During his presidency and beyond, Donald Trump and his allies have repeatedly condemned European democracies for allegedly draconian limits on free speech—from Germany’s hate speech laws to the EU’s Digital Services Act—framing the continent as a growing censorship state, while championing the United States as a bastion of unfiltered expression. But this narrative is not only misleading; it is profoundly hypocritical.

European countries, shaped by the traumas of fascism and genocide, have implemented legal limits on hate speech, Holocaust denial, and incitement to violence. These are targeted protections, not blanket bans, designed to prevent rhetoric that has historically led to real-world harm. Freedom of speech remains protected in European constitutions and upheld by institutions like the European Court of Human Rights.

Yet American conservatives conflate Europe into a monolith, accusing the continent of authoritarianism while ignoring that freedom of speech does not mean the same thing everywhere. The U.S. First Amendment offers especially broad protections, including for hate speech. European democracies take a different approach, shaped by their own legal traditions and historical responsibilities. Treating Europe’s legally balanced approach to speech as identical to America’s absolutist model ignores both history and context — and misleads the public.

The facts speak for themselves. According to the 2024 World Press Freedom Index by Reporters Without Borders, the countries with the highest levels of press freedom are overwhelmingly European—Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Estonia, and Finland top the list. The United States ranks 55th out of 180.

From the outset of his 2016 campaign, Trump sought to undermine journalism. He labeled critical coverage as fake news, smeared journalists as enemies of the people, and turned press briefings and campaign rallies into spectacles of hostility toward the media. These attacks were not spontaneous; they were strategic. Trump aimed not to defend free speech, but to discredit the institutions that protect it.

His administration acted accordingly. After an Associated Press journalist refused to refer to the “Gulf of Mexico” as the “Gulf of America” during a press briefing, AP was temporarily barred from the White House press room. Veteran journalist Terry Moran was fired after criticizing Trump’s rhetoric and Stephen Miller’s immigration agenda. This was part of a broader pattern: Trump and his team have consistently used lawfare, legal threats, and public defamation on social media to intimidate critics, activists, and journalists. From targeted lawsuits to online harassment campaigns, the message has been clear—criticize Trump, and face consequences.

Now, the hypocrisy has reached a new level. According to a May 2025 Washington Post report, the Trump administration is establishing a new Office of Natural Rights within the State Department. Its mission is to monitor what officials call “free speech backsliding” in Europe and to impose visa restrictions on European policymakers accused of regulating social media content or limiting public discourse. A delegation has already been sent to scrutinize court rulings and speech laws across the continent.

This Orwellian initiative comes from a country where press freedom is in decline, where election denialism is rampant, and where political violence shook the Capitol just two years ago. The idea that the United States now has the moral authority to lecture Europe on democratic norms would be laughable, if it weren’t so dangerous.

This new office is part of a broader ideological campaign. The MAGA movement’s conception of “free speech” is not about universal rights—it is about unchecked influence. It is deeply intertwined with the interests of U.S. tech billionaires who benefit from chaos and deregulation. Elon Musk, now owner of X (formerly Twitter), has reinstated extremists, amplified Trump-aligned content, and silenced critics, all while branding himself a free speech absolutist.

Peter Thiel, a long-time Trump donor, has helped fund a digital media ecosystem designed not to protect democratic norms but to dismantle them. Mark Zuckerberg, too, played a central role—meeting with Trump in 2024 before the presidential election and reportedly shifting Facebook’s content moderation policies to favor conservative narratives. The platform deprioritized fact-checking and political oversight, effectively granting Trump and his allies freer rein to spread disinformation.

These are not principled defenders of liberty. They are partisan actors with financial and political stakes in the erosion of trust in mainstream media, academic institutions, and public regulation.

Their hypocrisy is further exposed by how their social media platforms behave outside the West. In India, Twitter has complied with censorship demands from Prime Minister Modi’s government, removing content from journalists and opposition leaders. In Turkey, content critical of President Erdoğan has been geoblocked at the regime’s request. In Russia, most Western platforms—including Facebook, Instagram, and X—have been outright blocked by the state. Yet these same companies, while censored or co-opted by autocracies, push back hardest against regulatory efforts in democratic Europe. They do not defend free speech as a universal value; they defend market share, narrative control, and political leverage. Their values shift depending on the jurisdiction.

At the same time, when the EU enacts modest, transparent regulations to protect users from disinformation and algorithmic abuse, Trump and his supporters claim it is tyranny. What they are really defending is not freedom but unfettered corporate power, even when it facilitates harm.

And when actual authoritarianism strikes—when journalists are jailed or murdered in Russia, when media outlets are shuttered in Hungary, when independent courts are dismantled in Turkey—the MAGA movement is silent. Sometimes, it is openly admiring.

Trump’s so-called “free speech” agenda is not about defending liberty. It is about exporting American culture wars, destabilizing liberal democracies, and shielding allies and benefactors from accountability. Europe, with its robust press protections and stronger regulatory mechanisms, becomes an easy target for ideological projection.

The goal is clear: to delegitimize democracies that don’t align with MAGA orthodoxy, and to fracture transatlantic unity on human rights, platform regulation, and rule of law. By portraying European protections as tyranny, while embracing regimes and platforms that truly suppress dissent, the Trump administration shows this campaign for what it is—a political weapon cloaked in the language of liberty.

Yes, free speech is essential. But so are truth, transparency, and public accountability. Without them, freedom of expression becomes a weapon of manipulation rather than a tool for liberation.

European democracies should not be cowed by these bad-faith attacks. They should stand firm in defending their values, refine their systems as needed, and expose the hypocrisy of those who undermine democracy at home while pretending to defend it abroad.