Outside the Beltway

Trump Loyalty Shakedown: The New McCarthyism

Our current round of speech repression may prove worse than McCarthyism.

Michael Bailey · Sunday, September 21, 2025 · 5 comments

Here I join James Joyner and Steven Taylor in noting the troubling recent examples of repression of speech under Trump 2.0. In our era of chronic outrage, a hyper-quick news cycle, and an administration that overwhelms our ability to track the changes it affects, it is exceedingly challenging to maintain a sense of proportionality. Nonetheless, I am persuaded we have entered a new and significant moment of speech repression—but updated to the internet and social media era and adapted to Trump’s style of bullying. Whether any of our vaunted checks on tyranny, such as separation of powers, federalism, and judicial review, will eventually roll back the abuses we are witnessing may turn on what counts as “eventually.” I am dubious regarding any immediate effective pushback.

This new breed of McCarthyism belongs, unmistakably, to President Donald John Trump. Though I lack Trump’s own gift for the pithy, cutting nickname, I think we can fairly dub Trump’s speech repression as a Loyalty Shakedown. The Trump Loyalty Shakedown operates on the principle of MAGA: Make America Grovel, Always.

Three Threats to Democratic Free Speech

How shall we best understand the nature of the Trump Loyalty Shakedown? I’ve found it useful to contextualize what we’re observing by somewhat artificially breaking down threats to our speech into three distinct categories. Reality is rarely as tidy as our concepts, but having some conceptual foothold gives us breathing room as we begin to sort out the details.

Direct Legal Coercion

The most obvious, and, at first glance, the most concerning, violation of our speech results from direct government repression. 

Freedom of speech was understood from our Founding to be an important personal and political right, and protection of speech was enshrined in the First Amendment, which reads:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

I quote the amendment in full because, though our rights are not interchangeable, they are deeply intertwined in practice—and our Framers (and anti-Federalists) understood them as such. Freedom of speech means very little if one cannot publish one’s thoughts, or gather together peaceably with others to share them, or direct them to the government for consideration. Put differently, our government can attack freedom of speech from a number of angles.

The right to speech enshrined in the First Amendment was originally directed exclusively against the federal government and, if we are to follow the constitutional thinking of Yale constitutional scholar Akhil Reed Amar, its goals were two-fold: first, to protect individual speech, and second, to protect state and local political activity that dissents from the federal government’s decrees. In other words, the First Amendment was designed to protect both dissenting (individual and minority) voices and, importantly, localized majority voices.

In time, the constitutional right of speech was expanded in two significant ways. First, 20th-century jurisprudence interpreted the Fourteenth Amendment (1868) as obligating state governments (and thus local governments) to the same standards applicable to the federal government. Second, jurisprudence dramatically expanded the meaning of speech, bringing within its fold not merely political expression, but also symbolic or artistic speech, expressive conduct, and the like. As a result of these changes, the United States in general has more expansive rights than many democracies. That may be changing, however.

To be sure, there have been many episodes in which the government has taken aim at speech. A few of these episodes are worth noting for the sake of contextualizing our current situation:

• Late 18th Century – Sedition Act. Passed under President John Adams despite his trepidation, this law criminalized some political speech. It called for legal punishments of publications that made false or malicious charges against the federal (and Federalist-led) government. The law infuriated Democrat-Republican Thomas Jefferson, especially after it led to the arrest and imprisonment of several Democratic-Republican-leaning newspaper editors. When Jefferson was elected, he pardoned those arrested and successfully called for the repeal of the act.
  
• 1830s–Congressional Gag Rule. In response to a wave of anti-slavery petitions that roiled the House and infuriated its Southern members, the House of Representatives responded by tabling all anti-slavery matters, removing the topic from debate. Southern senators, led by John Calhoun, also refused to “consider the question,” effectively tabling any anti-slavery bill without voting. This episode highlights the complex manner in which free speech can be stifled. Though no citizen was imprisoned, the people’s right to petition government was effectively eliminated.  Moreover, one House member, Ohio representative Joshua R. Giddings, was formally censured, and John Quincy Adams faced at least two censure attempts for their efforts to discuss slavery. The overall effect was removing from our legislative body consideration of the most fundamental issue of the time.
  
• Civil War. President Lincoln famously suspended the writ of habeas corpus and allowed the military to shut down newspapers deemed sympathetic to the Confederacy. Dissenting speech was threatened, and disruptions to the draft were punished. Unlike Trump, however, Lincoln tolerated personal criticism; his actions, whether warranted or not, were strategic, not personal.
  
• World War I – Espionage & Sedition Acts. President Wilson encouraged Congress to pass laws punishing disloyal speech and anti-war activism. Over 2,000 people were arrested, many of them pacifists, socialists, and anti-war activists. Socialist leader Eugene V. Debs was imprisoned until his sentence was commuted by President Harding in 1921.
  
• 1919-1920 – Palmer Raids. President Wilson’s Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, with intelligence from J. Edgar Hoover, rounded up immigrants (mostly Italians and Jews) suspected of disloyalty often determined by the ideology of their rhetoric. Thousands were arrested, hundreds deported, though Assistant Secretary of Labor Louis Freeland Post canceled many deportations on civil liberty grounds.
  

Cultural Conformity and Self-Censoring

Direct acts of government coercion do not comprise the entire threat to free speech. What matters just as deeply—and arguably constitutes a more chronic concern for everyday democratic life—is the democratic tendency toward conformity, self-censorship, and the imposition of cultural sanctions on those who stray too far or too vocally from accepted views. Cancel culture is, and always has been, a problem of democracy. It may have gained that name and become more obvious due to social media, but the reality, by whatever name, is a perennial problem for democratic society.

A culture of free speech must go beyond legal protections. It must develop social norms of tolerance as well as an institutional culture (in the press and media) that allows the expression of unpopular and even unwelcome or sharply dissenting perspectives. Society benefits over the long run by freedom of mind—by boldness of expression and originality of thought. But even when we aim lower than a population of Socrates, just maintaining a culturally pluralistic society is hard. People must be able to speak their minds not only without fear of being punished by the government but also without fear of social ostracism, retaliation, public humiliation, job loss, and so on.

Here I echo a venerable set of thinkers who have warned of the dangers of self-censorship and conformity in a democracy. Such thinkers include Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, Walter Lippmann and Isaiah Berlin, and more recently, Noam Chomsky and Cass Sunstein. But for my money, the two most profound thinkers to argue for an open society and the cultivation of freedom of mind and speech are Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill. 

Tocqueville warns that “in America the majority draws a formidable circle around thought. Inside those limits, the writer is free; but unhappiness awaits him if he dares to leave them…He is the butt of mortifications of all kinds and of persecutions every day.”

John Stuart Mill read and admired Tocqueville’s work, and he subsequently presented the single greatest defense of freedom of thought in his little book, On Liberty (1859).  For the most part, Mill assumes a society of readers who enjoy legal protections for speech. His focus, like Tocqueville’s, is the “mental slavery” that results from the stultifying effects of unchallenged beliefs and from when custom is taken as certainty. 

Mill also warned us that repression of speech would fall heaviest and those of ordinary income. He writes, “In respect to all persons but those whose pecuniary circumstances make them independent of the good will of other people, (public) opinion, on this subject, is as efficacious as law; men might as well be imprisoned as excluded from the means of earning their bread…The price paid for this sort of intellectual pacification is the sacrifice of the entire moral courage of the human mind.”

A pretty good case can be made that the trauma of our pre-Trump 2.0 cancel culture fell under this category of cultural stigma. As an academic, I had a front-row seat to some of its worst excesses (though none at my workplace, thankfully). Universities uninvited speakers. Professors withheld their real opinions. Students echoed the ideology of their professors in essays to avoid bad grades. Legitimate alternative opinions were left unvoiced. And outside of academics, people lost jobs, were shamed for old social media posts, or ostracized for statements. It was not a healthy climate. 

It’s worth remembering that nothing about free speech culture is cost-free or makes governance easy. Fake news is real. Whether it cost Hillary Clinton the 2016 election is, in my opinion, an open question. Misleading, fraudulent, and simply false opinions about evolution, climate change, and vaccinations are already rampant. Glorification of Nazi Germany and Holocaust denialism are more common than I could have conceived a mere ten years ago. Being pro-free speech isn’t the same as being blasé about its risks. Nor do I have confidence that the invisible hand of the marketplace of ideas will straighten things out and set us on the path of truth. Even if it eventually does, the delay in getting there can prove catastrophic.

Toleration does not mean complacency. Again, I turn to Mill:

“It would be a great misunderstanding of this doctrine (of free speech) to suppose that it is one of selfish indifference… It would be well, indeed, if this good office (of correcting the wrongful views of others) were much more freely rendered than the common notions of politeness at present permit.”

A Gray Zone: Voluntary Compliance Pipeline

Between the extremes of government coercion and repression of speech absent government lifting a finger, there is a gray zone in which the government refrains from putting people in jail but otherwise actively encourages repression of speech. Government signals what is acceptable and unacceptable, and in turn, private institutions and individuals comply. Here I examine two such examples, one well-known and the other lesser-known.

• 1835 – The Southern Response to the Great Postal Campaign. When the American Anti-Slavery Society sent abolitionist material throughout the South, Southerners were not pleased. A mob in Charleston burned abolitionist mail, and local Southern postmasters sought guidance from President Jackson. Jackson responded by asking Congress to prohibit using the mail to transport inflammatory tracts. Though Congress refused, his Postmaster General Amos Kendall received Jackson’s message loud and clear. He instructed local Southern postmasters to deal with anti-abolitionist mail as they saw fit. What resulted was virtually identical in practice to a federal ban on sending abolitionist material in the South. Though neither Congress nor President Jackson took any formal action, Jackson signaled his position, and Southern postmasters voluntarily complied.
  
• 1950s – McCarthyism. This is the classic example of this “gray zone.” McCarthyism did not entail Congress passing laws that expressly prohibited speech. Instead, it signaled what it held to be the standards for what is acceptable, and then private actors carried out the punishments to realize these standards. 

The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) found renewed purpose during this second “Red Scare.” Its mission was to investigate subversive activities and disloyal persons, especially supposed communists who were active in government, universities, unions, and Hollywood. Those suspected of disloyalty or subversion were hauled before the committee to testify at hearings and called to rat out their friends and colleagues. A few years earlier, President Truman issued an executive order calling for the executive branch to develop methods for ferreting out disloyal federal employees.

These actions created a pipeline of “voluntary” compliance. Unions, universities, schools, and Hollywood studios all took their lead from the federal government. States and employers imposed their own loyalty oaths. The ripple effect of HUAC and Truman’s executive order extended far. This was the era of the Hollywood blacklist. Lives were ruined and the public was denied the talent and ideas of artists, scientists, and other valuable thinkers.

Where Do We Stand Today?

Tying together our thoughts thus far, what we find is that government restrictions tend to emerge from the perception of crisis—from war (WWI) or the threat of war (1798 Sedition Act), from fear of alien ideologies (Red Scares I & II), and from fear of social upheaval (Southern response to anti-abolitionist mail). Whether any crisis actually ethically and legally justified any of these restrictions is an important and debatable question, of course, but it can be distinguished from merely recognizing the psychology leading to the restrictions.

So where do we stand today?

I believe we are entering a new era of repression of speech that may easily match and possibly exceed the restrictions we have hitherto witnessed.

As for direct legal coercion, I have little doubt that direct repression is ominously close, and I certainly won’t quibble with those who characterize it as already here. 

Certainly any expectation of cancel culture (social repression) receding can be reasonably put to bed. Cancel culture today has changed hands—a new cultural oppressor is in charge—but whatever gains may have occurred in curbing the excesses of “wokeness” (whatever that means) have been erased by patriotic correctness.

At the moment, the most striking change we witness has been a dramatic lurch into this “Gray Zone” of private and public complicity to repress speech. We may not be at peak levels of speech repression or authoritarianism (it can always get worse), but there is no point of splitting hairs. Call it Trump Loyalty Shakedown or whatever you wish, but whatever you call it, we must acknowledge we’re in a bad place. Though the scope and duration may not yet resemble McCarthyism, in some respects it may be worse, as I point out momentarily. 

James and Steven have already done the heavy lifting of highlighting instances of speech repression. Here, I merely mention a few examples, most of which have been discussed on this platform:

• Trump has punished both law firms and universities for hiring unacceptable (read: liberal) personnel and for taking political and cultural stances he rejects.
  
• Trump has sued both the New York Times and Wall Street Journal for billions of dollars for defamation.
  
• When unemployment data did not look favorably on his economic policies, Trump fired Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, on the baseless charge of her manipulating data.
  
• Melissa McCoul at Texas A&M was fired for teaching gender identity, and her dean was demoted for defending her right. Texas Governor Abbott directly intervened, calling for her dismissal.
  
• Firings followed the Charlie Kirk murder. While this may seem like a simple case of regular cancel culture, the Trump administration has clearly weighed in on the acceptable parameters and mode of acknowledging his murder. Vice-President Vance called for citizens to out their fellows and report those they deem insufficiently grieving to their employers.
  
• Trump has threatened to remove the broadcast licenses of networks for being too critical of him.
  
• Stephen Colbert’s show, earlier, and more recently Jimmy Kimmel Live! was cancelled or suspended. Brendan Carr, the head of the FCC, celebrated the suspension of Jimmy Kimmel. Earlier he had warned the parent network that they can comply the easy way or the hard way. This is the language of mob thugs in gangster movies.
  
• Attorney General Pam Bondi, in the context of Charlie Kirk’s murder, said (incorrectly) that hate speech is not protected by the First Amendment. She later ambiguously qualified her claims without withdrawing her statement.
  
• President Trump held that left-wing rhetoric was directly responsible for Charlie Kirk’s murder, and that it would no longer be tolerated.
  
• White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller claimed the administration would target left-wing associations.
  
• The Defense Department will soon require its press pool to sign a pledge not to gather information from the department that hasn’t been authorized for release.
  

This list is meant to be suggestive, not comprehensive. However, it starkly reveals the extent to which President Trump is willing to lean on institutions to satisfy his preferences. Sometimes he acts through executive orders, but as often as not he attempts to bully his way into compliance through outrageous rhetoric and threats.

Comparing McCarthyism and Trump Loyalty Shakedown

Obviously, the most obvious distinction between McCarthyism and the Trump Loyalty Shakedown era is one of duration. McCarthyism—or more broadly, the Second Red Scare—lasted about five years. Our current Gray Zone of speech repression is synonymous with Trump 2.0, which is less than a year old. Nor has it (yet) affected as many people through firings and loyalty pledges.

That being said, one might argue that this round of speech suppression is, in some respects, worse. Two reasons come to mind. First, not only McCarthyism but virtually every instance of significant speech repression in American history emerged from a broadly accepted sense of national crisis, usually tied to some underlying perfectly real threat. We may debate the extent to which Communists infiltrated the government and other influential institutions, but there is no doubt that the Soviet menace was a very real and murderous global force. By contrast, today there is no underlying crisis—apart, of course, from the price of beef. Nearly every “crisis” Trump has declared, and nearly every emergency power he has claimed, has been fabricated to expand his power and advance his policy agenda. Yes, there are chronic national problems—inflation, undocumented immigration, crime, underperforming schools, and so on—but none of them constitute a crisis in the usual sense this word is used: an urgent, time-sensitive danger with significant stakes if not resolved quickly.

I cannot think of another moment in American history when speech has been repressed—albeit often through private actors prodded by the government—without the backdrop of a genuine crisis. Perhaps the closest parallel is the 1798 Sedition Act, which is widely seen today as a terribly regrettable intrusion on constitutional liberties. Whatever principles may have been invoked to rationalize past restrictions, today’s restrictions are wholly opportunistic.

Second, the typical movement of repression in American history has been in the service–no matter how misguided–of majority viewpoints.  For example, whether one agrees with Wilson’s WWI wartime restrictions, it is undeniable that once the U.S. entered World War I, the anti-war position was held by a minority. Similarly, McCarthyism was un-American in spirit and practice, but Communism was also perceived as un-American by much of the public.

But do Trump’s actions reflect the will of the majority of Americans? Trump officials and allies never tire of repeating that “elections have consequences,” and Trump himself has claimed his 2024 victory constituted one of the greatest electoral mandates in history. It’s worth remembering that in none of Trump’s elections did he secure a majority of the popular vote. The portion of Republicans who look favorably upon speech repression is concentrated among the MAGA constituency. But how large is this portion of the populace? Polls vary, but a decent rough estimate is that about one-third of the electorate—or about half of self-identified Republicans—consider themselves MAGA. 

Put differently, I know of no evidence that suggests a majority of Americans support any of Trump’s  restrictive measures on speech. Crushing dissenting opinions is bad enough when done in the service of actual majority preferences. Doing so without even majority support is doubly corrosive. It violates not only our civil liberties but also makes a mockery of the principle of majority rule.

Implications for Democracy

It’s standard political science to understand the distinguishing feature of liberal democracy as its focus on institutions and processes designed to facilitate widespread political participation, safeguard the right of opposition groups to counter the ruling parties, and to protect civil liberties. Reduced to its absolute simplest, democracy entails two things: the attempt by political actors to win elections for the sake of shaping public policy, and the freedom of electoral losers (and other minorities) to use their voice to gain adherents and possibly influence policy outcomes.

Winning elections and speaking out against the winners—this is the essence of democracy. And what we see in Trump 2.0 is an attempt to undermine both of these necessary wings. Trump has encouraged states to readjust their district maps to make it less likely that certain majorities (Democrats) will win as majorities. He is trying to rig the system to disproportionately amplify Republican power. In no case can Republican affiliation be understood to be a large majority of the American public, but that is the institutional effect Trump is trying to conjure.

At the same time, even as he is attempting to squeeze Democrats into permanent minority status, Trump is also attempting to silence their voice. He is seeking to indefinitely enshrine his party in office and to criminalize attempts to oppose them. Call this kind of action whatever you want, but you cannot call it democratic.

Whataboutism?
Conservatives have suggested that Americans will see through the left’s complaints about cancel culture. Where were they when cancel culture was directed against the Right?  That’s a legitimate question, but if you hated cancel culture under Obama and Biden but embrace it now, I have some news for you: you’re not in favor of free speech. You merely don’t like your speech being canceled. You’re entitled to your position, but you cannot in good faith claim to support free speech. 

But if you are, in fact, motivated by the principle of free speech—and if you are a Republican—now is the time to speak out against President Trump. Democrats do not hold a majority in any portion of the federal government, and most states are red as well. We live under Republican governance. If you don’t like violations of free speech and you are a Republican, I encourage you to join hands with us and to speak out–that is, while you can. 

Free speech applies to all, or it isn’t free speech.