The four years of the Biden presidency were a terrible low point for the protection of freedom of speech in the U.S. A web of government agencies and allied NGOs sprang up with remarkable rapidity to identify and ban disfavored speech, almost always of conservatives.

As just a few examples: the White House itself pressured social media platforms to suppress disfavored speech on politically sensitive topics like Covid and climate change; the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency collaborated with universities and NGOs like the Stanford Internet Observatory to get disfavored speech banned or suppressed; the Department of Homeland Security formed a Disinformation Governance Board to coerce social media companies to suppress speech deemed “disinformation”; and the FBI conducted wide-ranging investigations of Republican politicians and organizations.

The entire enterprise got the accurate nickname of the Censorship Industrial Complex.

This was an extremely important issue that drove many voters to Trump. After Trump was elected, we had every reason to expect that efforts like those of the prior administration to coerce the suppression of opponents’ speech of would come to an end. And, for the most part, they have.

However, the past week has seen two bad unforced errors on the freedom of speech front by high-ranking members of the Trump administration:

In my last post a couple of days ago (May 28), I was critical of the blizzard of injunctions issued by the courts against seemingly every policy change that President Trump seeks to implement. I went so far as to call this the “opposite of democracy.”

But I also noted that there are instances where judicial restraints on the executive are legitimate, most notably where the statute on which the President relies to implement a sweeping policy does not in fact grant him the authority he claims. Thus, on finding a lack of grant of authority in the statutes cited, the Supreme Court had reined in President Biden when he sought to implement policies forgiving student loans and banning fossil fuel power plants.

I ended that article by asking whether President Trump’s actions with regard to imposition of tariffs may fall into the same category of overreach as Biden’s student loan and power plant gambits. I also noted that multiple law suits had already been brought challenging the legal basis for the tariffs unilaterally imposed by the President.