Fighting for his re-election, U.S. President Donald Trump insisted that he would restore free speech and put an end to “government censorship. But a series of recent court decisions indicate that his own administration is involved in the suppression of those rights.

A new study of recent legal battles by the First Amendment Center shows federal judges have sided with the Trump administration in just 25 of 93 First Amendment cases. These decisions are expressly finding that the Government had violated the freedoms of speech, religion, and the press.

The judicial rulings point to the administration’s attempts to stifle dissent by citizens and groups against the administration’s agenda. Examples of crimes that have been committed include attempts to retaliate against organizations that help with lawsuits, violent acts at protests, and firing federal grants from institutions such as Harvard University for failing to agree with the president’s ideology.

The Legal Battle Over Viewpoint Discrimination

The White House has been stridently critical of these decisions. The administration has been accusing the judges of being “activists” over and over again, claiming the federal judiciary is illegitimately impeding the executive order that the American people voted for.

Even though Trump signed an executive order on Jan. 20, his day of inauguration, to lift any restrictions on federal censorship, critics cite later orders that restrict those of Trump’s political opponents. A Reagan-appointed judge, for instance, recently decided that the government had broken the law in deporting and rescinding visas for foreign students for their pro-Palestinian activities. A federal judge recently slammed the president for illegally suspending the security clearances of a certain law firm’s lawyers for a personal vendetta.

Compared, the Biden administration has only been involved in 13 cases in which the First Amendment was engaged, almost all of which have focused on religious objections to vaccine mandates, while the Trump administration lost 27 cases. Ten of Trump’s defeats at the hands of judges were the result of having gone to a judge nominated by a Democratic president. Ten of Trump’s losses involved Republican-appointed judges within the U.S. Courts system.

About two-thirds of these have been appealed to the administration. It scored an impressive win by having lawsuits against Columbia University‘s release of pro-Palestinian activists thrown out for lack of jurisdiction by appellate courts. Special counsel says that a case is on the verge of being taken to the U.S. Supreme Court. The administration also won a defense of its ability to limit the bargaining power of union members of federal employees.

But other appeals have been unsuccessful. A federal appeals court recently struck down a decision by the administration that it was engaging in illegal viewpoint discrimination by seeking to defund programs focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) at universities. Experts in the field say that a president has not gone so far in the suppression of speech, particularly in this modern-day with such defined boundaries of the First Amendment, since Woodrow Wilson’s First Red Scare.