One of the more disturbing pronouncements from Donald Trump recently – and there have been so many of them – was his assault on the First Amendment. As president, Trump would allow no dissent, he declared.

He would “open up our libel laws so when [reporters] write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money … So when The New York Times writes a hit piece which is a total disgrace or when the Washington Post, which is there for other reasons, writes a hit piece, we can sue them and win money instead of having no chance of winning because they’re totally protected.”

Now, there are already libel laws in the United States, and they’re workable. For the most part, they’ve struck a balance between the First Amendment and the value of someone’s reputation.

What Trump is proposing is something like the system used in the United Kingdom, British writer Peter Jukes explained.

“Welcome to my world, Donald, where the biggest threat to free speech is not press regulation or laws against incitement or harassment, but our chilling and atavistic laws of defamation,” he wrote recently for The Daily Beast. “Unlike U.S. libel laws – which, since the 1964 Supreme Court decision New York Times v Sullivan, require proof of ‘actual malice’ – in the U.K. the burden is on the defendant to prove that a reputation has not been damaged.”

That’s a huge burden on a defendant in a libel suit.

“Like our unwritten constitution which still frames us as ‘subjects’ of the monarch rather than citizens, the libel laws of England and Wales – though reformed two years ago – still construe libel in terms of what the rich and powerful may lose by others writing anything about them,” he explained. “This is in contrast to the U.S. tradition of the First Amendment which, as cited by Justice William Brennan in the Supreme Court’s majority opinion in 1964, implies: ‘a profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust and wide-open, and that it may well include vehement, caustic and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials.'”

Donald Trump, oversensitive to criticism and to hearing his own words repeated back to him, doesn’t get that.

As Walter Olsen noted: “Donald Trump has been filing and threatening lawsuits to shut up critics and adversaries over the whole course of his career. He dragged reporter Tim O’Brien through years of litigation over a relatively favorable Trump biography that assigned a lower valuation to his net worth than he thought it should have … He used the threat of litigation to get an investment firm to fire an analyst who correctly predicted that the Taj Mahal casino would not be a financial success. He sued comedian Bill Maher over a joke.”

Donald Trump is now threatening publications that editorialize against him. He said of the Washington Post, “If I become president, oh, do they have problems.”

That’s unacceptable. And it’s one more reason to not support Trump.