Trump’s threats remind us that freedom of the press is on the ballot

For all the distracting fascination last weekend over Donald Trump’s vulgar comments about golf legend Arnold Palmer, we should focus our attention where it belongs: on his escalating threats, renewed on Sunday, against media outlets that do not bend to his will.

On Fox News — an outlet that regularly does bend to his will — Trump said that he planned to subpoena CBS’s records over their interview on “60 Minutes” with his rival, Vice President Kamala Harris. Because the network edited the interview — ordinary practice for TV news magazines — the former president said CBS “should be taken off the air.”

If there’s one freedom that the rest of our liberty depends upon, it is a press free of government suppression. The governments that Trump admires under Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping control the media, and the public gets only disinformation. Trump’s threats to press freedom are deadly serious, and we ignore them at our peril.

Don’t take our word for it. Listen to his running mate, Sen. JD Vance, defending without qualification Trump demonizing critics as “the enemy within.” Vance said on Fox on Sunday that “when people ask him questions, he speaks from the heart.”

Trump’s threat to turn his Justice Department loose on CBS is only his latest signal of disdain for a free press. Last week, he said he would take away CBS’s broadcast license. Never mind that the federal government does not license national networks, only local stations. The message is his intent to disembowel media watchdogs by whatever means possible.

There’s a reason the framers of the Constitution placed freedom of the press first among its amendments. James Madison, who introduced the First Amendment, wrote that it declared the press to be “wholly exempt” from federal government power. He also warned that attacks upon it “ought to produce universal alarm” because “that right of freely examining public characters and measures [is] the only effectual guardian of every other right.”

Don’t think for a moment that the Supreme Court will be coming to save us during a second Trump term. Six decades ago, the high court was committed to the First Amendment principle that “debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open.” The unanimous court that issued the landmark decision of New York Times v. Sullivan would not have tolerated the chilling effect on journalistic expression represented by a government subpoena for media out-takes.

Unfortunately, the ghost of SCOTUS past no longer roams the chambers of this extreme court majority. From the wholly invented presidential immunity doctrine of Trump v. United States, we know that the far-right justices already bow to Trump’s worst impulses. If freedom of the press is to survive, we will have to save it ourselves.

The guardrails would be off in a second Trump term. There will be no Don McGahn or Patrick Cipollone as White House Counsel to restrain him, no Chief of Staff John Kelly as the brake on a president who has declared vengeance and retribution his first priorities, along with terminating the Constitution.

What’s truly concerning is the apparent lack of alarm at some leading organs of journalism, including the nation's paper of record. Monday’s New York Times story on Trump’s threats to CBS consistently downplayed their seriousness. Sprinkled generously amidst the article were editorial statements like this: “For all Mr. Trump’s bark, American networks and news organizations emerged relatively intact from his presidency.”

After noting that “in 2017, he floated the idea of stripping NBC of its licenses,” reporters Michael Grynbuam and David McCabe added that “in that instance, Mr. Trump took no further action.” Again, the implication was that because Trump’s first term bark was worse than his bite, nothing much has changed, so no need to over-worry. Let’s hope the Times’s journalists are not proven wrong by a second Trump term in which his words come back to haunt them in deeds.

Trump has been telling us every which way how different a second term would be from his first. The country is at risk when our journalists and storytellers normalize Trump, or fancy themselves too sophisticated to believe him, too wary of being duped into becoming the boy who cried wolf.

The far greater danger now is ignoring the wolf’s own warning that he intends to eat first the shepherds of democracy, and then the sheep.

Dennis Aftergut is a former federal prosecutor and now counsel to Lawyers Defending American Democracy. Jeffrey Abramson is a professor of government and law emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin and author of “We, The Jury: The Jury System and the Ideal of Democracy.”