Trump promises free speech government reform, universities, tech

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Former President Donald Trump speaks on May 28, 2022 in Casper, Wyoming. The rally was held to support Harriet Hageman, Rep. Liz Cheneys primary challenger in Wyoming.

Chet Strange | Getty Images

Former President Donald Trump on Thursday announced a series of aggressive and ambitious proposals to undo what he described as a crackdown on free speech in the United States if he is elected president in 2024.

Trump, who lost his 2020 re-election bid to the White House, promised in a videotaped address that he would target government agencies and employees, universities and tech companies with a series of executives orders and policies aimed at their alleged censorship of speech and ideas.

Among other things, Trump promised to “ban federal money from being used to label domestic speech as ‘mis-‘ or ‘dis-information,'” including federal subsidies and loan support of students for universities.

“The censorship cartel must be dismantled and destroyed and it must happen immediately,” said the Republican, who is prone to linguistic hyperbole and over-promises when announcing plans.

“When I am the president, the whole rotten system of censorship and information control will be removed from the system completely. There will be nothing left,” he said.

Trump and other right-wing figures have for years claimed they were victims of efforts to limit their speech by alleged “deep-state” actors, mainstream media outlets and social media companies. .

Those claims gained further fuel in recent weeks with the release earlier this month of what Twitter CEO Elon Musk called “Twitter files” to support claims handled by the company’s previous management. company is moderating content in a way that is biased against conservatives. Twitter released internal communications with several conservative writers, publishing a series of tweets detailing the social media company’s decision ahead of the 2020 election to temporarily suppress a New York Post story about the contents of a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden, son of the President. Joe Biden.

Musk has already said that Twitter, which he bought in October, interfered in the US election. Twitter did not respond to requests for records from CNBC and The New York Times.

Several studies have found that, despite claims of a liberal-leaning Twitter censoring conservatives, the social media platform increases conservative news and voices over liberal content.

Trump said that “within hours of my inauguration” he would sign an executive order prohibiting federal agencies “from colluding” with others to censor or otherwise limit the lawful speech of those individual.

He also said he would begin a process to identify and remove “every federal bureaucrat engaged in domestic censorship.”

And he said he would order the Department of Justice “to investigate all parties involved in the new online censorship regime, which is completely destructive and appalling, and to aggressively prosecute any and all crimes identified.”

“These include potential violations of federal civil rights law, campaign finance laws, federal election law, securities law and antitrust laws, the Hatch Act, and many other potentially criminal regulatory civil and constitutional offenses,” he said.

Stephen Farnsworth, professor of political science at the University of Mary Washington, dismissed Trump’s proposals as “something to generate energy among his supporters” after a soggy campaign kickoff.

“This is not a plan that will succeed legislatively or judicially if it comes to that,” Farnsworth said in an interview. He said Trump was “trying to change the narrative” after many of his handpicked candidates lost high-profile races in the recent midterm elections.

“The former president’s fast and loose connection to reality makes him a difficult choice to dictate the terms of discourse in the country,” Farnsworth added.

Ian Ostrander, associate political science professor at Michigan State University, said that if Trump is re-elected, “he will certainly be able to use tools like executive orders to creatively change government policy.”

“But making drastic and lasting change can be difficult using only unilateral power,” Ostrander wrote in an email to CNBC.

Trump also on Thursday reiterated his long-standing desire to repeal Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects websites from being sued over content posted by their users.

Just as there is no guarantee that Trump will be the GOP presidential nominee in 2024 or that he will win a general election contest, there is no guarantee that he can or will follow through on any or all of the promises in the plan he unveiled Thursday.

When he was president, Trump was frustrated by his inability to force the Justice Department to do the things he wanted to do, such as taking steps to reverse his election loss to Biden, and resented the appointment by the department of a special counsel, Robert Mueller, to investigate his 2016 campaign’s contacts with the Russians.

And when Trump vetoed the National Defense Authorization Act in late 2020 because the bill did not include the repeal of Section 230, Congress overrode that veto.

CNBC’s Lora Kolodny contributed to this report.

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