What did Donald Trump do today?

He threatened to put a journalist in jail for reporting what his own administration leaked.

Trump held a press conference today in which he continued his pattern of whipsawing between extreme opposite positions on the Iran war. At one point, pressed on whether he could even say whether he wanted to end the war or bomb Iran "back to the stone age," he responded, "Can't tell you. I can't tell you. I don't know."

But he also took the time to threaten unnamed American journalists with jail time if they didn't give up the name of a Trump administration official who told them that an American pilot was missing after Iran shot down two jets on Friday. Trump said he was going to find out who provided reporters with that information "because we’re going to go to the media company that released it, and we’re going to say,  'National security. Give it up or go to jail.'" 

To be clear, the leak came from inside the Trump administration, and there is no way to know that it wasn't authorized. The Trump administration, like all political offices, routinely "leaks" information that it wants publicly known without having to take responsibility for answering questions about it directly.

It is not illegal for American news outlets to publish information they receive confidentially from government employees, and for the most part, journalists can't be forced to disclose their sources. Even in the rare circumstances when the federal government can meet the high threshold of an "overriding and compelling state interest," most administrations have avoided that kind of a confrontation, out of a basic respect for the value of a truly free press. Trump notoriously feels otherwise and has spent a great deal of effort trying to handpick his own press corps and escape the more difficult questions that independent reporters tend to ask.

In other words, Trump can't simply order reporters "to jail" by invoking national security, although that hasn't stopped him from threatening that or worse many, many, many, many, many, many times.
 

Why does this matter?

• A free and independent press is essential to the functioning of democracy, which is why only dictators or people aspiring to be dictators attack it.