Donald Trump is now trying to make protesting illegal in America. Let that sink in

The way Donald Trump and the majority of the MAGA camp go around preaching ideals like freedom of speech and certain civil liberties, and then immediately backtrack on it when it doesn’t serve their interests, eerily reminds me of Napoleon and his gang from George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Take their recent rhetoric against protests in universities; it’s a textbook example of how all freedoms are equal, but some freedoms are more equal than others. (Or something to that effect; I’m paraphrasing.)

When Trump says he’s against censorship, you should automatically take “censorship” to mean, for example, curbing hate speech against minorities. So, for instance, if there’s a DEI program being run by the federal government that tries to mitigate the damaging effects of hate speech, the president will be all for giving it over to Elon Musk’s DOGE to rip it to shreds. Because if there’s one thing that can be said about the GOP, it’s that they take their freedom of expression very, very seriously in this country. At least, that’s what they want you to think.

It’s absolutely intolerable to the Trump faction when you compel speech to avoid offense to certain minorities, but if you’re protesting this government’s insistence on funding the genocide of an entire people, you better lawyer up. Trump has taken to his Truth Social page to announce that all federal funding to colleges and universities will stop if they permit “illegal protests” to take place on their premises. Not only that, but the “agitators” will be imprisoned or deported to their country of origin. For American students, this means either being “permanently expelled” or even arrested.

“All Federal Funding will STOP for any College, School, or University that allows illegal protests. Agitators will be imprisoned/or permanently sent back to the country from which they came. American students will be permanently expelled or, depending on the crime, arrested. NO MASKS! Thank you for your attention to this matter,” he wrote.

We’re not exactly sure what the president means by “illegal” protests either, but it does come on the heels of the administration announcing that they’re pulling more than $50 million in government contracts from Columbia University due to their inability to combat anti-Israeli protests.

There are certain elements in this new government, and the conservative/MAGA movement in general, who attribute the widespread protests of college students against Israel’s war crimes to antisemitism, but these activist protest groups have made it clear time and again that they’re only protesting the country’s inhuman carpet bombing of Gaza, which has caused the deaths of more than 40,000 innocent people, around half of whom were children.

But then, when you consider that Trump is openly speaking about “taking over Gaza” as if America could just waltz in there and claim it as its own, you realize exactly what the president’s ambitions are regarding the war-embroiled region. The same ambitions that he perhaps entertains regarding Canada and Greenland too, referring to one as the 51st state, and the other as a territory that the U.S. will annex soon.

And I hardly need to mention the absolute absurdity of a president tagging certain protests as “illegal,” because if he can define it in any way he sees fit, God only knows what else he’ll pass off as illegal or unlawful when he finds himself on the wrong end of a picket line.