So it turns out that 100 days in office hasn't made the people in Donald Trump's administration any wiser or more circumspect. Nope, instead, this weekend we had Donald Trump claiming his healthcare plan would support people with preexisting conditions, even though it seems to do the opposite of that. And chief of staff Reince Priebus went on ABC News and said that the administration has considered cracking down on the freedom of the press. If that last one seems far-fetched, I hate to tell you it's not.

Yep. That's a video of Reince saying that the administration has looked into changing libel laws in this country so that news outlets could be more easily sued. And if you're thinking, "What's so bad about that?" then you're playing right into their hands. Even though it's hard to remember at this point thanks to the bastardization of the term at the hands of Donald Trump and the alt-right, "Fake News" was a phenomenon that helped elect this president. But right as the term began gaining steam to describe the kind of false-story peddling websites that dominated Facebook during the election, Trump rebranded it as a rallying cry against the legitimate press's critical coverage of him. Which is how we end up with tweets like this:

And so when Priebus and Trump talk about opening up libel laws, they're not talking about fighting back against the disinformation campaigns that occurred in the fall, they're talking about being able to use the threat of a lawsuit to silence critical coverage from legitimate news outlets. This is a textbook example of a move authoritarian leaders use to cement their power and fight opposition. And lest you still think this isn't an attack on the free press, look no further than Gawker if you want to see what a lawsuit can do to a media company.

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