Meet The New Boss, Same as the Old Boss
On speech, Donald Trump is making a mess, for himself and the country.
The Trump administration announced Thursday that it would be dropping subpoenas issued to New York Times reporters over a story about Air Force One, acknowledging these could have swept up private information of reporters’ relatives. “Upon further consideration,” said Sean Buckley, Chief Counsel for the Southern District of New York, “the government is prepared unilaterally to withdraw the subpoenas.”
An embarrassing court exchange came first. District Judge Arun Subramanian announced to Trump lawyers, “Either we can quash the subpoenas, or you could withdraw the subpoenas.” Subramanian got Buckley to admit the government issued them before exhausting investigative avenues, an “error” that was a “consequence of trying to move too quickly.” The Judge also asked the prosecutor who’d sought a nondisclosure order from another judge, Kevin Sullivan, to get up from the audience and come forward for a dressing down. “Are you going to do this again?” he asked.
“No, Your Honor, absolutely not,” Sullivan said.
The subpoenas fiasco was a concentrated dose of everything that’s gone wrong with the second Trump term. Unlike the Biden administration, whose unethical pursuit of mass speech violations was organized, purposeful, and efficient, Trump keeps dancing on First Amendment principles in haphazard, impulsive, nonsensical episodes. In this latest case involving the New York Times, the big question is — why?
Subpoenas were issued as a response to a story claiming that when Trump earlier this month flew from Ankara to Mildenhall Air Force Base in England, he went in an old Air Force One plane instead of his new, Qatari-donated Boeing 747-8 as “a security precaution related to the resumption of hostilities with Iran.” Secretary of State Pete Hegseth issued a tweet earlier this week denouncing the story as a leak of “sensitive defense information,” but the Times had already reported on alleged security problems with the new Qatari plane.
Even the Air Force admitted in a late June press release that the new “Bridge” plane was missing security specs, saying “the collective team made trades on some of the less commonly used mission sets that Boeing must deliver.” It can’t be fun for the White House to have the Times add that the plane “did not have the same counter-defensive capabilities of the previous model,” but it’s not like the Times published a how-to guide on shooting down presidential aircraft.
Dropping subpoenas on reporter Julian Barnes and his family while they watched Sheep Detectives was guaranteed to create a storm of new media problems, without solving the old ones. Why do it? Why also go the subpoena route against the Wall Street Journal, one of the few papers that doesn’t seem to have a policy of avoiding stories that help Trump? Why resort to gambits like revoking Pentagon credentials and only re-issuing them to reporters who sign a loyalty-oathish document? Forget about whether or not that’s legal, who thought it would improve coverage? The reporters who objected to the Pentagon credentials business, like Barnes, Eric Schmitt, and Eric Lipton of the Times, were bylined on the Air Force One stories that annoyed Trump so much later.
The best-case scenario for Trump’s re-election was always that he’d be a highway pileup on speech, stopping heavy traffic in the direction of the full-blown censorship bureaucracies that were being constructed at least in part with the aim of shutting him up. America under a second Trump administration was never going to expand the State Department’s Global Engagement Center or join the EU’s Digital Services Act, nor was he likely to increase funding to the “anti-disinformation” programs growing like weeds in the budgets of organizations like USAID (to say nothing of DHS and the Pentagon). If Trump just didn’t add new speech problems, it would have been a huge accomplishment. He’s been too thin-skinned to manage:
