In short, Trump is expressing an interest in censoring the American free press. As usual, it’s hard to tell how serious Trump is—viewed amid the barrage of fake-news tweets, it may just be an off-the-cuff riff. (Earlier this week, Trump said in an interview that Puerto Rico’s debt would need to be erased, leading the White House to say he didn’t really mean it.) If made in that spirit, it’s striking that the president casually and carelessly suggests infringing on constitutional protections.

Yet this is not the first time he has worked to undermine the free press. He has attacked reporters personally and en masse; he has incited crowds against them; he has accused reporters (with no evidence, of course) of sedition; and he has said he wants to change libel laws to make it easier to sue news outlets for misstatements. Less consequentially, though for some reason to greater attention, he has passed along memes of cartoonish violence against the outlets.

Trump’s focus on a few outlets, especially NBC News, CNN, and The New York Times, suggests he is interested not in across-the-board censorship so much as targeted persecution of those organizations that he feels are making his life difficult. The good news is there’s no reason at this moment to believe that the Senate Intelligence Committee would take up Trump’s invitation, but it’s hard to simply dismiss it. Trump has successfully pushed for bogus inquiries in the past, as when he accused President Obama of “wiretapping” him and then demanded his evidence-free allegation be investigated. The Justice Department concluded there was no evidence to support the claim.

Trump is likely the most media-obsessed president in American history, and has long recognized and exploited its power to assist him, but he cleverly latched onto a decades-long conservative campaign to undermine the press. (Some of the same conservative commentators and outlets who helped drive that campaign watched with dismay as Trump capitalized on distrust to upend longstanding norms.) But Trump’s frustration with the press has grown, and his bitterness now seems genuine. While the media’s approval ratings have long been lodged in the basement, a Reuters poll this week showed that as confidence in the administration has sunk, confidence in the press has risen—jumping from 39 to 48 percent since November.

Even so, freedom of the press is in a beleaguered state. Not only have traditional economic models crumbled, but public support for the underlying venture is low. In March, just a third of respondents told Gallup they trust the press, and six in 10 Americans said the press was biased. In April, a plurality of respondents told YouGov that the media abuse First Amendment rights. Forty percent of Millennials support censorship of hate speech. And three-quarters of people in a Newseum poll said that “fake news” should not be protected by the First Amendment. Meanwhile, courts—responding to lawsuits funded by Trump’s friend and backer Peter Thiel—have proven newly willing to punish outlets for publishing even accurate information.