Trump takes aim at the free press ahead of midterms

President Trump speaks at a campaign rally at The Mitchell Center in Mobile, Ala., on Oct. 2, 2026.

Does President Trump really control a video channel? Yes. That’s not hype — it is true. The YouTube channel is being advertised as showing his “biggest moments all in one place.”

“Quite literally state-run TV,” said California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat.

Also, hard to believe but true, is that in the last few days President Trump used taxpayer money to run political ads on television framing him as the nation’s hero.

There is more. For the first time in history the president controls a social media platform, Truth Social. He recently tried to charge a fee for early access to his presidential announcements on the site. And Trump is blaming the press for polls showing his party doing badly in the midterm elections. He is lashing out, getting even, with an assault on the First Amendment protection for a free press.

Trump wants to energize his voters by demonizing the press. He recently pulled White House passes from reporters for three media companies. He announced the punishment on Truth Social and identified the targeted outlets as “Fake News” organizations.

Trump’s effort to control the news extends to coverage of the war in Iran.

That fighting is now more than six months along. But the Pentagon has not held a press briefing since May.

And last month, the Washington Post reported that the Pentagon hid full reporting on the extent of casualties in the war.

Four people killed in combat had not been counted as casualties as the Trump administration attempted to “portray the war as a success,” the Post reported. The Pentagon had “reclassified,” some deaths. Those deaths of those soldiers did not count, according to the Pentagon, because they took place in a separate phase of combat.

More unsettling revelations about the administration’s carefully shaped image of the war emerged last week.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told military leaders last week that news reports about declining levels of arms stockpiles and poor morale among troops are “anti-American.” He called these reports acts of “partisan activism that intentionally smears the troops and the historic mission that they’re undertaking … it’s sick. It’s a national betrayal. It’s treason, actually.”

Keep in mind that members of the U.S. military swear an oath to the Constitution, not to a president or a political party. That constitution includes the First Amendment.

Last year, Hegseth imposed strict restrictions on reporters moving around the Pentagon. That prompted virtually all major news organizations to surrender their Pentagon press passes and leave.

Hegseth later replaced them with his hand-selected group of reporters.

“The Pentagon has secretly installed several conservative military veterans with large online followings in government roles,” the Washington Post reported in August. The influencers’ job is to “amplify … Hegseth’s viewpoints and attack those who scrutinize the Trump administration,” the paper reported.

News stories from several outlets reported this summer about crisis conditions among sailors on an American aircraft carrier that had been at sea for nine months. Hegseth dismissed those stories as “completely misrepresented.”

The president supported Hegseth’s appraisal by saying the ship’s deployment was “not nearly long enough.”

Last week, the Navy conceded that eight sailors had attempted suicide on that ship.

The consequences of attacks on independent American journalism is not abstract. A free press at the Pentagon is vital to voters’ understanding of the war as they vote in the midterms. Government-controlled press reports amount to propaganda. They undercut the basic premise of an informed electorate freely choosing its leaders.

Trump’s offensive against the free press extends to bragging that he can get better ratings than independent news organizations. His midterm Republican convention got “107 million views,” he claimed. He said that number surpassed the number of viewers for an NFL game that was aired at the same time.

Let the record show that he got 2.5 million viewers while the NFL got more than 25 million.

When Chinese President Xi Jinping visited the White House last month, Trump praised the Chinese reporters as the “friendliest press corps.” He did not mention that the Chinese have no First Amendment protection for a free press. He made no reference to the heavy-handed censorship of the press in China. Trump merely made Chinese state-controlled press into a positive model for the American press.

That fit with comments he made earlier this year when confronted with the historical pattern of midterm losses for the party in power. Trump told Reuters: “When you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.” It is hard to believe, but he said it.

Maybe that is why conspiracy theories about potential election tricks by Trump continue to circulate.

The basic script is clear: Republicans could seek to delay or prevent the seating of members from closely contested districts, citing bogus allegations of voter fraud or unresolved election disputes.

Trump is likely to blame “fake news,” for reports about any political maneuvering to weaken any defeat in the elections.

As Thomas Jefferson famously wrote from Paris in his 1787 letter to Edward Carrington, given the choice, he would prefer “newspapers without a government” over “a government without newspapers.”

Juan Williams is senior political analyst for Fox News Channel and a prize-winning civil rights historian. He is the author of the new book “New Prize for These Eyes: The Rise of America’s Second Civil Rights Movement.“