In a recent speech, Donald Trump renewed his call to throw political opponents into prison while standing in front of the DOJ logo.
If you dare to disagree with the Trump regime, you will face the full force of the “law”. That has long been a general message sent by the Trump regime. Sadly, these are just empty words. This has been followed up by an increasingly deranged set of actions by him and his inner circle to crack down on anyone daring to speak out against the fascist dictator or saying anything the moron in chief disapproves of.
Examples include Trump’s earlier call to throw journalists in jail for the crime of reporting the news Trump disagrees with. There was the legal threat against the New York Times and Penguin Randomhouse. Another example is Trump silencing the Associated Press. That, of course, was followed up by the silencing of the Huffington Post and Reuters. Shadow president, Elon Musk, also joined in by echoing calls to jail reporters. FBI pick, Kash Patel, also threatened the media.
Further, there was the two “investigations” into news outlets publishing thought crimes. What’s more, Trump also filed a lawsuit against a pollster for the crime of getting a poll wrong when compared to election results (which, in a sane world, is also not a crime).
While the brunt of the vitriol from the Trump administration has been directed at reporters daring to accurately report the news, both good and bad, it wasn’t exclusively directed at journalists trying to do their jobs. Examples include the push to have Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) to scour the internet looking for critical speech and punishing those who dare post such commentary. Edward Martin also urged Trump to get the Department of Justice (DOJ) to crack down on critical online speech as well. The Heritage Foundation, for its part, has been formulating plans to dox Wikipedians for posting comments that the organization disagrees with.
I could go on and on about examples of the Trump administration and his inner circle cracking down on free speech, but you should get a good idea of how much Trump has been fighting to destroy free speech in America. Recently, we found out that Trump has given a speech renewing his push to crack down on perceived political opponents and throw them in jail. This time, it is with the DOJ logo serving as the background of this speech. From Politico:
President Donald Trump on Friday walked into the Department of Justice and labeled his courtroom opponents “scum,” judges “corrupt” and the prosecutors who investigated him “deranged.”
With the DOJ logo directly behind him, Trump called his political opponents lawbreakers and said others should be sent to prison.
“These are people that are bad people, really bad people,” the president said in a rambling speech that lasted more than an hour.
While condemning officials who directed the military’s withdrawal from Afghanistan and repeating his false claims about the 2020 election being stolen, Trump said: “The people who did this to us should go to jail.”
In remarks that were by turns dark, exultant and pugnacious, Trump vowed to remake the Justice Department and retaliate against his enemies, some of whom he called “thugs.”
It was, even by Trump’s standards, a stunning show of disregard for decades of tradition observed by his predecessors, who worried about politicizing or appearing to exert too much control over the nation’s most powerful law enforcement agency. Trump, instead, called himself the “chief law enforcement officer in our country” and accused the DOJ’s prior leadership of doing “everything within their power to prevent” him from becoming the president.
The timing of this is particularly bad. This is happening in the backdrop of a crashing US stock market and an economy that is already seemingly spiralling into a Trump caused recession. Stagflation fears are shooting through the roof and all diplomatic bridges with strong allies are in the process of being burned. Moreover, measles has already started getting a foothold in the US as Trump health officials like RFK spend their time pushing health disinformation in response.
In other words, more and more people are being handed damn good reasons to disagree with what the Trump administration is doing. So, the fact that Trump is renewing calls to crack down on speech he and his administration disagrees with is a recipe for things to get even uglier in the future.
