Don Lemon arrest gives Trump just the culture war drama he likes | Opinion
There’s something a little shady about a journalist livestreaming from a “clandestine” location surrounded by activists who are about to violate the sanctity of a church. It blurs the lines between participant and observer. That’s what former CNN personality Don Lemon did leading up to the Minneapolis church invasion for which the Donald Trump-run Justice Department has now arrested him.
But blurring the lines doesn’t mean they aren’t still there. We’ve got two violations of the First Amendment here. First, protestors stripped local congregants of their right to worship, and then we’ve got Lemon being stripped of his rights as a journalist to cover the first violation.
While the rights violations might seem to be equal, they are not. The government running roughshod over the First Amendment is a far more serious affront to constitutional norms than protestors peacefully breaking the law.
To be clear, Lemon has got lots of standard-issue lefty opinions, but opinionated journalists don’t lose their freedom of speech and the press. Indeed, freedom of the press was around for more than a century before progressive-era thinkers even came up with the idea of an unbiased press.
Lemon will likely be all right. He has an able attorney representing him and the benefit of an independent judiciary, which is growing increasingly skeptical of the reckless lawfare Trump wages against his opponents. There’s a reason the magistrate who was asked to approve charges against Lemon turned the Justice Department down before a spoon-fed grand jury apparently said yes.
Even if the charges don’t stick, the process will act as a punishment. Every minute Lemon is in jail or in court, he’s not building his independent media business. Every minute Lemon is in jail or in court, it is going to cost him attorney fees. Every minute Lemon is in jail or in court, he can’t spend it with his loved ones.
It will be worse for the less famous independent journalist, Georgia Fort, who was also arrested by the FBI after filming the protest in Cities Church.
But what worries my wife is that I might be next. Oh, I know I am way down toward the bottom of Trump’s retribution list. That’s what I told her when she saw the news this morning. She wasn’t comforted.
And for good reason: Trump’s misdeeds are rarely a one-off. He carefully dips his toe in unconstitutional waters before jumping in with both feet. There is no more classic move for a wannabe authoritarian than putting critical journalists behind bars.
Lemon has long been at the intersection of journalism and controversy. He was among the first national news anchors to call Trump a racist. He got a little too friendly with hate crime fabricator Jussie Smollett. And he was ultimately fired for airing sexist comments about then Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley’s looks.
Lemon’s line-blurring style of embedding with anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement protestors as they execute their secret church-storming plan still makes me queasy. He knew disrupting church services would be a national lightning rod. He knew his law breaking-adjacent journalism would enrage the right.
No doubt Lemon may even benefit from his arrest. As of last week, I had forgotten about him, and now he is front-page news on the websites of all the national newspapers and TV networks. That can’t hurt the popularity of his YouTube channel.
Nothing good comes of that questionable kind of journalism. It is a gift to Trump that allows the president to pose as a defender of worshipers’ First Amendment rights even as he shreds those rights for his opponents. Lemon gave Trump exactly the culture war contrast our president thrives on.
David Mastio is a national columnist for The Kansas City Star and McClatchy.
This story was originally published January 30, 2026 at 2:52 PM.
