After Trump administration officials accidentally added The Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg to a private group chat discussing confidential defense plans, the world waited to see how the president would respond. Between Goldberg’s viral exposé and the published screenshots of the Signal chat, the massive mistake seemed impossible to deny.

Nevertheless, irrefutable evidence has rarely changed Trump’s tactics. Appearing on the VINCE podcast on Mar. 26, Trump described Goldberg as “a sleazebag, but at the highest level.” Plus, “his magazine is failing.”

It should be shocking to hear the president blatantly twist the truth and disparage journalists in this way–but these attitudes are far from new. The divisive and extreme comments that became his signature during the 2016 presidential election have continued to extend to the press; he went as far as to call the media the “enemy of the people” during a 2022 rally. According to the organization Reporters Without Borders, Trump made over 100 public statements attacking the press in an eight-week period leading up to the November 2024 election. In other words, Trump has retaliated against outlets criticizing him, with lawsuits against ABC, CBS News, and the Des Moines Register. ABC settled its defamation case and paid Trump $15 million in December 2024; the other suits are ongoing.

Perhaps most frighteningly, Trump’s second presidency has allowed him to instill repudiation for the free press into policy. In her first briefing on Jan. 29, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt announced that the White House will reinstate the press passes of those barred during Biden’s presidency and that press conferences will be open to “new media,” including podcasters and influencers.

“We will ensure that outlets like yours—Axios and Breitbart, which are widely respected and viewed outlets—have an actual seat in this room every day,” she added. Never mind that Breitbart is ranked as a “strong right” media source, according to the Ad Fontes Media Bias Chart. The hypocrisy is evident: outlets considered to be left-leaning are belittled and discredited, while far-right sources are legitimized.

Then, on Feb. 25, the White House announced that it would choose its own press pool, ending the White House Correspondents’ Association’s independent rotation. Two weeks earlier, journalists from the Associated Press were barred from the Oval Office and Air Force One for using the term “Gulf of Mexico” instead of Trump’s renamed “Gulf of America.”

These actions, from targeting individual newspapers to endorsing misinformation, contribute to the growing distrust of major media outlets. A free press is one of the rights enshrined in the First Amendment, and it is troubling to see that liberty openly disregarded by the Trump administration. Without independent news organizations, and especially with limited fact-checking on other media forms like Meta, Americans are left ill-informed and vulnerable to disinformation.

Beyond the harm to all citizens, journalists, in particular, are at risk. A Feb. 2024 survey by the International Women’s Media Foundation found that one-third of respondents had faced threats of violence or actual physical violence for their journalism.

Trump is not the only reason for mistrust and outright dislike of journalists, but he has normalized these attitudes. His blurring between truth and fiction and frequent calls for a media outlet to lose their credentials are no longer surprising. Given the constant chaos and attacks on journalists, we have been conditioned to believe that this is normal. We must recognize that a political reality that threatens a free press is crossing the line into authoritarianism. We must stand up for journalistic freedom and fight censorship in all its forms.