What did Donald Trump do today?

He tried to punish people who said things he didn't like.

The Associated Press, one of the oldest and largest news agencies in the country, was banned from an Oval Office event this afternoon because they referred to the body of water bordered by the land mass stretching from the Yucatán Peninsula to Florida as the Gulf of Mexico. This is the name it has been known by since the mid-1500s. Trump recently declared that he wanted it to be called the "Gulf of America," and has strong-armed some tech companies into using that name on internet maps within the United States.

The AP released a brief statement on the matter:

As a global news organization, The Associated Press informs billions of people around the world every day with factual, nonpartisan journalism.

Today we were informed by the White House that if AP did not align its editorial standards with President Donald Trump’s executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, AP would be barred from accessing an event in the Oval Office. This afternoon AP’s reporter was blocked from attending an executive order signing.

It is alarming that the Trump administration would punish AP for its independent journalism. Limiting our access to the Oval Office based on the content of AP’s speech not only severely impedes the public’s access to independent news, it plainly violates the First Amendment. 

 
He also fired the Inspector General of the United States Agency for International Development, a day after he released a report identifying dangerous and counterproductive consequences to Trump's attempts to cripple the agency. USAID, which Trump is trying to unilaterally shut down in defiance of law and court orders, is one of the most effective means of exercising "soft power" in parts of the world where the United States has little commercial or military presence. 

Martin's report noted that the chaos unleashed by Trump's actions were directly benefiting anti-American terror groups and endangering American aid workers on the ground. He also pointed out that the unprecedented freeze means that some $500 million in food aid that would already have been delivered is about to spoil.

The sabotage of USAID also benefits China and Russia by creating an opportunity for them to replace the United States as a trustworthy source of aid during humanitarian disasters—and because, on occasion, USAID missions have allowed for crucial intelligence gathering that could not have been done any other way. Protecting that extremely sensitive information is why USAID officials resisted efforts to turn over their classified files to "DOGE" employees, some of whom are obvious security risks themselves.

Trump had previously fired about twenty other Inspectors General, in violation of a law requiring notice and cause. Some of these firings appear to have been done in order to disable any internal objections to his plans in advance. Others, like the firing of USDA Inspector General Phyllis Fong, were retaliation for her investigation of Trump patron Elon Musk's company Neuralink. That company saw mass deaths of monkeys it used as its test subjects, often in gruesome fashion, that were brought to light by the USDA and other agencies. (Neuralink claims its products are safe for testing in humans.)

Why does this matter?

• If you cannot stand to be contradicted in any way, you're too emotionally unstable to be president.

• Governments composed entirely of people who can't or won't tell the leader "no" can't govern.

• Forcing political orthodoxy by making up new words for things and policing who has to use them is so obviously authoritarian they made a classic dystopian novel about it.