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This is the third in a series of articles, “Try, Try Again?,” drawn from my new book—Great and Dangerous Offences: The Case For (and Against) Impeaching Trump a Third Time—due out in early 2027.

The speech, press, and assembly protections of the First Amendment are central pillars of our constitutional order. Without a robust press scrutinizing the workings of government, an unrestricted prerogative of speech including speech critical of government, and a right in the people to gather and voice their grievances to the state, a healthy democratic republic would be impossible. As the Supreme Court has held, the government may not “use the power of the State to punish or suppress disfavored expression.”

Since returning to office in 2025, Donald Trump has mounted an accelerating assault on the First Amendment. He has aggressively and repeatedly sought to silence his personal and political critics in government, the media, academia, civil society groups, and the public at large, and to monopolize the flow of information to the American people. The famous constitutional phrase “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors,” which defines impeachable conduct, includes—as founder George Mason was at pains to emphasize—“attempts to subvert the Constitution.” Trump’s attack on the First Amendment is an attempt to subvert a cornerstone of the Constitution and is impeachable on that basis.

Trump’s campaign has taken multiple forms: abuse of private litigation, use of federal regulatory power against media critics, abuse of federal regulatory authority to place media outlets under politically favorable ownership, exclusion of critical media outlets from access to public information and spaces, suppression of independent media voices within government, legal attacks by the government on individual regime critics, attacks by the Trump administration on law firms, and attacks on universities and academic researchers.

Abuse of Private Civil Litigation

Between Trump’s November 2022 announcement that he would run for reelection and late summer 2026, he filed a sequence of personal lawsuits against both traditional media outlets and social media companies like YouTube, Meta, and X. Trump sued a pollster for issuing allegedly false predictions about the 2024 election in Iowa, as well as the Des Moines Register for publishing the pollster’s findings. He even sued the board that awards Pulitzer Prizes because it conferred 2018 Pulitzers on the staffs of the New York Times and Washington Post for their reporting on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

The media defendants fought these cases, which most experts viewed as legally meritless. Then Trump won the 2024 election, and the implicit threats to use the retributive powers of the presidency against these outlets became more concrete. At this point, many outlets folded, paying Trump $117 million in settlements during 2025 alone.

Last month, Trump threatened a new lawsuit, taking the intimidation campaign to a new level. On Aug. 16, a personal lawyer for Trump sent a letter to the Center for American Progress (a liberal think tank) threatening that Trump would sue the group if it did not retract and apologize for a report that concluded that Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops to cities around the country had little effect on reducing violent crime. Unlike Trump’s earlier lawsuits against the media, this threat lacked even the fig leaf of supposed defamation of Trump’s personal character. It was instead a straight-up threat to embroil a nonprofit organization in exhausting and expensive litigation because it had the temerity to study, analyze, and cast doubt on the efficacy of a Trump administration policy.

The government cannot sue for defamation. Trump’s defenders might argue that he cannot be impeached for suits he filed in his personal capacity. But the use of private means to upend the constitutional........

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