In a Truth Social post on Tuesday morning, President Donald Trump said he would punish students who engage in demonstrations of any kind — a clear violation of their First Amendment speech and assembly rights — and threatened consequences for any college or university that allows protests to take place.
“All Federal Funding will STOP for any College, School, or University that allows illegal protests,” Trump wrote in his post, failing to specify what constitutes an “illegal protest.”
The president added that “agitators” taking part in demonstrations will either be “imprisoned” or “permanently sent back to the country from which they came.” Trump also demanded that students be “permanently expelled” or “arrested” if they take part in protests.
Although he didn’t mention pro-Palestine protests in his post on Tuesday, Trump has previously threatened to deport any student who took part in protests against Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. “One thing I do is, any student that protests, I throw them out of the country,” Trump told donors during his 2024 presidential campaign.
Earlier this year, Trump signed an executive order authorizing the deportation of noncitizen students who took part in protests against Israel’s genocide, falsely describing such protests as inherently antisemitic. Within an explainer of that order, the Trump administration described those taking part in demonstrations as “pro-Hamas aliens and left-wing radicals,” prompting the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) to describe the order as a “dishonest, overbroad, and unenforceable attempt to smear college students who protested against the Israeli government’s genocidal war on Gaza in overwhelmingly peaceful ways.”
Notably, Trump’s Truth Social post on Tuesday directly contradicts the claim that his administration is pro-free speech, as his vice president, J.D. Vance, alleged at an international security meeting in Munich last month.
During that meeting, Vance chastised other European countries for supposedly limiting speech rights in order to address right-wing extremism. He then dubiously claimed that the Trump administration was the eminent example of what a country upholding free speech rights should look like.
“In Washington, there is a new sheriff in town,” Vance said. “And under Donald Trump’s leadership, we may disagree with your views, but we will fight to defend your right to offer them in the public square.”
While that claim has always been demonstrably false, Trump’s post this week is further evidence that the administration has a double standard when it comes to freedom of speech, critics pointed out.
“If Trump or J.D. Vance or any of these hypocrites who claim to be free speech warriors actually believed in free speech, they would vociferously defend speech they hate, including pro-Palestine/anti-genocide speech. But they don’t,” Drop Site News journalist Jeremy Scahill said. “This has been the con from the start with that crowd.”
“Trump here is referring to pro-Palestine protests so you won’t hear a peep from conservatives or even pro-Israel liberals,” Zeteo founder Mehdi Hasan said in a Bluesky post. “But just imagine if this was Biden referring to ‘illegal protests’ by conservative students or pro-life groups. [The] Free speech brigade would be going mad!”
In a statement shared on X, the free speech organization Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression wrote, “Free speech on college campuses is a proud American tradition, and — on public campuses — protected by the First Amendment. President Trump’s message this morning, combined with other recent executive orders threatening punishment for protected speech, is deeply chilling.”
“Threatening schools with the loss of federal funding will result in a crackdown on lawful speech. Schools will censor first and ask questions later,” the organization went on. “Today’s message will cast an impermissible chill on student protests about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Paired with President Trump’s 2019 executive order adopting an unconstitutional definition of anti-Semitism, and his January order threatening to deport international students for engaging in protected expression, students will rationally fear punishment for wholly protected political speech.”
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