One year into Trump’s second term, the United States has not abolished press freedom. It has done something more methodical: it has made press freedom expensive, dangerous, and in some cases, impossible to exercise from inside the country at all.
There is a version of this argument that gets made too easily. Journalists are not being disappeared. The presses have not been stopped. The New York Times still publishes every day, the Washington Post still breaks stories, and cable news still runs for twenty-four hours. The argument follows that things are not that bad, and anyone claiming otherwise is being hysterical.
That argument is wrong. Not because the situation is the same as Russia or Hungary. It is not. It is wrong because it mistakes the absence of the final step for the absence of a process. What the Trump administration has done in its first year is build the infrastructure of press suppression, systematically, across every lever of federal power available to it. The presses are still running. What has changed is who is allowed to watch them work.
Access, by Permission
Start with physical space, because it is the most concrete.
In February 2025, the White House Correspondents’ Association, which had controlled the White House press pool for more than a century, ceded that control to the Trump administration. The president’s team now decides which journalists cover the president. That is not a technicality. Every authoritarian government in the world understands that controlling access is the first move: you do not need to ban reporting if you can simply ensure that unfavorable reporters are not in the room.
The Associated Press was barred from White House events in February 2025 as retaliation for declining to refer to the Gulf of Mexico by Trump’s preferred name. NBC News, the New York Times, NPR, and Politico lost their long-standing offices in the Pentagon. They were replaced by Gateway Pundit, LindellTV, and podcasters whose editorial independence consists of endorsing the administration that gave them the seats. At the State Department, journalists now require advance passes for access to events, making spontaneous coverage of breaking news all but impossible.
By October 2025, the Pentagon had gone further still, introducing rules that required journalists to sign pledges not to seek or publish any information the Defense Department had not authorized for release. Not classified information. Any information. Most major outlets, including Fox News, refused and surrendered their credentials.
Edit 22 March 2026: A federal judge struck down the policy as unconstitutional on March 20, 2026. The administration announced it would appeal.
Reporters Without Borders has documented eight distinct ways the administration is physically restricting journalists’ access to spaces where previously they could work freely. In one year. This is not rhetoric. It is architecture.
The Financial Weapon
Physical exclusion targets individual journalists and outlets. The financial weapon targets journalism itself.
The administration dismantled the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which funds Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and Radio Free Asia. These are the outlets that deliver uncensored journalism to places like Belarus, Vietnam, Myanmar, and China, countries where reliable information can get you imprisoned. At least 84 journalists employed by these outlets on U.S. work visas now face deportation to regimes that would arrest them for the work they did. According to Reporters Without Borders, 23 of them face immediate imprisonment if returned home.
The administration also froze $268 million in congressionally appropriated funding for international independent media. USAID, which funds hundreds of independent news outlets globally, was effectively defunded. In some countries, those outlets have already closed. This is not an abstraction: when American funding for free press infrastructure disappears, the gap is filled by state propaganda in Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran.
Domestically, the economic pressure on journalism was already severe. The RSF’s 2025 World Press Freedom Index ranks the United States 57th globally, a position that reflects years of local news collapse, ownership concentration, and declining public trust. Roughly a third of American newspapers operating in 2005 have now shut. The administration’s defunding of NPR and PBS accelerates a trend that was already hollowing out the information landscape in rural and low-income communities.
The tactic is elegant in its brutality. You do not need to ban journalism. You starve the institutions that make it possible, then replace them with friendly voices that cost nothing to manage.
The Legal Cudgel
What physical restriction and financial pressure cannot accomplish, litigation can begin.
Trump has filed a $15 billion lawsuit against the New York Times over coverage he labels malicious, a $10 billion suit against the Wall Street Journal over a story about his connection to Jeffrey Epstein, and suits against CBS, the Des Moines Register, the Gannett Company, and the Pulitzer Center. Most of these cases will likely fail in court. That is not the point. The point is that defending a major defamation suit costs millions of dollars and years of management attention. The bill alone is the punishment.
This mirrors what authoritarian governments in Singapore, Hungary, and Poland have done with their own press: not censorship by decree, but censorship by legal attrition. The goal is not to win in court. The goal is to make editors hesitate before the next story runs.
The most alarming single event in year one was the FBI raid on the home of Washington Post journalist Hannah Natanson on January 14, 2026. Agents arrived with a search warrant, confiscated her laptops, phone, and smartwatch, and said they were looking for materials related to a government employee. A federal judge later ordered the government not to examine the devices until it received express authorization, but agents had already had access for a week. The devices contained communications with hundreds of confidential sources.
The Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia called the raid “intensely concerning.” PEN America described it as behavior associated with authoritarian police states. The administration has expanded the Justice Department’s authority to treat journalists as accomplices to leaks, and revised or set aside long-standing guidelines, dating to the post-Watergate era, under which searches of journalists were treated as measures of absolute last resort.
When a government can walk into a reporter’s home with a warrant and spend a week reading her source communications, the chilling effect is not hypothetical. It is the explicit goal.
Self-Censorship and the Offshore Record
The effects that do not make headlines are often the most damaging. And I can write about this one from the inside.
I am not an American citizen. I am a journalist who worked in the United States and covered what happens there. Over the past year, I have found myself doing things I have never done before: checking whether a story I am working on might draw immigration enforcement scrutiny, thinking twice before posting an opinion on social media that could be construed as anti-administration, running a quiet calculation before boarding a flight back to the U.S. about whether anything I have published recently might flag me at the border.
None of those calculations is the work of a coward. They are the rational responses of a non-citizen journalist operating in a country where the administration has detained journalists for their reporting, revoked visas as retaliation for coverage, and demonstrated a willingness to use immigration status as a tool against people it considers hostile. The Salvadoran journalist Mario Guevara was deported after 111 days in ICE detention, charged with nothing, for the crime of filming federal agents making arrests. The Nashville journalist Estefany Rodriguez was detained by agents who knew she had written critically about ICE. The message those cases convey is unambiguous.
What I notice most is not any single calculation, but the cumulative weight of them all. A story I would have filed without a second thought two years ago now gets held an extra day while I think through the exposure. A source conversation I would have had on a regular phone now happens on encrypted messaging. A social media post that might have gone up immediately instead sits in drafts while I consider the blowback. Each individual adjustment is small. Together, they represent a meaningful change in how I work, imposed not by any law or directive but by a reasonable reading of what this administration has shown it is willing to do.
I am not alone in this. Poynter documented non-citizen journalists wiping social media histories and removing bylines. Reporters Without Borders has catalogued widespread self-censorship among foreign journalists working in the U.S. These are not hypothetical harms. They are happening now, at scale, to people who are doing nothing illegal, simply trying to do their jobs in a country that used to be considered a safe place to do them.
I am writing this from abroad. That is not incidental to the argument. It is the argument.
The ICE List, the accountability database documenting federal immigration agents, is hosted in Iceland specifically to avoid U.S. jurisdiction. Its creator, an Irish activist based in the Netherlands, built it offshore because he correctly judged that it could not safely exist within the country it was designed to hold accountable. I understand that judgment. It is one I have made myself, in a different way, about my own work.
This is what has happened historically in countries where press freedom declined faster than anyone predicted. First, the calculations get harder. Then the self-censorship starts. Then some people leave, and the ones who stay assume the ones who left were timid. Then more leave. The exile phase is not the beginning of the end. It is the signal that the beginning already happened, quietly, while everyone was still telling themselves the First Amendment made it impossible.
What This Looks Like from the Outside
To anyone who regularly covers governments that suppress journalism, the American pattern is not unfamiliar. It is precisely the progression documented in RSF’s analysis of how press freedom erodes: restrict physical access, cut financial lifelines, redefine who qualifies as a legitimate journalist, weaponize regulatory bodies, use litigation to impose costs, and expand the security apparatus’s reach into newsrooms.
RSF now explicitly compares Trump’s approach to Vladimir Putin’s. That comparison is meant to provoke, and it should. Not because the United States is Russia. It is not. But because the techniques are recognizably the same, and the distance between where the United States is and where Russia was before the final suppression is shorter than Americans are accustomed to believing.
The Pew Research Center found that only 36 percent of Americans were paying attention to the administration’s relationship with the press by early 2025, compared to 72 percent at the same point in the first term. The public, in other words, has largely stopped watching. The administration understands this. The most effective press suppression is the kind that happens in the news cycle’s margins, incrementally, while the audience is focused on the war, the economy, or the next controversy the same administration has helpfully provided.
None of this requires a final act. The United States does not need to formally abolish press freedom for the press to become functionally less free. It only needs to make independent journalism expensive enough, dangerous enough, and exhausting enough that the people doing it start making different choices. Some already have. More will.
The First Amendment is still there. So is the padlock on the press briefing room.