Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally in Michigan on Friday. Julia Démarée Nikhinson/AP

Donald Trump is amping up attacks on the media in the final days of the campaign, widely threatening retaliation against the industry for its critical coverage of him.

“To make America great, news really has to be shaped,” Trump said Fox News Saturday morning.

At a rally in North Carolina later that day, Trump called journalists covering the event “monsters” and “horrible, horrible, dishonest people.”

During the Fox News interview, Trump attacked several media outlets. He called ABC News “corrupt,” repeating his charge that the network’s David Muir, during a September debate, correctly noted that FBI data showed violent crime. in declinecontradicting Trump’s erroneous claims that it “blew the roof off.”

Trump doesn’t just attack the media with words. On Thursday, the former president continued CBS News for $10 billion, alleging that the editing of a “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris “amounts to a brazen attempt to interfere in the 2024 U.S. presidential election.” The lawsuit was filed in the Northern District of Texas, where the only judge is Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee known for his partisan pro-GOP rulings. Despite this, the prosecution is unlikely to succeed. TV networks regularly run interviews (including those featuring Trump, who retreated (from her appearance on “60 Minutes” last month.) My colleague Pema Levy has written more about this trial and its chances of success. here.

Trump’s suit is “meritless,” a CBS spokesperson said last week. “The interview was not rigged; and 60 Minutes did not conceal any part of the Vice President’s response to the question in question… 60 Minutes presented the interview in an honest manner to inform the public, not to mislead them.

Trump also said that CBS should lose its news broadcasting license because of the Harris interview. This is one of many such threats. CNN recently note that Trump, over the past two years, has called for all major U.S. television news networks, including Fox News, to be punished for coverage he deemed unfair. Trump also sworn that if he wins back the White House, he plans to take greater control over independent regulatory agencies, including the FCC.

As president, Trump attempted to punish media outlets that criticized him. His administration tried to block AT&T acquisition of CNN’s parent company and to refuse a cloud computing contract to Amazon, founded by Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos.

Trump has also threatened to jail journalists who report information he says has national security implications. (Trump himself, of course, has been indicted for illegal possession of highly sensitive national security documents that he removed from the White House.) In 2022, NPR recently noteTrump has repeatedly said that the prospect of prison rape would prompt journalists to disclose their sources. “When this person realizes that they are soon to become the wife of another prisoner, they will say, ‘I would love to tell you exactly who that was,’” Trump said at an event in Texas .

All of these statements pose a constant threat that, if elected, Trump will use his power to curb any critical speech about him. This is a direct challenge to the First Amendment, and is therefore unlikely to be fully successful, even among a growing number of countries. partisan judges.

But Trump could still make life difficult for the media, and his threats already appear to have had a chilling effect. Amid attacks from Trump and his allies on his philanthropic efforts to help register voters in 2020, Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg has I tried to extract himself of politics, including in limiting what the company considers political content on its platforms. THE Washington Post The editorial page’s rejection of support for Harris was widely read as an attempt by Bezos to avoid angering Trump, although Bezos disputes that. THE Los Angeles Times was also criticized for refusing to support a candidate this year.

THE JobThis decision did not appease Trump. The former president ripped the paper during his call to Fox on Saturday, even suggesting that the 250,000 lost subscriptions and high-profile resignations the paper suffered due to non-support were linked to his criticism of the paper . Why the Job facing these problems? According to Trump, it’s “because they don’t have credibility.”