Τhe Censor

Before Donald Trump and "Don't Say Gay," there were Woodrow Wilson and Albert Sidney Burleson.

- By Adam Hochschild

During his time in the White House, no target provoked as much anger from Donald Trump as the American press. In 2017, he declared, "The press, honestly, is out of control." In 2019, he called it "truly the enemy of the people." His reelection campaign sued the Washington Post and the New York Times. Some 500 of Trump's tweets attacked individual journalists by name, and at one point he accused the Times of "treason." When Trump and Vladimir Putin-under whose rule some critical journalists have been assassinated-sat down for a press conference at a Group of 20 summit, Trump pointed to the reporters waiting in front of them and joked, "Get rid of them."

A century earlier, an American administration did get rid of opposition journalism with a ruthlessness Trump would be fiercely jealous of. It closed down about 75 newspapers and magazines, prevented the distribution of specific issues of many more, and put journalists on trial in federal courts. This entire operation was managed from the landmark Washington building that would become, 100 years later, the Trump International Hotel.

Ironically, this wave of repression took place under a president who, on the surface, appeared to be the polar opposite of Trump. Before entering politics, Woodrow Wilson was known as an intellectual: a longtime college professor and the president of Princeton University. But when in April 1917 the United States declared war on Germany, joining the bloody conflict that had ravaged Europe for nearly three years, both the United States and its president revealed a ferocity that few people had anticipated.