Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) is worried about creeping authoritarianism in the United States. Not from Donald Trump, whose presidential bid Rubio endorsed Sunday despite Trump’s comments supporting the “termination” of unnamed “rules” in the Constitution, his promise to rule as a dictator on “day one” of his presidency, and his threat to “root out” his “vermin” political opponents — all after inciting a violent insurrection as the culmination of his plot to subvert the results of the election he lost in 2020.

Instead, Rubio is warning against the menace purportedly posed by CNN and MSNBC declining to air, live and in full, Trump’s Monday night victory speech following the Iowa caucuses. 

“This is exactly how state-run media is used by authoritarian governments to delegitimize, to discredit, to basically make people believe there is no alternative but to the regime and to their rule,” Rubio said on Wednesday night.

The Florida senator’s complaint is ridiculous. Privately owned media outlets making their own decisions about what to cover, unimpeded by state actors, is distinctly not what happens in authoritarian countries. Amplifying the stupidity, Rubio made the comments on Fox News — which functioned as Trump’s personal propaganda outlet during his presidency and would inevitably return to that role if he is elected again — and to host Sean Hannity, one of Trump’s closest advisers and a propagandist who once took coverage orders directly from his White House.

Rubio is trying to undermine journalistic efforts to grapple with the problem posed by the constant stream of lies Trump spews in his public statements. And he is providing cover for the former president’s own explicitly authoritarian demand for the government to punish CNN and MSNBC for not airing his speech in full by taking them off the air.

Trump’s lies are a problem for the press

Trump is a uniquely dishonest person. He misleads the public constantly and repetitively, on matters great and small, deliberately or out of sheer ignorance. He gained new political relevance with his lie that Barack Obama was not born in the U.S., he still clings to the lie that he won the 2020 election, and in between, he’s promulgated countless falsehoods and conspiracy theories, often ripped from the right-wing media fever swamps. 

Trump’s rampant dishonesty — as a presidential candidate, as president, and as a candidate once more — has posed a dilemma for the press. Outlets which allow him to speak uninterrupted can be assured that he will be pushing false claims to their audiences. That’s no problem for outlets like Fox, which prioritize promoting right-wing worldviews over conveying accurate information and want to help Trump win elections. 

But journalists with higher standards have spent most of the last decade trying to figure out how to deal with Trump’s lies.

Some print outlets responded by increasing the scope of their fact-checking operations, treating Trump’s dishonesty as a specific beat, and breaking the taboo against describing his statements as “lies” in news articles. 

Television journalists, however, do not share the standard practice in which print reporters pick and choose what to report from a politician’s remarks. Their convention is to air live speeches and interviews with newsmakers — and when they give Trump that opportunity, he bombards their viewers with falsehoods and conspiracy theories. TV news networks have tried a range of tactics in response to criticism of their role in platforming Trump’s falsehoods, from running fact-checking segments immediately after his speeches, to trying to fact-check them in real time with on-screen text or by breaking into their coverage, to declining to air the speeches live altogether on the grounds that he would mislead their audiences. 

Those efforts have often been uneven, with various outlets backsliding. But they nonetheless reflect a real attempt to cope with the difficult problem of having a major-party presidential nominee and president who could, at any moment, push a conspiracy theory about one of his critics committing murder or promote an antimalarial drug as a miraculous pandemic cure.

Rubio is criticizing cable news networks that tried to grapple with that predicament following Trump’s win in Iowa.

MSNBC host Rachel Maddow, who was anchoring the network’s coverage, announced as Trump was beginning his victory speech that they would not be taking the speech live. “There is a reason that we and other news organizations have generally stopped giving an unfiltered live platform to remarks by former President Trump,” she explained. “It is not an easy decision, but there is a cost to us as a news organization of knowingly broadcasting untrue things.”

CNN did air the first 10 minutes of Trump’s speech. But when he began ranting about the “invasion of millions and millions of people that are coming into our country,” CNN anchor Jake Tapper broke in, highlighting the former president’s “anti-immigrant rhetoric” and the “false belief” in a rigged 2020 election that he had inculcated in his supporters. 

Their actions infuriated Trump’s allies in the media, who relish the opportunity to attack more credible news outlets by demanding they promote Trump’s lies.

They also drew fire from Trump himself.

Trump’s authoritarian response to CNN and MSNBC

Trump lashed out at CNN and MSNBC at a Tuesday rally, calling for the federal government to pull their “licenses” over the slight.

“We were talking about her show and how corrupt the press is, and last night it was amazing,” he said in New Hampshire. “NBC and CNN refused to air my victory speech. I think of it because they are crooked. They’re dishonest, and frankly, they should have their licenses or whatever they have. Take it away.”

Trump repeatedly called for CNN and MSNBC to lose their broadcast licenses from the Federal Communications Commission due to their coverage of his presidency. That is a difficult proposition — cable networks aren’t regulated by the FCC, and as the Trump-appointed FCC chair noted after similar remarks in 2017, the agency lacks the authority to revoke licenses over content. But this is a case where we should take Trump seriously but not literally — he’s calling for the destruction of news outlets whose decisions displease him, and as president would have plenty of avenues to pursue that un-American goal.

Trump suggested last month that if elected, he plans to use federal power to punish news outlets that provide unfavorable coverage. “Our so-called ‘government’ should come down hard on them and make them pay for their illegal political activity,” he said of MSNBC and its political coverage on his Truth Social platform. “Much more to come, watch!” 

Trump tried in his first term to bend outlets to his will by threatening the business interests of their owners or parent companies (to say nothing of the many frivolous lawsuits he has threatened and filed against outlets that displease him). He would have plentiful opportunities to redeploy that strategy if he is returned to the White House — and it is unclear whether or how long those corporate owners would hold out in the face of his pressure, rather than selling off their assets to Trumpist magnates like Fox’s Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch or Sinclair Broadcast Group’s David Smith. 

That’s what happened in Viktor Orbán’s Hungary: The government selectively blocked mergers until corporate owners sold their media outlets to his supporters, who then ensured that their coverage aligned with his interests. Orbán has, not coincidentally, become a hero for the U.S. nationalist right, and drawn praise and an endorsement from Trump himself. 

Now, Trump appears driven on importing the Orbán model to this country, even as allies like Rubio pretend that the former president is actually the victim of authoritarianism.