Those who describe the first year of Donald Trump’s second term as a series of personal skirmishes with “difficult” or “hostile” journalists miss the bigger picture. As Tom Jones of the Poynter Institute has written, this is not about isolated incidents but about a structural attack on the press as a democratic institution.
Consider the Associated Press, one of the most authoritative news agencies in the world. AP was barred from White House events because it continued to refer to the Gulf of Mexico rather than adopting Trump’s ideologically motivated renaming of it as the “Gulf of America.” This was not a misunderstanding or a slip of the tongue, but an explicit sanction for an editorial decision.
Trump and his administration have meanwhile filed lawsuits—or threatened to do so—against CBS News, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the BBC and other news organisations. ABC News reportedly paid around $14 million to settle a case; CBS News followed with a settlement estimated at $16 million related to the editing of an interview with Kamala Harris. Legal experts widely described these claims as weak, but media owners opted to settle rather than litigate, often fearing that refusing to do so would provoke presidential retaliation.
Alongside this legal pressure, Trump continued to target individual journalists publicly. On 14 November he snapped “Quiet, piggy” at Bloomberg reporter Catherine Lucey. Four days later he called ABC News journalist Mary Bruce “a terrible person and a terrible reporter.” Entire newsrooms were repeatedly branded “enemies of the people,” “sick,” or simply “fake news.” Critical reporting is systematically framed by the president as malicious opposition.
Crucially, analysts stress that this is not improvisation. According to press-freedom organisations and journalists at Poynter, Trump is following the blueprint laid out in Project 2025: an ideological plan to fundamentally reshape the relationship between government and the press. The steps are familiar—restrict access to officials, redefine who qualifies as a journalist, politicise regulatory bodies, and cut public funding. Media organisations that depend on federal support—NPR, PBS and outlets under the U.S. Agency for Global Media—have been hit hardest.
In October 2025 this strategy became starkly visible at the Pentagon. New press guidelines were introduced that effectively made independent reporting impossible. Access was tied to conditions that media organisations, Amnesty International and press-freedom groups said undermined normal journalistic practice and eroded protections for confidential sources.
Almost the entire mainstream press—including AP, Reuters, NPR and all major newspapers and broadcasters—refused to accept these conditions and collectively surrendered their press credentials. The vacated places were filled by pro-Trump outlets and political “influencers.” Critical journalism was not formally banned—but it was rendered unworkable. This is a familiar technique in countries where democratic institutions are hollowed out from within.
Some fear a similar scenario may soon unfold at the White House itself, where critical questions are increasingly unwelcome. Last week, Belfast-born journalist Niall Stanage was publicly berated by White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt—an incident that many reporters see as a warning sign.
The pressure has not been limited to rhetoric, lawsuits or access restrictions. In recent weeks, a line was crossed that until recently seemed unthinkable in the United States: a search of a journalist’s home. Hannah Natanson, an investigative reporter for The Washington Post, was visited by federal investigators as part of a leak investigation. Her home was searched and her laptops were seized.
This was made possible by a broader reinterpretation of national-security legislation, an explicit weakening of source-protection safeguards, and expanded discretion for the Department of Justice to treat journalists as “accomplices” to leaks. Long-standing guidelines dating back to Watergate—under which searches of journalists were allowed only as a last resort—have been revised or set aside.
Press-freedom organisations warned of a “tremendous intrusion” and a profound “chilling effect.” Even if the case against Natanson ultimately collapses, the signal is unmistakable: journalists who expose abuses of power or publish internal documents risk not only legal intimidation but direct intrusion into their private lives. The protection of sources—a cornerstone of investigative journalism—is now under direct threat.
As PEN America’s journalism leadership has noted, this is behaviour we associate with authoritarian police states, not with democratic societies that recognise the essential role of journalism in informing the public.
Amnesty International now argues that this is no longer merely a media dispute, but a full-blown human-rights crisis. Paul O’Brien, executive director of Amnesty International USA, has warned that by tearing up norms and concentrating power, the administration is attempting to make accountability impossible. There is, he says, no doubt that these authoritarian practices undermine human rights and increase risks not only for journalists, but also for protesters, lawyers, students and human-rights defenders.
Amnesty identifies twelve interconnected domains in which the foundations of a free society are being eroded. Attacks on press freedom and access to information lie at the centre. The organisation documents intimidation of journalists, restrictions on access, delegitimisation of media and the politicisation of regulatory bodies. The consequences extend well beyond the United States. The dismantling of Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia and Radio Martí weakens independent reporting in regions where press freedom is already fragile.
International press-freedom rankings confirm that this is not a matter of perception. Reporters Without Borders has recorded a marked decline for the United States on the World Press Freedom Index, citing political pressure, legal intimidation and the politicisation of access to information. The organisation draws a stark conclusion: Trump promised after his re-election to be a “dictator on day one,” and with regard to the press, that promise has largely been fulfilled. In just one year, government data have been censored, public broadcasters dismantled, independent agencies politicised, media intimidated through the courts, and international support for press freedom withdrawn. RSF explicitly compares this approach to that of leaders such as Vladimir Putin.
As RSF’s Clayton Weimers observes, individual attacks disappear in the daily news cycle—but taken together, the conclusion is unavoidable: the American president is waging a systematic war on the free press, with consequences that extend far beyond the United States.
Writing recently in The New York Times, journalist and author Masha Gessen captured the moment succinctly: “We still have independent media. But when we take stock of how much the media landscape has changed, it is sobering.”
Gessen ends with a warning—and a call to action. “Of course, the United States is not Russia — or Hungary or Venezuela or Israel or any of the many other democracies that have turned or are turning themselves into autocracies. But now is the time to focus on the similarities and try to learn from the ways other countries have cracked down on protest, eviscerated their electoral systems, limited their media freedom and built concentration camps. The only way to keep the space from imploding is to fill it, to prop up the walls: to claim all the room there still is for speaking, writing, publishing, protesting, voting. It’s what the people of Minnesota appear to be doing, and it’s something each of us needs to do — right now, while we still can.”