Pick your most bracing defence of freedom from the Trump administration: here is the vice-president, J.D. Vance, lecturing Europe for having the arrogance to judge “hateful content” and the fragility to fear speech by foreigners. There is Elon Musk, punning on Nazi names to mock people so prudish as to take offence at his straight-armed salutes. Or, most radical, there is President Donald Trump himself, proclaiming he was erasing “a grave national injustice” by pardoning people who protested against his defeat in 2020 by storming the Capitol while chanting racist slurs and calling for Mike Pence, then vice-president, to be hanged.