We are two weeks into President Donald Trump’s ill-conceived war of choice against Iran, and the president is already suggesting his administration should shut down news outlets for producing critical reports — or even consider treason charges based on spurious claims of collusion with America’s enemies.Though U.S. and Israeli forces have successfully bombed a wide array of Iranian targets and assassinated its former supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran has followed through with its strategic doctrine by closing the Strait of Hormuz, shutting down a major channel for the global energy and fertilizer trades.As a result, Trump is begging/demanding foreign navies bail him out by sending ships to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, deploying additional troops and ships to the region for unknown reasons, lifting sanctions on Russia in hopes of lowering the price of oil, denying reports that a Pentagon investigation preliminarily found the U.S. military accidentally incinerated scores of Iranian schoolchildren with an errant missile — and railing against the American press for refusing to report that the war is going well.Meanwhile, Trump’s hand-picked Federal Communications Commission chair, Brendan Carr, is signaling to broadcast stations that they will face regulatory retribution if they don’t “correct course."It’s all part of the authoritarian playbook Trump wields against news outlets that produce anything less than Fox News-style propaganda. The protections of the First Amendment ensure that those outlets could likely prevail in court — but fighting is expensive, and over the course of Trump’s second term so far, the corporate moguls who control them have proven unnervingly unwilling to do so.