There’s nothing completely new in Donald Trump’s latest attacks on reporters.

But they’re more extreme now and ever more indicative of what he wants: a docile press that provides propaganda – not factual journalism – for everything he does, including for his misguided war in Iran.

He even suggested this week that news organizations could be charged with treason for, as he baselessly sees it, spreading false information and thus helping America’s enemies.

He’s getting plenty of help from his top loyalists.

The chair of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, threatened that media companies could lose their licenses if they didn’t get in line.

Pete Hegseth, the former Fox News host who is now the secretary of defense, is demanding more “patriotic” headlines and stories, and expressed hope that CNN would soon be brought to heel by new, Trump-friendly ownership.

Hegseth’s specific complaint was over CNN reporting that the administration had failed to fully foresee the war’s effect on the strait of Hormuz.

CNN’s chairperson and CEO, Mark Thompson, appropriately, stood by the story.

“Politicians have an obvious motive for claiming that journalism that raises questions about their decisions is false.” But CNN’s mission, he insisted in a statement, is to inform its audience, and “no amount of political threats or insults is going to change that”.

That’s heartening to hear, and I hope that sense of mission doesn’t change under the likely new ownership of the network’s parent company.

In US media, oligarchs are increasingly in charge, and their chief motivations tend to be protective of commercial interests, not of traditional press rights.

That works just fine for Trump, who can manipulate the levers of governmental regulation to help achieve his ends.

Although Americans (and people around the world) are hardened to Trump’s outrageous behavior – especially his unhinged rants on social media – they ought to be aware of what this is.

It’s the language and the strategy of authoritarian states.

Jameel Jaffer, who directs the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, noted that Trump can say what he wants in criticizing the press, but news outlets have the right to publish reporting as they see fit, not as government officials demand.

“This is constitutional bedrock, if anything is,” Jaffer said in a written statement on Monday.

He added that Trump’s latest threats are “an intensification of his long-running effort to bring news organizations into closer alignment with his own ideological and political agenda”.

The scary thing is that Trump is making progress.

At CBS News, some news coverage has taken a Trump-friendlier turn under new management. Several well-respected journalists have departed the network, noting the loss of the editorial independence they counted on for so long.

And given Trump’s propensity for suing news organizations over coverage he dislikes (and getting hefty settlements), a certain amount of self-censorship is inevitable.

While treason convictions and the loss of broadcast licenses may not be realistic, they are surely alarming. And it’s becoming more rare for news companies to keep a stiff spine and fight back in court, though both the Associated Press and the New York Times admirably have done so over the past year.

As Matthew Gertz of Media Matters noted, legal fights may be successful, but they have a huge downside.

The protections of the first amendment suggest that news outlets could likely prevail in court, he wrote, but “the advantage Trump and Carr have in their attempts to cudgel the press into line is that it can be very expensive to fight the federal government … and many people who own or control news outlets don’t care enough about such principles to do it.”

A weakened press and a would-be autocrat in the Oval Office?

That’s a deeply troubling combination for American democracy – and an especially dangerous one as Trump’s ill-conceived and unpopular war rages on.