The American Prospect

04/22/2025

One of the oddities of America’s slide into dictatorship is that it’s all playing out publicly and being reported on by a still-free press, often to Donald Trump’s embarrassment. If you look at other despotisms, one of the first things the dictator does is to shut down the opposition press.

As Trump tries to destroy one free institution after another—universities, law firms, independent public agencies, trade unions—sooner or later he will come for the press. For the moment, his forays against the press have been petulant and feeble rather than systematic.

But Trump, assuming that he is not restrained, has several other means at his disposal. I wrote about one of them in a Prospect piece last year. The progressive infrastructure is heavily dependent on tax-exempt status and foundation funding. That includes research centers, advocacy groups, and many magazines like ours.

Trump’s abrupt efforts to summarily remove the tax exemptions of institutions such as Harvard University were flatly illegal. The law explicitly prohibits a president from instructing the IRS to target a particular institution. Due process is required before an exemption can be lifted. And the rationale cannot be simply political.

But many foundation-funded 501(c)(3) organizations are careless about separating those entities from related (c)(4)s, which are permitted within limits to be partisan. (For the record, the Prospect does not have a (c)(4).) A Trump IRS could also try to change the ground rules and further limit advocacy by (c)(3)s. Trump could intimidate the foundations that fund advocacy groups and media. Foundations themselves have tax-exempt status, and risk-averse foundation trustees would likely overcorrect and reduce a lot of legitimate funding.

I’m not giving away trade secrets here: Trump knows the power he has. He may reportedly try to pull the tax exemption for several environmental groups on Earth Day, today. But this hasn’t yet moved to the nonprofit journalism space yet, and it could.

The press is also vulnerable to a flood of defamation suits that Elon Musk could underwrite single-handedly. For now, the Supreme Court’s 1964 landmark decision in Times v. Sullivan protects the press from losing frivolous libel suits. The decision provided that to win a defamation suit against a press outlet, a plaintiff who is a public figure, broadly defined, has to prove “actual malice” and “reckless disregard for the truth.”

But smaller press outlets could go broke paying legal fees, even if they ultimately won cases. Times v. Sullivan has long been a target of Clarence Thomas. Its terms could be altered by a right-wing Supreme Court majority, and also narrowed by statute.

Another tool, which operates in many countries but not the U.S., would be an Official Secrets Act. In the U.S., if a journalist publishes information that the government considers confidential or classified, the public official who leaked the information is vulnerable to prosecution, but the journalist is not. But with an Official Secrets Act, the journalist could also be prosecuted. Trump wants to keep nearly everything secret.

Public broadcasting is also a sitting duck. NPR has done some of the best reporting on Trump. As noted, if Trump shut down the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, loyal listeners would probably make up the difference. But Trump, in full dictatorial mode, has a more powerful weapon. Radio and TV stations broadcast on public frequencies. A Trumpified FCC could simply reallocate spectrum and toss stations off the air.