The sticky note said “treason”.
That’s what Donald Trump reportedly scrawled on top of a stack of news articles he handed to his acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, earlier this year. The articles concerned leaks about the coming Iran war. The note was an assignment of sorts. Within weeks, the justice department had issued grand jury subpoenas to reporters at the Wall Street Journal, demanding to know who their sources were. This week, the existence of those subpoenas became public.
That word — “treason” — has become very familiar to me. It’s what Trump said he was investigating me for last year. In fact, to my surprise, the US President is using that personal revenge campaign against me as part of his justification for a new crackdown.
Let me explain.
A year ago, Trump issued an executive order directing federal agencies to investigate me for “treason”. It was the first time in 250 years of American history that a president had signed such an order to open a specific inquiry into a specific critic. The crime? I quit his first administration and exposed the misconduct I witnessed. And I haven’t shut up about it since. He came back into office determined to make an example.
But it didn’t stop there. As I later found out, then-attorney general Pam Bondi used Trump’s order against me as the flimsy justification to strip away longstanding protections for reporters. In April last year, she quietly issued a memo to make it easier for federal agents to seize the communications of journalists to uncover their sources, and cited my purported “treason” in speaking to the press as one of the reasons, along with the supposedly seditious disloyalty of other officials who told the truth about what was happening inside the first Trump administration.
With that, Trump had set the stage for a war on free speech.
Of course, the Trump administration has made it sound like this is about stopping leaks of classified information. Unfortunately for Trump, criticism of a president is not “classified”, no matter how badly he wants it to be.
Trump’s logic is obvious. He doesn’t want dissent amplified, and certainly not the most damaging kind — from insiders who have seen his impulsiveness and corruption up close.
So they’re using mob-like tactics to scare news outlets and the sources who they rely on to expose what’s really happening around the President. The attack on the Wall Street Journal is meant to send a signal that those who call out Trump’s follies will face costly litigation or worse – First Amendment be damned.
Trump’s revenge tactics are spreading to his lieutenants, says Taylor (Photo: Bill O’Leary/The Washington Post via Getty Images)In January, the FBI raided the Virginia home of a Washington Post reporter, seizing her phone, laptops and hard drives. Days later, federal agents arrested two journalists in Minnesota for filming a protest against immigration agents.
The following month, the White House barred the Associated Press from the Oval Office and Air Force One because the wire service refused to adopt Trump’s “Gulf of America” renaming and, in March, the justice department issued grand jury subpoenas to Wall Street Journal reporters over reporting Trump didn’t like (which became public this week). Last month, Trump’s Federal Communications Commission ordered Disney’s ABC stations to file for early licence renewal after the President called for comedian Jimmy Kimmel‘s firing.
Trump’s billionaire buddies have also moved forward with plans to take over CNN and its parent company, with reported plans to fire reporters Trump doesn’t like. And this week, Blanche publicly announced that any reporter who receives sensitive government information should expect a subpoena to try to unmask their sources.
Trump’s “trickle-down revenge” is spreading, predictably, to his lieutenants. FBI Director Kash Patel last month sued The Atlantic for $250m over a story alleging he drinks to excess on the job and has now reportedly ordered polygraph tests of more than two dozen members of his own team to identify who spoke to reporters. On top of that, the FBI is reportedly investigating the journalists tied to the story.
Patel’s wounded ego has apparently been converted into a federal counterintelligence operation. The mechanism is the same one Trump deployed against me, now miniaturised and replicated down the chain.
FBI director Kash Patel with Trump at the White House press briefing following an attack on the correspondents’ dinner last month (Photo: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)For British readers, none of this should feel comfortably foreign. The Atlantic Ocean won’t protect you from the shockwave of a US President bringing his fist down on the media. Reporters Without Borders (Reporters Sans Frontiers, or RSF) recently released its 2026 World Press Freedom Index, and the findings should chill anyone who assumed the “free” world would stay that way.
Global press freedom is at its lowest level in 25 years, according to the index, with the US leading the downward spiral and falling seven places in the rankings. RSF describes the second Trump administration as both importing and exporting authoritarian tendencies, and from my vantage point, the export business is booming.
Trump’s assault on free expression is fast becoming a Pinterest board for aspiring autocrats.
For instance, when Serbian authorities recently raided the country’s largest independent fact-checking organisation, they cited social media posts by Elon Musk, in his former capacity as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge), among their evidence. American officials are the source material for foreign crackdowns, to say nothing of the high-level delegations Trump has sent to countries like Hungary in praise of autocratic leaders.
For 80 years, when an autocrat from Ankara to Moscow to Beijing jailed a journalist, raided a newsroom or shut down a broadcaster, it was the US state department that issued the condemnation. Washington usually stood up. While American moral authority on press freedom was not perfect, it often constrained the worst excesses of regimes around the world. They feared we’d cut them off or sanction them. Now they’re taking pointers from us.
US Vice President JD Vance with Hungary’s Viktor Orbán in April (Photo: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)I saw the warning signs in the first Trump administration. It’s why I came forward to say that a re-elected Trump would put the crosshairs on free speech — how he didn’t care about the Saudis murdering journalist Jamal Khashoggi, queried staff about wiretapping his own associates to find leakers and sought to destroy the lives of anyone who spoke up, mine included. I wrote in 2023 in my book Blowback that, if re-elected, he would launch sham “leak investigations” that were “bubble-wrapped in legalese” about protecting national security but whose real purpose would be “prosecution of political adversaries”.
Last year, the President’s aides told Rolling Stone he was coming after me to “send a message”. He certainly has, though it’s gone far beyond me. He’s out to make an example of people everywhere who say what he doesn’t want them to say.
If the US President wants to conflate free speech with “treason”, then we should proudly wear the label of traitors. Indeed, in almost every period in which open society was under threat, those who preserved it did so by committing to a shared course of action: defiance.
Miles Taylor is a former chief of staff at the US Department of Homeland Security and has served on Capitol Hill, in the White House and at the Pentagon. He is a No 1 New York Times bestselling author, regular national security commentator and democracy reform leader.
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