Are we now officially in a dictatorship?

Comparing Trump to Viktor Orbán. Trump would like a world where any one of us would be punished for saying anything critical of him. That sounds more like North Korea than the United States.


Trump has filed lawsuits against outlets whose coverage he dislikes, threatened to revoke TV broadcast licenses and sought to bend news organizations and social media companies to his will.

The tactics are similar to those used by leaders in other countries who have chipped away at speech freedoms and independent media while consolidating political power, including Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, a close Trump ally whose leadership style is revered by many conservatives in the U.S.

“What we’re seeing is an unprecedented attempt to silence disfavored speech by the government,” said Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth College. “Donald Trump is trying to dictate what Americans can say.”

Trump’s approach to governing has drawn comparisons to Orbán, who has been in power since 2010. The Hungarian leader has made hostility toward the press central to his political brand, borrowing Trump’s phrase “fake news” to describe critical outlets. He has not given an interview to an independent journalist in years.

The moves against independent media, along with Orbán’s systematic capture of Hungary’s democratic institutions, prompted the European Parliament in 2022 to declare that the country could no longer be considered a democracy.

Polyák said that while the American media landscape is far larger and more diverse than Hungary’s, he’s been struck by the willingness of major U.S. companies to accommodate Trump’s threats.

“There is a very strange kind of self-censorship in America,” he said. “Even with European eyes, it is very frightening to see to what degree individual bravery does not exist. From Zuckerberg to ABC, everyone immediately surrenders.”

Who needs free speech when we have Trump?

Trump is all we need! As long as we have Trump America is great.

If the founding fathers had known Trump would eventually be our president they would have written the Constitution completely differently. It would have had an asterisk after everything and at the bottom it would have said

"*Subject to the whims of Donald J Trump"

“When 97 percent of the stories are bad about a person, it’s no longer free speech.”

Or, maybe that person just won’t cease inviting criticism, and maybe a lot of that criticism develops out of a clear, unavoidable conclusion, namely, that the president of the United States is profoundly, and clearly, un-American. And only interested in being a “Strongman”, and not at all interested in being the Chief Executive of a constitutional republic. It’s not that complex. It’s his intention to stand tall among the Strongmen of the world, every one of them being profoundly anti-democratic. As is Trump: profoundly anti-democratic. Power does not rest with the people, it rests with Trump. That is as un-American as it can get. And democracy in America? A quaint concept. It’s a Strongman’s world, and we will all do as our Strongman tells us we will do. So, in recent days, Trump is making all of this as crystal clear as possible.

It’s almost like Donald Trump is saying: “Now do you recognize who I am, and what I represent?”. Does MAGA need any more help than Trump is now providing MAGA to recognize who he is? Trump, in so many words: “I AM the State”.


President Donald Trump on Friday reiterated his claim that critical television coverage of him is “illegal” and pushed back on criticisms that his administration was taking actions that chill free speech.

“When 97 percent of the stories are bad about a person, it’s no longer free speech,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office, complaining about an apparent asymmetry between his victory in the 2024 election and his treatment by media organizations. It was not immediately clear what statistics or laws he was referencing.

Trump’s comments came days after Disney indefinitely suspended the late night host Jimmy Kimmel after Federal Communications Commissioner Brendan Carr suggested on a podcast that his agency may take regulatory action against ABC, which Disney owns. Kimmel drew ire over comments he made about Charlie Kirk, the conservative activist and White House ally who was shot and killed last week.

After Kimmel was suspended, Carr said “I don’t think this is the last shoe to drop” and suggested the FCC — an agency, overseen by Congress, designed to act independently from the president — may target other shows, including ABC’s “The View.”

The Kimmel saga caused Democrats and some free speech hawks to protest. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer demanded Carr’s resignation.

One notable Republican also weighed in: Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who on a podcast released Friday called Carr’s actions “dangerous as hell” and “right out of ‘Goodfellas.’”

Trump in the Oval Office defended Carr, calling him “incredible” and “a great American.” He said he disagreed with Cruz.

“I think he’s a courageous person,” Trump said of Carr. “He doesn’t like to see the airwaves be used illegally and incorrectly.”

Apparently, it took Charlie Kirk’s death for Trump to make clear that his will be a dictatorship.


The Trump administration is enthusiastically abusing its power to intimidate anyone who criticizes its policies, and to silence those who won't fall in line. Now, using a long-standing government tactic, the administration is leveraging a tragedy to justify its censorship campaign.

The government is villainizing and threatening to punish anyone who dares to express anything but unequivocal support for its political views. In the last week, lawmakers have bullied schools into taking disciplinary action against teachers who have criticized Charlie Kirk’s political views. Police officers are being put on leave for similar reasons. Federal agencies are disciplining public servants for expressing views contrary to those supported by the administration. Journalists and the media companies they work for have also felt a McCarthy-like pressure from the government, with popular late-night hosts losing their jobs after engaging with the ideas of a free speech provocateur whose tagline was “Prove me wrong.”

This forceful crackdown is part of a troubling pattern we've seen emerge during the Trump administration. In the last week, alone, administration officials — including Vice President JD Vance, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, and Attorney General Pam Bondi — have encouraged the public to call the employers of anyone expressing views disfavored by the government; vowed to use every resource the Department of Justice and Homeland Security have to identify, disrupt, and destroy groups the administration perceives to be an enemy; and claimed that “there's free speech and then there's hate speech” while threatening to “absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.”

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