President Donald Trump increasingly is playing the role of information gatekeeper, striving to control access to venues—technological and physical—where important expressive activities occur. By dictating access on his terms, Trump seeks to ensure that narratives serving his agenda can flourish, while speakers––for example, Associated Press and broadcast journalists––who don’t amplify it are punished.

In doing so, the president simultaneously acts as defender and curtailer of First Amendment rights. On the one hand, Trump wants to facilitate online platform access for everyday citizens to express conservative viewpoints safeguarded by the Free Speech Clause. On the other hand, Trump is denying Press Clause-protected journalists access to confined physical quarters like the Oval Office and Air Force One when their news organizations don’t parrot his preferred nomenclature. The former is exceedingly laudable while the latter is pettily vindictive.

Two seemingly unrelated––save for deployment of “restoring”––executive orders (EOs) that Trump signed on January 20 illustrate this phenomenon: EO 14149 (“Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship”) and EO 14172 (“Restoring Names that Honor American Greatness”). The former, as I previously explained, “hammers away at the Biden administration’s jawboning” of social platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and X to get them to remove or deprioritize conservative-tilting opinions on matters such as COVID-19 vaccines, mask mandates, and school closures. Trump’s EO blasts Biden officials for squelching “free speech rights by censoring Americans’ speech on online platforms, often by exerting substantial coercive pressure on third parties, such as social media companies, to moderate, deplatform, or otherwise suppress speech that the Federal Government did not approve.” The EO, in turn, pledges that it is US policy to “ensure that no Federal Government officer, employee, or agent engages in or facilitates any conduct that would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen” and that “no taxpayer resources are used to engage in or facilitate any conduct that would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen.”

Given the US Supreme Court’s failure last year to address the substantive merits of the jawboning claims against the Biden administration in Murthy v. Missouri, EO 14149 is an excellent effort (even if mostly symbolic) to right the free-speech ship in the absence of a high court decision. The EO signals that dissenting viewpoints should not be squelched by the government.

The flipside to Trump’s gatekeeping efforts stems partly from EO 14172, “Restoring Names that Honor American Greatness.” Among other things, it calls for changing the name of a significant portion of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. The Associated Press (AP), an independent wire service founded in 1846 that provides news reaching four billion people daily, updated its style guide in response. The AP explained it:

will refer to [the gulf] by its original name while acknowledging the new name Trump has chosen. As a global news agency that disseminates news around the world, the AP must ensure that place names and geography are easily recognizable to all audiences.

That didn’t sit well with the White House. Trump is now punishing the AP and coercing it into calling the body of water the Gulf of America by denying the AP––without advance notice or an opportunity to be heard––longstanding White House press-pool access to the Oval Office, Air Force One, and other areas where physical space is limited. The AP filed a federal lawsuit on Friday against multiple White House officials, asserting violations of the First Amendment and its due process rights under the Fifth Amendment. The complaint contends that:

The press and all people in the United States have the right to choose their own words and not be retaliated against by the government. The Constitution does not allow the government to control speech. Allowing such government control and retaliation to stand is a threat to every American’s freedom.

In short, by denying AP journalists’ press-pool access, Trump wants to control his America First narrative––to constrain words––in articles read worldwide. As David McCraw, senior vice president and deputy general counsel for The New York Times, recently stated, “access becomes a choke point for journalism.”

The irony is obvious: While Trump’s “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship” EO condemns the “substantial coercive pressure on third parties” placed by Biden administration officials, his denial of press-pool and other White House access to AP employees unless they call the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America is equally coercive. It’s an “embrace our term or else” choice, with Trump playing the access card to get his way.

Compounding press access problems are Trump’s calls for the Federal Communications Commission to strip stations of licenses because he dislikes their reporting, thereby denying them access to the broadcast airwaves. Trump’s strategy is transparent: control access, control the narrative.