America's Teetering Democracy: Trump's Thought Police Hit Their Stride
SOURCE:Spiegel International
The murder of Charlie Kirk has fanned the flames of the Trump administration's lust for thought control. The hunt for his enemies and dissenters, long since begun, has entered a new and dangerous phase.
A protest against the suspension of Jimmy Kimmel in Los Angeles.
Foto:
David Swanson / REUTERS
In April 2011, late-night comedian Seth Meyers dealt the ambitious businessman Donald Trump what was likely his most painful humiliation to that point. There is a video of the scene showing Meyers as a guest speaker at the annual White House Correspondents Association dinner in Washington, holding forth before a room full of distinguished guests. And all of them are laughing.
Donald Trump has been saying he plans to run for president as a Republican, says Meyers from the stage. "Which is surprising, since I just assumed he was running as a joke.” Trump sells his own line of neckties, the comedian says, "you can find them at Macy’s in the flammable section.” Trump has said he has a great relationship with "the Blacks,” Meyers says, before suggesting he must be referring to a white family with the last name Black.
Entertainer Seth Meyers and then First Lady Michelle Obama during the White House Correspondents Association dinner in 2011.
Foto: Jason Reed / REUTERS
After that last joke, the camera pans to President Barack Obama, who is shaking with laughter. And then to Trump, who is unmoving. Rigid. Like his own wax figure.
That moment, some will still tell you today, was the moment Trump made it his ambition to become the most powerful man in the world.
Time for Sweet Revenge
A couple of weeks ago, it was the turn of Donald Trump, now the most powerful man in the world, to gloat. After the Walt Disney Company temporarily suspended popular late-night host Jimmy Kimmel under pressure from top government officials, the U.S. president wrote on his social media channel Truth Social that only Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers were left – "two total losers, on Fake News NBC.” Trump then urged: "Do it NBC!!!”
Fourteen years after Meyer’s speared Trump at the Correspondents Dinner, it seemed as though the time for revenge had come.
Late night comedian Jimmy Kimmel.
Foto:
David Russell / Disney / Getty Images
Having talked himself into a rage, the president didn’t just turn his bile on prize-winning TV comics. He went after all those who would dare to criticize his glorious presidency. Liberal media outlets that still had the temerity to question his leadership were acting, he claimed, "really illegal.” That comment came a day after he said "I would think maybe their license should be taken away” in reference to news networks that run negative stories about him. He even took the step of – unsuccessfully – suing the New York Times for $15 billion in damages. The paper, he insisted, had defamed him enough. "That stops, NOW!”
Freedom of the press? Not so much.
Trump and his lackeys, though, went even further. Much further. Apparently unleashed by the mid-September assassination of MAGA whisperer Charlie Kirk in Utah, members of the Trump administration have recently fallen all over each other in their rush to call for a their political opponents to be hunted down.
A Call for Denunciations
The investigation into the motives behind the murder of right-wing extremist Kirk, a man Trump and his supporters quickly identified as a martyr, isn’t even close to being finished and the 22-year-old suspected assassin has thus far remained silent.
Yet within the Trump administration, there isn’t even the slightest doubt that the gunman must be from the "radical left.” The government, he said at the recent Kirk memorial in Glendale, Arizona, would be launching investigations into "networks of radical left maniacs” that are behind attacks such as the one launched against Kirk. One day later, he declared the Antifa movement to be a domestic terror organization.
President Donald Trump at the memorial service for Charlie Kirk in Arizona.
Foto: Patrick T. Fallon / AFP
Vice President JD Vance, who long considered himself a champion for freedom of speech, encouraged the Trump faithful to inform on anyone who had expressed pleasure over Kirk’s death online – and to denounce them to their employers.
Numerous Americans lost their jobs shortly after the assassination as a result. Disney also pulled the prize-winning late-night comedian Kimmel off the air for several days – ignoring the fact that he had called the attack "horrible and monstrous.”
Massive Pressure on Disney
On his show, though, Kimmel also pointed out – not without reason – that Trump’s MAGA supporters, even as the facts were largely unclear, and done everything they could to brand the perpetrator a leftist and "score political points from it.” Kimmel then pointed out that Trump’s reaction to Kirk’s death was hardly heartfelt: "This is how a four-year-old mourns a goldfish.”
That was enough for the administration to heap so much pressure on Kimmel’s parent company that his show was pulled. Following massive protests, Kimmel returned to the air a short time later. But the message was clear. Freedom of opinion? Also, not so much.
The freedom of speech and opinion, both anchored in the First Amendment of the Constitution, have long been rooted more deeply in the U.S. than in almost any other democracy. Yet after Kirk’s murder, Attorney General Pam Bondi seriously proposed denying this right to certain groups, particularly on the left. It is time, she said, to go after hate speech. Even Charlie Kirk, who made racist and sexist statements part of his brand, once said: "Hate speech does not exist legally in America.”
What Bondi apparently also forgot in the heat of the moment – aside from her official duty to protect the Constitution – is the fact that several studies in recent years have shown that the tendency toward political violence is greatest in right-wing and far-right circles, and that two groups in particular stand out: white evangelicals and MAGA followers.
Last year, the National Institute of Justice wrote that "the number of far-right attacks continues to outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic violent extremism.” A few days after Charlie Kirk’s murder, the Justice Department, which oversees the National Institute of Justice, quietly removed the study from its website.
Attacking Thought
So what exactly are Donald Trump and his followers aiming to achieve with their unprecedented campaign against satirists, the media and actual or perceived leftists? There is much to indicate that the assassination of Charlie Kirk is being used as just another justification to ramp up the intimidation of the president’s remaining opponents.
America at the moment is not just enduring attacks by a completely untethered president and his administration against critics and political rivals. It is an attack on thought itself. It is an assault that began nine months ago – and it has been waged with increasing brazenness since then. Only those are welcome who do not contradict Trump’s views and worldview. Everyone else must fear sanctions, ostracism and censorship, be they universities, publishers, museums, libraries or media outlets. In other words, all those committing to providing a broad and sometimes controversial dissemination of knowledge and facts.
“It was never about me. It was about spreading fear and stifling protest."
Mahmoud Khalil, student leader
The onslaught has even created unease in parts of the Trump camp. If the murder of Kirk is used to implement drastic limitations on the freedom of opinion, warned Tucker Carlson, an erstwhile rabid Trump supporter who now shares his thoughts on a podcast instead of Fox News, then it is time for "civil disobedience.” "If they can tell you what to say, they’re telling you what to think.” And once that happens, he went on, "there’s nothing they can’t do to you.”
The truth is that Trump and his followers have already wandered alarmingly far down the path of enforcing ideological conformity in the "Land of the Free.” And they have been able to do so because in large parts of the U.S., a spirit of myopia prevails. Rather than a spirit of resistance.
"Criminal” Journalists
One of the highest priorities of this administration from the very beginning has been to exert control over the free press. And there is method to the madness. Even the former slave Frederick Douglass, a leading human rights and abolition activist in the 19th century, once said that freedom of speech is the "dread of tyrants.” It is, Douglass intoned in December 1860, "the right which they first of all strike down.”
Donald Trump, who has never tried particularly hard to conceal his admiration for dictators, is no exception. From the very beginning of his second term in January, he has had his devoted spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt put their scorn for traditional journalists on full display. Leavitt has flooded the pressroom in the White House with representatives of "new media,” including obscure influencers from the MAGA cosmos, radicals and conspiracy theorists, many of whom don’t give even the slightest impression of neutrality. Since their arrival, they have enjoyed preferential treatment.
The media regulatory agency Federal Communications Commission (FCC) – which, like the Justice Department, Trump has long since brought into submission – has launched several investigations into media outlets, many of them for "unfairly” pursuing diversity and inclusion. Which Trump abhors.
Back in May, the NGO Reporters Without Borders released a report noting that there has been an "alarming deterioration in press freedom.” Anna Gomez, a Democrat who is one of the five FCC commissioners, spoke of a "campaign of censorship and control” fand warned that not standing up to it would be akin to "capitulation.” What we need, said Gomez, is for "all institutions, all corporations, all users, all viewers, all listeners to stand up and push back.”
But that’s not what is happening.
Caving In
In July, for example, Paramount followed in the path of other media giants and succumbed to Trump’s will. The president had sued the Paramount subsidiary CBS for allegedly having edited a 2024 campaign interview with the Democratic candidate Kamala Harris to make her look better than in the full version of the interview. It was an absurd allegation. But instead of going to court, the company elected to settle out of court for $16 million.
At the same time, CBS announced that it would be cancelling the beloved "Late Show” with Stephen Colbert in 2026, allegedly for financial reasons. Colbert is part of the group of television comedians in the U.S. who have become some of the most sharp-tongued political watchdogs in the country – and they have fallen afoul of Donald Trump as a result. Whether by chance or not: Shortly after the multi-million-dollar payment and the announcement that Colbert was being jettisoned, the FCC approved the $8 billion fusion of Paramount and Skydance.
In mid-September, when Colbert’s colleague Jimmy Kimmel was targeted, the FCC again played a decisive role. Kimmel had hardly finished his monologue about the Kirk shooting before FCC Chairman Brendan Carr slipped into the role of a mob gangster, demanding that Kimmel be punished and growling: "We can do this the easy way or the hard way.”
An anti-censorship protest in Los Angeles in September.
Foto: David Swanson / REUTERS
It is helpful to remember here that ABC broadcasts Kimmel’s show into American living rooms with the help of local partners. One of the largest of those is the company Nexstar, which is currently in the process of acquiring a major competitor for $6.2 billion. To do so, it needs permission from Carr’s agency, which is responsible for issuing – and revoking – broadcast licenses.
All of which added up to Kimmel being temporarily sidelined – yet another blow to the freedom of the press and freedom of expression.
The Trump Team’s Changing Tune
It seems incongruous to remember that Carr was once quite a fan of the First Amendment. Political satire, he once said, is "one of the oldest and most important forms of free speech.” It "challenges those in power while using humor to draw more people into the discussion,” he wrote on Twitter in 2022. He followed up in 2023 by writing that "censorship is the authoritarian’s dream.”
He seems to have forgotten.
But he’s not the only one. Trump’s current deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, wrote in 2022: "If the idea of free speech enrages you (…) then I regret to inform you that you are a fascist.” Vice President JD Vance, meanwhile, sounded in February like the reincarnation of Voltaire when he lectured Europeans on the pillars of democracy from the Munich Security Conference stage. "We may disagree with your views, but we will fight to defend your right to offer them in the public square.” Eight months later, Vance finds it perfectly okay to call on Americans to denounce others for their beliefs.
And then there is Donald Trump himself, who promised in his inaugural address in January to defend the freedom of speech, even that of his critics, and to end state censorship. "Never again will the immense power of the state be weaponized to persecute political opponents,” Trump proclaimed in the Rotunda in the U.S. Capitol.
Trump’s word, though, has never carried much weight.
Birth of the "Woke Right”
The shocking thing about this sudden about-face is just how closely Trump and his followers now resemble the caricature they spent years portraying of their political opponents. "Cancel culture” was the accusation they never tired of leveling at the liberals, who did, in fact, occasionally go too far in their morally rigorous zeal to force equality and to right historical wrongs. In Trump’s testosterone-fueled, triumphantly imperious America, there was to by no more room for "wokeness.”
Now, though, Jonathan Rauch of the Brookings Institution, the Washington-based think tank, has identified a "woke right,” whose methods are astonishingly similar to those used by the progressive left. "What they’ve learned from the left,” Rauch told the New York Times in mid-September, "is that if you can control what people say, if you can make them afraid of being canceled, you can make the minority view look like the majority view.”
There is, however, one decisive difference. Under Trump, the new worldview is being dictated from on high – and implemented with a ruthlessness unparalleled in a democracy.
“They can turn away while dissidents and scapegoats lose their political liberty. But once the prerogative state is built (…) it can swallow anyone."
Aziz Huq, law professor
For the past several months, for example, the Trump administration has been on the warpath against the country’s institutions of higher learning, accusing them of being bastions of anti-Semitism. Trump’s real motivation, however, is apparently that of preventing any form of student – and thus, from his perspective, left-wing – protests. A number of student leaders and faculty members have been pulled off the street and detained without any basis in law.
Memories of McCarthy
One of them, Mahmoud Khalil of Columbia University in New York, spent almost four months in an immigration detention center in Louisiana and now faces possible deportation to Syria or Algeria – allegedly for inconsistencies relating to his Green Card. "It was never about me,” Khalil told DER SPIEGEL. "It was about spreading fear and stifling protest.”
At the same time, the government withdrew billions in funding from universities to force them into line. And it worked. In July, Columbia bought back its right to receive public funding at a cost of $221 million. The university also pledged to do a better job of controlling student protests and to allow an "independent monitor” on campus.
The University of California, Berkeley – also once a paragon of free speech – succumbed in early September to pressure the Department of Education had heaped on the school through an investigation into alleged discrimination. University leaders handed the government the names of 160 students, professors and other staff members, who have since been wondering what exactly they were accused of doing.
Many professors find themselves reminded of 1950, when Joseph McCarthy, a Republican Senator who declared war on communism, launched a witch hunt against purportedly left-wing enemies of the state.
"Truth and Sanity"
America’s censor-in-chief isn’t just interested in suppressing and criminalizing opinions. Trump is also eager to eradicate entire worldviews from his America. By the time the nation’s 250th birthday rolls around in 2026, the president wants the country to present itself as a nation which, since its founding, has spread freedom, individual rights and human happiness across the globe. And nothing else.
In late March, Trump issued an executive order aimed at "restoring truth and sanity to American history.” Museums, national parks and other public monuments are to become "solemn and uplifting” places where the country’s "extraordinary heritage” is honored. The full import of this executive order has recently become clear – as has, once again, the fact that Trump can count on the acquiescence of countless of his compatriots.
The Trump administration, for example, called on all employees of national parks and national monuments to report objectionable materials at their workplaces by mid-September. The New York Times reported that attention soon focused on, among other places, the souvenir shop at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in Washington. The store is full of books by Malcolm X along with volumes about slavery and the civil rights movement Freedom Riders – which may not be all that "uplifting,” as an anonymous employee noted.
Martin Luther King Jr. memorial in Washington, D.C.
Foto:
Bonnie Cash / newscom / picture alliance
At Stones River National Battlefield in Tennessee, the site of some of the bloodiest fighting in the Civil War, an anonymous park official reported an informational plaque on which slavery was described as the "primary cause” of the conflict. That is, the official wrote, "historically correct,” but potentially not "aligned” with the executive order.
Forgetting the Past
Such doubts are justified. It was only in August that Trump said he was tired of hearing "how bad slavery was.” And the revisionism has already begun. At Fort Pulaski National Monument in Georgia, for example, the 1863 photo "The Scourged Back” is to be removed from the display, according to media reports. The image shows the dense web of scars on the back of a Black man who was frequently whipped; it is one of the most forceful documents of the brutality of slavery. In other places, signs have been criticized that call to mind the displacement and extermination of numerous indigenous peoples.
Human trafficking and genocide: For Trump they are apparently nothing but "a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth” – as noted in his March executive order.
It remains to be seen what it all might mean for the Smithsonian Institution’s unparalleled network of museums in Washington. The 11 buildings packed with invaluable collections encircle the government’s ministries like cautionary cathedrals of knowledge. And almost every one of them is a thorn in Trump’s side. Especially the Museum of African American History and Culture, the very existence of which may be threatened should Trump’s order be implemented as written.
Some museums have already begun making changes, very clearly intended to mollify the president.
Censorship, to be sure. And self-censorship.
Banning Books
Just how far Trump’s thought police are prepared to go was demonstrated most clearly by none other than Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Shortly after entering office and at Trump’s behest, the Christian nationalist had a long list of undesirable books banned at the schools operated at the roughly 160 U.S. military bases around the world. Not long later, the Naval Academy in Annapolis, a place that churns out future politicians, business leaders and scientists, was forced to remove suspect tomes from its respectable library as well.
Three-hundred-and-eighty-one books vanished, including "Have Black Lives Ever Mattered?” by Mumia Abu-Jamal and the 1960s bestseller "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” in which human rights leader and poet Maya Angelou wrote about her experiences with racism in America. Virtually all critical works on racism, political violence and far-right religious fanaticism were removed from the library’s shelves.
Among the books allowed to remain was "The Camp of Saints” by Jean Raspail, a cult novel among white supremacists from 1973 that serves as a foundational work for the "Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, according to which whites are being "replaced” by immigrants. Another is "The Bell Curve,” a work of "nonfiction” according to which Blacks are genetically inferior to whites when it comes to their intellectual capacity. The stated goal of the Naval Academy, it should be noted, is to develop students "morally mentally and physically” such that they are prepared for the "highest responsibilities.”
Eight months have now passed since Donald Trump moved into the White House for the second time. And given the speed with which the 79-year-old has since bent the state to his will, co-opting the minds and memories of his fellow citizens and silencing critics – it seems fair to ask: Where is the resistance?
The Dual State
One answer may be found in a book that first appeared in America 84 years ago called "The Dual State.” It was written by the German-Jewish labor rights activist Ernst Fraenkel, who left Germany in 1938 and spent the rest of his life wrestling with the question as to why it was so easy to transform Germany from a democracy into a dictatorship.
Following the Nazi power grab, Fraenkel argued, a "normative state” continued to exist in Germany for quite some time, within which the established legal order still applied for the vast majority of citizens, private property was protected, and companies could continue operating with no hindrance in order to keep the capitalist economy up and running.
In parallel, however, a "prerogative state” developed, a state of "unlimited arbitrariness and violence” wielded against certain people and institutions, who were gradually stripped of their essential rights. The majority was able to convince themselves for an extended period that they would remain untouched by the excesses of state violence. Until the prerogative state ultimately pushed aside the normative state.
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"Today, we are witnessing the birth of a new dual state,” writes Chicago-based law professor Aziz Huq in an article that appeared several months ago in the Atlantic. It should not be assumed, Huq writes, that it will follow the same path as Germany once did – "but it is striking how Donald Trump’s executive orders reject some basic tenets of American constitutionalism.”
The U.S. economy, Huq writes, remains largely intact and the judiciary continues to function normally, aside from political cases. Most people can ignore the establishment of a prerogative state because it simply has no effect on their lives. "They can turn away while dissidents and scapegoats lose their political liberty. But once the prerogative state is built (…) it can swallow anyone.”
Whether a student or a public prosecutor. Or maybe just a television comedian who makes an ill-advised joke.
