This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, February 16th, 2017.

I'm Caleb Brown.

After witnessing a president elected with unprecedented amounts of free media, who is at many times willing to sharply denigrate

major news outlets, will the American left come around to a more robust view of the First

Amendment? Luke Walkov of the Center for Competitive Politics believed so. We spoke this month.

Throughout his campaign and since he has become president Donald Trump

has talked about the media in very negative ways.

Either during or before his campaign, he sort of poo-pooed the notion of freedom of speech on a number of occasions.

He seems willing to make it more difficult

for the press to do their job in covering

the administration, and specifically the White House.

So what do you think is the likely alignment to come when it comes to a broad robust recognition of the rights of

petition of speech of association and so on.

Yes, well, I think that, you know, given all the surprises we had over the past year,

it's very hard to make predictions about what's going to happen in politics going forward, but I think you're right

that there is tremendous concern, particularly on the left, that the Trump administration

may be hostile to criticism, that they don't play nice with the media, and

that they could be possibly a sort of thin-skinned or vindictive presidency. This is something that we've heard

from his critics all along, that there's a motivation for revenge, sort of

against the elites as they see them. So it's going to depend what actions the Trump administration takes,

but for instance, you could see something like a repeat

of the IRS targeting scandal where this time it's groups on the left

...