Attacks on Press Freedom: 'Enemy of the People' Rhetoric and Revocation of Press Credentials
Tier 3Ongoing2017-02-17 to 2025-04-01
Factual Summary
On February 17, 2017, less than a month into his first term, Donald Trump posted on Twitter: "The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!" This was the first use by a sitting American president of the phrase "enemy of the people" to describe journalists and news organizations. The phrase has a documented history of use by authoritarian governments in the twentieth century, including by Soviet leaders and by Nazi propagandists, as a label for groups designated as threats to the state.
Trump used or endorsed the phrase "enemy of the people" to describe the press on dozens of occasions throughout his presidency and continued to use it during his 2024 presidential campaign and into his second term. The Committee to Protect Journalists documented 1,339 critical tweets targeting the press between 2015 and 2019 alone.
In November 2018, the White House revoked the hard pass press credentials of CNN chief White House correspondent Jim Acosta following a contentious exchange with Trump at a post-midterm press conference. Acosta's press pass was revoked on the basis of disputed characterizations of his conduct during the conference. CNN filed suit in federal court. On November 16, 2018, Judge Timothy Kelly, a Trump appointee, granted a temporary restraining order requiring the White House to restore Acosta's credentials, finding that the administration had failed to provide due process before revocation. The White House subsequently returned the pass and later established written rules governing press conference conduct, a process Acosta's lawsuit helped prompt.
CBS News anchor Lesley Stahl has publicly described a conversation she had with Trump before his first inauguration in which he explained his strategy toward the press. According to Stahl, Trump told her he attacked journalists "to discredit you all and demean you all so when you write negative stories about me, no one will believe you." The account was first reported in May 2018.
During the 2020 campaign and after, Trump's campaign organization filed defamation lawsuits against the New York Times, the Washington Post, and CNN. The lawsuits were largely unsuccessful. Courts dismissed several of the claims on First Amendment grounds.
The Committee to Protect Journalists broke with its longstanding tradition of declining to evaluate domestic political candidates and issued a statement during the 2016 presidential campaign warning that Trump represented a threat to press freedom. CPJ had previously focused exclusively on journalists imprisoned or killed in other countries.
Former Fox News anchor Chris Wallace, who served as a White House correspondent and moderator of presidential debates, described Trump's approach to the press as "the most direct sustained assault on freedom of the press in our history."
During Trump's second term beginning in January 2025, the administration took additional actions affecting press access, including excluding certain outlets from pool coverage and modifying the White House Correspondents' Association process for credentialing.
Primary Sources
1. Trump tweet, February 17, 2017: "@realDonaldTrump: The FAKE NEWS media...is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!" archived at: https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/
2. CNN v. Trump, No. 18-cv-02610 (D.D.C.), Temporary Restraining Order granted November 16, 2018, by Judge Timothy Kelly
3. White House press pass rules, issued December 2018 following the Acosta case, archived by the White House Historical Association
4. Committee to Protect Journalists statement on Trump and press freedom, October 2016: https://cpj.org/
Corroborating Sources
1. Committee to Protect Journalists: "Tracking Trump: 1,339 Attacks on the Press," database of critical tweets 2015 to 2019: https://cpj.org/reports/2019/08/trump-twitter-press-freedom-enemy-people/
2. Washington Post: "Lesley Stahl: Trump told me he bashes press 'to demean you and discredit you,'" May 22, 2018: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2018/05/22/lesley-stahl-trump-told-me-he-bashes-press-to-demean-you-and-discredit-you/
3. The Guardian: "'Enemy of the people': Trump's phrase and its echoes of totalitarian regimes," August 2018
4. NPR: "Federal Judge Rules White House Must Return Jim Acosta's Press Pass," November 16, 2018
5. Columbia Journalism Review: "Trump's war on the press, a running list," updated through 2021: https://www.cjr.org/
6. Reporters Without Borders (RSF) World Press Freedom Index, noting the U.S. decline in rankings during the Trump years: https://rsf.org/en/index
Counterarguments and Context
Trump and his allies have argued that his criticism of the press reflects legitimate pushback against biased coverage and that freedom of the press does not obligate a president to facilitate or reward hostile journalism. They have argued that several major news organizations published stories that were later corrected or retracted and that aggressive press criticism is a form of protected political speech, not an attack on press freedom. Legal scholars have noted that the First Amendment protects Trump's right to criticize journalists as much as it protects journalists' right to publish. Trump has characterized his lawsuits against news organizations as necessary to hold them accountable for what he calls defamatory reporting, rather than as attempts to suppress coverage. The Acosta credential revocation was the subject of litigation rather than a permanent restriction and was reversed by court order within days.
Author's Note
The "enemy of the people" designation is the organizing fact of this entry because its historical antecedents are documented and because the phrase was new to American presidential rhetoric in 2017. The entry does not adjudicate the fairness or accuracy of any specific press coverage of Trump. It documents a pattern of conduct toward the institutional press, including rhetoric, credential revocation, litigation, and coordinated framing of journalists as adversaries of the public, that historians, press freedom organizations, and experienced journalists across ideological lines identified as a departure from prior norms. The documented Lesley Stahl account is included because it is a direct first-person account of stated intent. The related pattern of false claims is documented under FALSE-003.