Who knew the fiercest war cry against the destructive Trump Administration would come in the form of the soft, melodic National Public Radio announcer voice? After NPR and three local public radio partners sued Trump and his minions, their statement came through well enunciated and direct.
The First Amendment does not bend to Trump’s whims.
Despite decades providing award-winning news coverage and providing public access to a broad scope of voices, NPR and the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) found themselves in Trump’s crosshairs on May 1. Deriding both as “left-wing propaganda” — apparently any media outlet that falls short of outright adulation qualifies — Trump issued an executive order stripping their funding. Entitled “Ending Subsidization of Biased Media,” it reads like Doublespeak when issued by a man who filled government positions with Fox News personalities.
Through the first few months of his new administration the tactic has worked on others. He has cowed multiple big law firms, forced prestigious schools to adopt his preferred policies and pushed legacy media companies to grovel before him. When employees refuse to go along with acquiescence, their only option is to resign like Bill Owens when he left “60 Minutes” rather than compromise his journalistic integrity.
That made NPR CEO Katherine Maher stand out.
Rather than complying or begging for relief or changing policies, she stood firm. Along with three local stations from here in Colorado, NPR filed a lawsuit against Trump and the cronies in his administration. The complaint claims that Trump did not have the authority to strip funding, retaliated and discriminated against the stations in violation of the First Amendment, and violated their due process rights.
Using the bully pulpit of an NPR interview, Maher explained: “… I should say that we are not choosing to do this out of politics. We are choosing to do this as a matter of necessity and principle. All of our rights that we enjoy in this democracy flow from the First Amendment: freedom of speech, association, freedom of the press. When we see those rights infringed upon, we have an obligation to challenge them. And that’s what’s at stake here.”
That is how you deal with a bully. It’s a lesson many of us learned in grade school: if you keep on giving them your lunch money, they will come back day after day with increasing demands. Eventually the demands crush you beneath their weight. Trump is no different. There is no appeasing him long term, and the cost continues to mount. The cycle only continues as long as no one stands up to him.
So Maher stood athwart the oppression and yelled stop.
That is the type of courage necessary in the current political climate. And it will not come from politicians or pundits; too often their own self interests, whether to constituents or ratings, get conflated with principled resistance. Instead it will be people like Maher and Harvard President Alan Gerber, who rallied the nation’s oldest institution of higher education to the democratic cause.
The longer they stand, the better the chances of success. Other organizations under threat will be inspired, or maybe shamed, into doing the same. The repeating cycle will build a critical mass that will make it impossible for the Trump Administration to effectively target individual organizations in the same manner.
The time they buy should also allow courts to fulfill their constitutional charge. As Congress has abdicated any check or balance on President Trump, it has fallen to the third branch to meet our founders’ vision. Many of Trump’s shock and awe executive orders have already run into the hard wall of legal insufficiency. From ending birthright citizenship to eradicating the Department of Education, federal judges have been highly skeptical of his power grabs.
It seems neither he nor his advisers believed any constraint could be placed on their power. Now he is lashing out judges, even those he appointed. Most recently he took to denigrating the Federalist Society, a conservative legal society that helped him put many of those judges in place. Apparently they failed to obtain a blood oath of fealty during their vetting process.
As those legal challenges trickle through courts, people like Maher will also be rallying public opinion. As the NPR complaint pointed out, NPR and its hundreds of local affiliates served tens of millions of listeners across 99% of the country every day. That is a lot of folks in a lot of places who will hear their side of the story.
Maybe Trump should have thought twice about picking fights with media stations that order airwaves by the barrel.
Regardless, NPR has made it clear that the initial deer-in-headlights period is over for Trump. He can no longer count on the outlandishness and audacity of his actions, much less his electoral victory, freezing opponents in place. Some may follow the path of least resistance and hope to outlast the next four years, but more will become galvanized to resist.
All things considered, that is a pretty good outcome obtained by NPR already.
Mario Nicolais is an attorney and columnist who writes on law enforcement, the legal system, health care and public policy. Follow him on BlueSky: @MarioNicolais.bsky.social.
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