By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

President Donald Trump hates the press perhaps as much as he loves it. Since his 2015 embrace of electoral politics, though, his lifelong craving for headlines has been at odds with adversarial journalism that holds him to account. Thus, he attacks the press as the “enemy of the people,” insults journalists and even incites violence against them. Now, in his second term, his attacks have multiplied, not only on news outlets that report his abuses of power, but on the very existence of a free press.

Trump gave one of his more frightening speeches on March 14th, before a large crowd at the Department of Justice. While the DOJ is supposed to be independent, Trump’s rambling speech was essentially a roadmap to the assembled federal prosecutors and FBI agents gathered, directing them to launch his campaign of retribution against his perceived political enemies, including the press.

“I believe that CNN and MSDNC, who literally write 97.6% bad about me are political arms of the Democrat party. In my opinion, they’re really corrupt and they’re illegal. What they do is illegal,” Trump said.

While Trump may have never read the First Amendment to the US Constitution, you can be sure that most of his audience that day had. The First Amendment reads in part, “Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” Indeed, journalism is one of the only professions explicitly protected by the Constitution.

In his drive towards authoritarianism, Trump isn’t going to be deterred by 250 years of constitutional precedent.

Robert Kuttner, co-editor of The American Prospect, laid out specifics around Trump’s attack on the press, speaking on the Democracy Now! news hour:

“They might go after the nonprofit tax-exempt status of much of the progressive media…Public broadcasting broadcasts on frequencies that are allocated by the FCC. The FCC could say, ‘hey, actually, we need those frequencies for national security purposes, and public radio stations you don’t get to broadcast over the air anymore…You already have a kind of anticipatory capitulation appeasement on the part of big corporate owners of the Washington Post and the LA Times, and sometimes the New York Times feels like it’s pulling its punches. Because when a billionaire owns a media property, – I hate the word – they have their other business interests to look out for, Shari Redstone being a classic example.”

Redstone is the heiress behind the multinational Paramount Global media empire, which owns a slew of media companies including CBS, Paramount, the CW and BET television networks, Comedy Central and more. Redstone has been trying to engineer a merger between Paramount Global and Skydance Media, run by founder and CEO David Ellison, the son of tech billionaire Larry Ellison, the world’s fourth richest person and co-founder of software giant Oracle.

Redstone stands to reap billions from the merger, which still has to pass regulatory hurdles at the Federal Communications Commission.

This might explain why Redstone, as reported by Semafor, “kept tabs on ‘60 Minutes’ segments on Trump.” CBS’ storied investigative TV news magazine was sued by Trump, claiming the show engaged in “unlawful and illegal behavior” in its edit of an October interview with his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris. Redstone is reportedly seeking a settlement in what was widely considered to be a frivolous lawsuit, to advance the merger.

Amidst rumors of a CBS settlement with Trump, long-time ‘60 Minutes’ executive producer Bill Owens resigned. In a memo obtained by the New York Times, Owens wrote, “over the past months, it has become clear that I would not be allowed to run the show as I have always run it, to make independent decisions based on what was right for ’60 Minutes,′ right for the audience.”

Nobel Peace laureate Maria Ressa knows something about attacks on the press. The founder of the Rappler news website in The Philippines suffered countless legal attacks and threats of arrest and violence under former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte.

“The biggest lesson we learned is that you are at your most powerful at the beginning of the attacks,” Ressa said on Democracy Now! “I’m a traditional journalist in the old sense of the word, and I didn’t want to be an activist. But when it’s a battle for facts, journalism is activism. In our case, I said, we hold the line. This is the line where the Constitution gives us our rights.”

Respected journalist Maria Ressa remains free, while former President Duterte is now imprisoned in The Hague, awaiting trial in the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity.

A free press is a bulwark against authoritarianism. Trump knows this, which is why we all need to support and defend independent journalism, while we still can.