When you criticize the president, that's not free speech?

Huh?

Eh, well, that's what President Trump says.

Trump is on the attack, and the media is enemy number one.

Welcome to the Reason Roundtable.

This is your Libertarian Review of Politics and Culture from the editors of Reason magazine. I am your host, Peter Souterman. And today I am joined by my illustrious colleagues, Catherine McGuward, Matt Welch, and Nick Gillespie. Happy Monday and happy Nogroni week, except to journalists and writers who want to criticize President Trump. So here's what Trump told reporters at the White House.

When 97% of the stories are bad about a person, it's no longer free speech.

This is what the president is saying.

Catherine, I am not a First Amendment lawyer, but I don't think that's how free speech works.

No, it's the opposite. I regret to inform you. The whole point of the First Amendment, it has a lot of excellent side effects. But the whole point of the First Amendment was very specifically to protect our right to criticize our politicians. And there's lots to criticize. So sometimes it might even be 97%.

Okay. So this comes on the heels of a week or so of attacks on free speech here. Trump's FCC

chairman, Brendan Carr, bullied ABC into suspending the late night host Jimmy Kimmel after Kimmel linked

Charlie Kirk's assassin Amaga. Trump applauded that move, said that other late night hosts might be next.

There wasn't even a pretext that those other late night hosts had said something inaccurate or inoffensive.

You have senior White House official Stephen Miller proposing a crackdown on the radical left.

He says it represents a vast domestic terror movement, which may be a pretext

for legal action. Attorney General Pam Bondi said she wanted to be on the lookout, said she would

be on the lookout for a leftist hate speech to prosecute. She did walk that back, to be fair,

after some criticism from the right, it was correct, correctly saying that the hate speech isn't a legal

standard. And then over the weekend, Trump posted a message on truth social saying that Bondi

was not prosecuting his enemies swiftly enough that wasn't targeting the media, but basically

saying that the DOJ should be going after people who have said mean stuff about Donald Trump.

...