What did Donald Trump do today?

He threatened to kick any TV station off the air that reported the news in a way he didn't like.

Trump had his FCC chair send a blunt message to American news networks covering the ongoing Iran disaster: be nicer to me or lose your license.

The post was sent from FCC chair Brandon Carr's account, but the language was straight from a Trump campaign speech: grievances about the "fake news" and the "hoaxes" they report on. ("Hoax" is Trump's pet word for any sufficiently damaging scandal, from his collaboration with Russia to interfere in American elections, to his decades-long close friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, to Americans caring about being able to afford groceries. 

This is a threat Trump has made many times before, and legally it's completely empty. It's difficult to imagine a more obvious First Amendment violation than punishing a media outlet for not being nice enough to the government. 

But lawsuits cost money, and most broadcast licenses are owned not by the networks but by individual local affiliates. If the threat of having to face down the entire government makes local stations shade their coverage even a little, Trump may get something of what he wants.

For example, Trump might hope that the nightly news decides not to run stories about him fundraising off the bodies of dead American soldiers returning from the Middle East this week, or how he's making jokes about picking bombing targets in Iran "for fun," or how he's promising a multi-nation armada to patrol the Persian Gulf but apparently hasn't gotten around to checking with any specific country yet.
 

Why does this matter?

• Treating reporting as an attack on the state is what dictators do.   

• Americans' freedom of speech is more important than Donald Trump's feelings.