Trump didn’t just denounce “The Apprentice” movie. He also lamented the fact that filmmakers are “allowed” to say “whatever they want.”

Almost 7 years to the day earlier, he said it's “disgusting” that the nation’s press can “write whatever it wants.”

It’s unlikely that Donald Trump has seen “The Apprentice,” a movie that chronicles his early rise, but he evidently doesn’t care for it. The Hill reported:

Former President Trump is slamming “The Apprentice,” calling the film about his early rise in New York “fake and classless.” “It’s a cheap, defamatory, and politically disgusting hatchet job, put out right before the 2024 Presidential Election, to try and hurt the Greatest Political Movement in the History of our Country,” Trump wrote in an early morning Truth Social post on Monday.

The 150-word missive, published shortly before 1 a.m. ET, covered some predictable ground, including the Republican expressing hope that the film will “bomb.”

But there was one sentence in the online piece that stood out for me: “So sad that HUMAN SCUM, like the people involved in this hopefully unsuccessful enterprise, are allowed to say and do whatever they want.”.....

Trump is also arguing that his rivals shouldn’t be “allowed” to run against him, targeting immigrants with Hitler-style rhetoric while promising to create militarized mass deportations and detention camps, speaking with greater frequency about deporting people who entered the United States legally, promising pardons to politically aligned criminals, raising the specter of military tribunals for his perceived domestic political foes, and talking about expanding the use of the U.S. military on American soil.

But specifically when it comes to the First Amendment, Trump recently insisted that those who criticize judges and Supreme Court justices that he likes “should be put in jail,” pushed for CBS to be pulled from the nation’s airwaves, made veiled threats against the nation’s largest newspaper, and asserted in writing that it’s awful to see filmmakers being “allowed” to say “whatever they want.”

It’s almost as if the former president were running on an authoritarian-style platform.

In early 2017, the then-president delivered a speech in which he boasted, “I love the First Amendment. Nobody loves it better than me. Nobody.”

It was ridiculous at the time. It’s vastly worse now.