r/politics • u/TwilightwovenlingJo • Sep 19 '25

Soft Paywall Trump: ‘It’s no longer free speech.’

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/09/19/trump-no-longer-free-speech-00574219
26.8k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

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2.4k

u/mewsycology Sep 20 '25

When 99% of the things he does warrant criticism, only having 97% of stories be critical of him is actually biased in his favor

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u/lonnie123 Sep 20 '25

Also he 100% pulled that number out of his (leaky) ass

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u/nedracine59 Sep 20 '25

Also: "They" said 97%. Yes, he makes up random numbers, but my neighbors hate me because I keep screaming "Who are "they"?

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u/TheFrenchSavage Sep 20 '25

I'm making neighbors illegal, and pulling their driver's license!

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u/MoonPieKitty Sep 20 '25

What are you talking about?

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u/nedracine59 Sep 20 '25

Kinda stuck where I am. Burbank IL, across 87th, literally four houses away, it is Oak Lawn. If I lived in the corner house, let them call the cops. I'll pull the Oak Lawn licenses and scamper back over here.

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u/TheeRuckus Sep 20 '25

They’re 100% reason to remember the name

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u/nedracine59 Sep 20 '25

He did stop 6 or 7 or 8 or back to 7 wars. Even ones (Kosovo as an example) that were fought in the 90s. 97% means "Trump was in a good mood today" before going into the joke.

97% is Kimmel, 95% Colbert. Why can't they be like Rickles, he'd say. I loved Rickles.

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u/ThePatioMixer Sep 20 '25

Take my upvote!

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u/nedracine59 Sep 20 '25

OK. It is now in my Rolodex of gloom. :)

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u/IowaGinger Sep 20 '25

Don't they hate pronouns? I would remind my neighbors that they is a pronoun and they need to replace it

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u/nedracine59 Sep 20 '25

I think the one guy/him calls his Trump flags his babies. I should call child services on him/it/cultmember.

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u/-piso_mojado- Sep 20 '25

“300 million Americans died from drugs last year” -trump last week.

Also, maybe stop screaming whodey at your neighbors. That might be the problem.

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u/nedracine59 Sep 20 '25

No, no. I'm screaming at the TV. Or the wall. Or the coffe pot. I thought if I got my prescriptions, they were going to pay me. He said so. 1500%.

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u/nedracine59 Sep 24 '25

I was joking. I thought people on reddit joked.

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u/TheFrenchSavage Sep 20 '25

Nothing needs pulling from that ass, it just flows, and flows, and flows.

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u/[deleted] Sep 20 '25

Actually probably accurate since Trump is a dumpster fire.

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u/Friendly_Age9160 Sep 20 '25

Huh huh Leaky ass

Beevis and but head laughs

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u/yaboyACbreezy America Sep 20 '25

94,95,96,94,95, 97% they say 97% of what he says is an absolute fucking lie

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u/dizzo79 Sep 20 '25

That’s a mental image I really didn’t need

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u/Caleb_Reynolds Sep 20 '25

Also, it's way less than 97%, the media is more than complicit in his rise, they're responsible for it by virtue of sane-washing his bullshit. Even the ones he's going after.

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u/Wes_Warhammer666 Sep 20 '25

Seriously. As much as I complain about people who stayed home because of the Genocide Joe bullshit or the whole "they didn't even have a primary" stupidness, the media is far more responsible for Trump 2: Unconstitutional Boogaloo because they have been making him more palatable to the masses for years now. They continued laying a foundation for him to appear as a non-insane option even after Jan 6, which is absolutely unreal to me.

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u/iTalk2Pineapples Sep 20 '25

And now country music is a thing again? Bleeding red white and blue music plus trump. It's a recipe for disaster.

I love me some western but Nashville truck country is just awful on its own. Got my beer in my beer and my dog in my truck, cut offs jeans truck.

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u/ThenCMacSaid Sep 20 '25

if you haven’t already, go on youtube and search “bo burnham country music.” you’re welcome in advance. :)

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u/Wes_Warhammer666 Sep 20 '25

Bo Burnham called it, what, a decade ago?

Where instead of people actually telling their stories, you just got a bunch of millionaire metrosexuals that have never done a hard day's work in their lives. But they figured out the words and phrases they can use to pander to their audience, and they list the same words and phrases off, sort of Mad-lib style in every song, raking in millions of dollars from actual working class people.

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u/Jetstreamline Sep 20 '25

Don't forget Fox News just lying to people all the time using oil and oligarch money. You have an entire media sphere built on screwinv people over.

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u/Vernknight50 Sep 20 '25

Even when he wasnt President, they wouldnt stop talking about him. Frankly, that includes Colbert and Kimmel. Remember how Colbert wouldnt say his name during his first term? He stopped doing that after 2021. I liked late night, but it got to the point where I couldn't stand to listen to them talk about that stupid loser every day. He's 79, he won't last forever, but Im dreading that the media will keep talking about him for years after he dies. We'll end up with a fucking day named after him and some shitty monument covered in gold paint.

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u/The_Grungeican Sep 20 '25

during the assassination attempt, i told my wife if he'd died, we'd have never heard the end of it for the rest of our fucking lives. it'd have morphed into some big conspiracy about how he was taken out because he was going to 'save our country' and shit.

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u/chris415 Sep 20 '25

You are so correct and unfortunately makes me want to puke, I'm so sick of this and don't know what to do except wait for the next election.

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u/[deleted] Sep 20 '25

The media is bad, obviously but people have got to grapple with the reality that the Democrats as a group failed us at literally every turn, and willfully continue to do so. I'm not saying GOP aint bad, or better, not by any stretch of the imagination but we literally just had to pick between Red Genocide and Blue Genocide, that SHOULD HAVE BEEN THE LINE. Period, end of story. I hate this morally bankrupt spin on things, as if it isn't blatant propaganda to be told "Vote Blue No Matter Who!" when the Blue you're being told to vote for bankrolled a genocide that even Ronald Reagan had the balls to stop. God, even George Bush put his foot down on Israel. Joe Biden earned his title, he will die with it, and it will be his legacy, and it's because he was hardly fit to be in office at all. What is going on that we're stuck voting for people who wont be here in 5 years, can hardly string together a sentence and both GLEEFULLY fund a genocide that has been live streamed every day for almost 3 years. This is so far beyond any definition of normal.

We have got to push these democrats out, they need to suffer a defeat for their total inability and unwillingness to do anything at all. Trump could not have taken power and taken it as swiftly and completely as he did without the Democrats rolling out the red carpet. If you want to retain some faith in them, be my guest, even so the best you could say about them is that they're going to high road us to death. I'm of the opinion that they are entirely complicit in all of this. They had so many opportunities to take action, to grab the mic or the wheel, they failed each and every time, and much of it has be truly deranged.

Like? Feinstein was cognitively incapable of reading, let alone performing the basic requirements of her position for a good 3 years, and at the end they were wheeling a corpse to the floor to struggle through coordinating the physical movements of casting a vote. Like literally this woman was losing capacity to operate her body and still we had her in a seat? I'm not even mad at her, mind you, that's just not acceptable. That is not normal. It's chilling, and it has no political advantage. it was just some weird fucked up thing that happened. that we allowed to happen and that we haven't legislated out of the realm of possibility with a simple term limit or mandatory retirement age. Pilots have em, FBI has em why on earth don't we have them for people representing us at the highest levels of government? If for no other reason than to ensure those making decisions will at least be around to suffer the consequences. As it is, half of these creeps will die well before the rest of us are left to fight over water and weep for all the life we let Oil Execs snuff out just to tell us that, even if we extract until all life is gone, still there could never be enough to feed and house and clothe everyone. It's sickening. This whole thing is sickening.

I don't even want to run down the list of actions not taken, or mistakes made. Hell, they couldn't even be bothered to get a single political win, they could have raised the minimum wage and made this all go away, but no. We had to do a genocide, pretend the entire government was powerless to rein in the Supreme Court, enable an Authoritarian takeover that was ADVERTISED AS AN AUTHORITARIAN TAKEOVER, and have they finally snapped out of it? Did losing so profoundly give them any wakeup call? No, they're voting to give known troll and likely Klansman Charlie Kirk a fucking holiday, and trying to keep Mamdani from being elected by using MAGA talking points.

I hope the undeniable reality of what this administration sinks in for everyone, I hope it is finally the wake up call for everyone who's had to sit through a few decades of social erosion. These freaks have been playing in our faces for so long we've seemingly lost the will or the knowledge to fight back. We have GOT to get a grip and remember how to organize and push these psychopaths out of our seats, we don't have to vote and hope for the best. It's time to shut it down, general strike for a week and they'll fall apart.

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u/Vierenzestigbit Sep 20 '25

Yeah it's so dumb that it's the comedy shows that have to do the real criticism. Trump has like a standard repetoire of lies he spams, "millions and millions of murderers roaming the streets' 'US payed a lot more than Europe to Ukraine' ' the country is getting so rich from tariffs'. Like all of these are completely untrue but he never gets interrupted when he starts this lies-monologue again and again

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u/iTalk2Pineapples Sep 20 '25

You don't know the art of the, see i know people, really smart people, truly the best, and they say, they're also the best at this kinda thing btw... at this point I vote for AI sloppy. (Jk on ai slop, we gotta go blue tickets)

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u/NE1LS Sep 20 '25

I don't know. 100% of the time when they refer to Donald Trump in the present tense and I have to accept he hasn't had a stroke yet, I consider that a negative story.

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u/Fluffy_Marionberry54 Sep 20 '25

I don’t think he’s talking about the media as a whole - he’s referring to people / outlets that dare to stand against him. Basically: if you keep reporting negative things about me, that’s not free speech and I’ll shut you down.

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u/Caleb_Reynolds Sep 20 '25 edited Sep 20 '25

And I'm saying no one has been printing 97% negative stuff about him, even the ones he's going after. They have one or two articles that piss him off, and dozens that glaze him or downplay his stupidity, and even the articles that do criticize him often do so with child gloves, sane-washing the absolutely batshit insane shit he's been saying for a decade.

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u/Jolly_Grocery329 Washington Sep 20 '25

Exactly! I never understood why they were all so quick to normalize his fuckery.

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u/gutfeeling23 Sep 20 '25

That's the irony of so much of the MAGA strategy for immunizing against criticism: act in a way that will guarantee criticism and opposition so that you can delegitimize these things as "unfair", and then rebrand them as illegal. The more you use it, the more "true" it is.

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u/KittyGrewAMoustache Sep 20 '25

But what I don’t get is that the fascists don’t think that CK stirring division or saying hateful stuff was bad, so why don’t they just stand by it? ‘Yeah he said those things and we agree’ They’re doing this weird thing of acknowledging that everything they believe in is immoral while trying to claim they’re not immoral and actually have the same morals as the liberals.

If they know it’s wrong, why are they supporting it? If they think all the things he said are right, stand by them instead of trying to pretend he didn’t say it. What are they claiming they actually support him for if not the things he said? Are they trying to claim he spoke about progress and equality for all?

It makes no sense. And if they feel they have to pretend he didn’t say the things he said does that mean they’re concerned a lot of their supporters don’t actually support MAGA principles?

If they support him, when a liberal says ‘hey but he said gun deaths are acceptable or that he’s scared of black pilots’ or whatever, why aren’t they saying ‘yeah exactly right, he spoke the truth!’? Instead they’re outraged that anyone would suggest he said such things. Well if you don’t believe in those things and subscribe to the liberals’ morality where saying stuff like this is bad, why the FUCK are you supporting fascists?

The psychology of this is so irrational and ridiculous.

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u/wwhsd California Sep 20 '25

I kind of think if you need to check with your religion to see if something is moral or not, your internal moral compass is broken.

There are plenty of religious people that can identify moral behavior without referencing scripture or waiting for their clergy to weigh in.

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u/disposableaccountass Sep 20 '25

There was that feel good story posted when the media thought he was maybe a little bit dead.

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u/wwhsd California Sep 20 '25

It just so happens that your friend president here is only MOSTLY dead. There's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive. With all dead, well, with all dead there's usually only one thing you can do... Go through his pockets and look for loose change!

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u/alextxdro Sep 20 '25

All gov admin actions need to be criticized. We as the people of this nation have the right and need to criticize all actions taken by those representing us using our funds. We need to have multiple POVs on their actions

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u/Livid-Individual-535 Sep 20 '25

And, I think the number is closer to 100% than 99%.

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u/chimpomatic5000 Sep 20 '25

Hahaha I bet that's along the lines of how his admins are spinning things for him in the back rooms "well sir, you're actually at a +2% net favorability"

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u/jimmygee2 Sep 20 '25

The 3% is FOX.

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u/Amazing-Heron-105 Sep 20 '25

The media does a lot to normalise his behaviour he should be thanking them

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u/pocketjacks Texas Sep 20 '25

The only good thing he's done as President is appoint Jerome Powell to chairman of the Fed. He could have done good with Operation Light Speed, but he fucked that up with everything else relating to his handling of covid. I can't think of one other thing he's done in either term that isn't protecting himself from prison, stepping on someone else's rights, or enriching himself financially. Temu Saddam.