Trump is threatening to jail political enemies. So are Democrats.
In December, Trump adviser Kash Patel set off alarm bells when he said that if the former president returns to the Oval Office, his new administration might prosecute media figures and others “who lied about American citizens.”
“We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media,” Patel told Steve Bannon. “Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections—we’re going to come after you. Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out. But yeah, we’re putting you all on notice.”
Unfortunately, Republicans don’t have a monopoly on schemes to jail their enemies in the media. In a column for the Guardian Friday, Robert Reich—who served as Labor secretary under President Bill Clinton and is now something of a progressive policy celebrity—argued that “regulators around the world should threaten” to arrest Elon Musk “if he doesn’t stop disseminating lies and hate on X.” Reich’s demand for censorial prosecutions of a high-profile Trump supporter was made all the more appalling by the fact that it was published in a paper founded two centuries ago in the wake of a violent crackdown against freedom of speech and the press.
