Deeper Into the Mechanisms of Donald Trump’s Censorship Regime

The regime of Republican President Donald Trump is an enterprise built on perfidy, corruption and bigotry. It is clear, given the conduct of the administration and how it operates the censorship regime it established to put up a supposed defense of the First Amendment rights for its MAGA adherents and members of far-right movements. Of course, there is a double standard at work.

As I’ve said time and again, nothing that President Trump and his inner circle have done since returning to the White House has been done to the benefit of the country as a whole. Rather, it is a tiring, seemingly daily slump from one crisis to the next. There has yet to be a reprieve. This is especially true in the face of Trump’s efforts to censor his opponents through intimidation and persecution. Events of recent weeks solidify my observations, including my views that Trump is the most injurious president to the sacrosanct protection of our collective freedoms of expression.

Let’s consider the simultaneous censorship mechanisms at work in the U.S. Justice Department and from within the president’s immediate office. Between my last column for The Humanist and now, so much has changed—and it is definitely to the detriment of the First Amendment and the rights of millions.

For example, the Justice Department released its official anti-Christian bias report to the public. Initiated under the executive order that established a Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias, the report accuses the administration of Trump’s predecessor, Democratic President Joe Biden, of violating the rights of so-called “traditionalist Christians” who practice conservative theologies.

I read the full report, all 565 pages of it, to understand what the task force identified as examples of Biden’s state-sanctioned campaign of supposedly carrying out “religious discrimination.” The bias report published by the task force openly alleges that, “[the] Biden Administration’s policies regularly clashed with a Christian worldview and burdened traditional religious practices. These conflicts frequently arose over abortion, gender ideology, and sexual orientation. Ultimately, the Biden Administration penalized Christians who lived in accordance with their beliefs.” Much of the information reported by the task force is a byproduct of hyperpartisan talking points and the white Christian nationalist victimhood developed in recent years. Simply put, the report is crap.

“The dizzying hypocrisy of this report is a feature of the Christian nationalist political project, not a bug,” argued Dr. Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons of the Interfaith Alliance in early May at a press briefing reacting to the government’s report. The briefing was organized by Georgetown University’s Center on Faith and Justice and featured other leaders critical of the bias report’s findings. Graves-Fitzsimmons explained, “Let’s be honest about what the report actually argues: that protecting access for women seeking out reproductive health care is anti-Christian. That protecting transgender people from cruelty is anti-Christian. That public health measures during a pandemic were anti-Christian. This so-called report on anti-Christian bias is an exercise in manufacturing a persecution complex with petty grievances.” And those “petty grievances” are clearly the same extremist talking points adopted by the Project 2025-style, far-right extremists that claim they are the victims of a mythical anti-Christian agenda perpetrated by left-wingers.

In a recent column I wrote for The Kansas City Pitch analyzing the report, I found that the term “transgender” occurs about 141 times. The report authors, once more, frame the fact that Easter in 2024 fell on the same day as International Transgender Day of Visibility — an annual day of recognition created on March 31, 2009 — as some sort of official public policy position. I found that the term “LGBTQ” was mentioned 50 times, while the term “gender ideology” was in the report a total of 36 times. Unsurprisingly, the task force took issue with the efforts of the U.S. federal government under President Biden to protect access to abortion care for women and vital gender affirming care for transgender youth and adults. While this report is simply a diatribe of a rising authoritarian and theocratic regime, it proves to be a bedrock foundation for executing the administration’s ongoing efforts to silence critics, including critics who are themselves Christian.

Rev. Mara Richards Bim, writing in an analysis for Baptist News Global, pointed out that “the federal government is elevating the work of pseudo-historians to sow doubt about our nation’s founding,” and those pseudo-historical sources of information are imputing the “retelling of our country’s origins as a Christian nation.” This is a consistent sentiment across other mechanisms.

Another mechanism of note, which I additionally covered, is the recent counterterrorism strategy that President Trump’s counterterrorism czar, Sebastian Gorka, authored and released days later. Gorka presented a Christian nationalist pipedream, framing Trump’s dissenters as terrorists. In such a capacity, Gorka said that the Trump administration “will prioritize the rapid identification and neutralization of violent secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist.” This strategy has been characterized as purely “slop” and a full demonstration of the administration’s lack of social awareness and respect for truth and veracity.

While I don’t want to spend much time on the counterterrorism strategy, I will say it presents a clear authoritarian turn in the American system of government. Pairing the U.S. counterterrorism strategy by Gorka and the anti-Christian bias report by the task force led by the acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, there is a systemic culture of right-wing Christian victimhood and white fragility. As Gorka and Blanche lay out the “evidentiary” basis for Trump’s censorship machine, it is the mechanisms enforced by the administration on multiple fronts that harm us all.

Taken together, these initiatives reveal the ongoing coordinated effort to redefine dissent as some form of deviance and to further elevate a worldview so narrow and discriminatory that requires absolute state capture.

The First Amendment must survive this. And it only will if we collectively resist. We can. We will.