added.
Ian Ostrander, associate political science professor at Michigan State University, said that if Trump were elected again, he “could definitely use tools reminiscent of executive orders to creatively alter government policy.”
“But making drastic and enduring changes will be hard using just unilateral powers,” Ostrander wrote in an email to CNBC.Â
Trump on Thursday also reiterated his long-standing desire for the repeal of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects web sites from being sued over content posted by their users.
Just as there isn’t any guarantee that Trump will likely be the GOP presidential nominee in 2024 — or that he would win a general election contest — there isn’t any guarantee that he can or would follow through on any or the entire guarantees within the plan he announced Thursday.
When he was president, Trump was frustrated by his inability to force the Department of Justice to do things he wanted done, reminiscent of taking steps to reverse his election loss to Biden, and was enraged by the department appointing a special counsel, Robert Mueller, to analyze his 2016 campaign’s contact with Russians.
And when Trump vetoed the National Defense Authorization Act in late 2020 since the bill didn’t include the elimination of Section 230, Congress overrode that veto.
— CNBC’s Lora Kolodny contributed to this report.
