Freedom of Speech, Trump Variant
Contradict him at your peril. Jul 11 2025In his March 5th address to a joint session of Congress, President Donald Trump said, “I’ve stopped all government censorship and brought back free speech in America.” He backed that up with an executive order. What he did not say was that his free speech edict does not permit others to say or write what he doesn’t like.
Just before July 4th, Paramount announced it would pay Mr. Trump – his library fund supposedly — $16 million to settle a lawsuit brought by him about the editing of a snip of what Kamala Harris had to say in an interview with the CBS program “60 Minutes”. The suit, filed just before the election for a preposterous $10 billion, would have gone nowhere in court, but Paramount is up for sale to a Hollywood studio run by the son of the world’s third richest person, Larry Ellison, who co-founded Oracle Corporation, and the transaction needs the approval of the federal government.
To the extent that the broadcast journalists and their research and production staffs don't quit in protest, the sellout tarnishes the reputation and future credibility of “60 Minutes”, an institution that has been on air since 1968.
the official verdictIt doesn’t stop with CBS. Mr. Trump has now threatened to sue The New York Times and CNN for reporting on an assessment of the Iran nuclear site bombings that differed from his proclamation that they were “totally obliterated”. The Times and CNN must pay for mention of any other conclusion. On social media he said journalists at both organizations should be fired.
One of the 18 government intelligence agencies had quickly issued a “preliminary” report expressing its surmise that Iran’s nuclear enrichment program had been set back by only a few months. Not just any of the agencies, but it was by the Defense Department itself – the Defense Intelligence Agency or DIA.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had immediately fallen in line: “Iran’s nuclear program is obliterated”. So did Steve Witkoff, billionaire real estate investor and now Trump’s special Middle East envoy and negotiator, who concluded:
“[T]here’s no doubt that it was obliterated. So the reporting out here that in some ways suggests that we did not achieve the objective is just completely preposterous."
Explosives expert and Trump Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was irate:
”The leaking of this alleged assessment is a clear attempt to demean President Trump, and discredit the brave fighter [sic] pilots who conducted a perfectly executed mission to obliterate Iran’s nuclear program. Everyone knows what happens when you drop fourteen [sic] 30,000 pound bombs perfectly on their targets: total obliteration."
Fox News wanted to disseminate the official line quickly, so in the prime nine-o’clock slot, Jesse Watters skated quickly past the briefest mention of a Defense Department report so as to make it a CNN reporter’s article. “CNN says the bunker busters we dropped didn't work.”
Trump outside the White House made no mention that it was a DIA report:
"That place is demolished. The B2 pilots did their job but when I see CNN all night long they’re trying to say, well, maybe it wasn't really as demolished as we thought. It was demolished…and I will say I think CNN ought to apologize to the pilots of the B2s. I think that MSDNC ought to apologize. I think these guys, really, these networks, cable networks, are real losers...They're gutless losers. I say that to CNN cause I watch it. I have no choice. I've gotta watch this garbage. It's all garbage. It's all fake news. But I think CNN is a gutless group of people."
(MSDNC — i.e., Democratic National Committee — is the president's moniker for the MSNBC network).
The letter from Trump’s attorney to the Times and CNN said that their reporting had damaged Mr. Trump’s reputation by making the DIA report known and they must “retract and apologize” for reporting that the lawyer called “false”, “defamatory”, and “unpatriotic”. The newpaper's lawyers responded with “No retraction is needed” and “No apology will be forthcoming”.
In the days since, there has been a mix of assessments in the media and from government figures ranging from an Iran capable of fashioning a dirty bomb in days if the uranium had been moved before the attack, to needing years to recover. Certainly the “obliterated” claim has been obliterated and yet the president exhibited his questionable faculties still saying just last Sunday:
”The attack turned out, according to every single atomic energy commission that was a complete and total obliteration.”
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