Jane Fonda condemned Donald Trump and his administration’s attacks on the First Amendment in a fiery protest speech given outside the Kennedy Center.
On Friday, the legendary actress was joined by a number of notable names, including Maggie Rogers, Joan Baez, Billy Porter, Sam Waterston, Jim Acosta and Joy Reid, where she blasted the Warner Bros.-Paramount Merger, the Iran War and more as an attack on the freedom of expression.
“Since Trump has taken over the approval of media mergers, we risk having major jewels in the crown of independent journalism and nuanced entertainment being gutted,” Fonda sounded off at the pre-No Kings Day rally in Washington, D.C. “I am referring to Warner Bros. Studios, CNN and HBO. God, it hurts me to say those names that may soon not be what they were.”
She continued: “If we don’t fight back, the news we get will be increasingly fake. We won’t be allowed to know what’s really happening. Our children’s academic curriculum will be actually censored. Ticket costs for cultural events will go up while the quality will go down. Books and films will be shallower, lacking nuance and complexity.”
On why Fonda’s Committee for the First Amendment, which relaunched in October 2025, chose to meet outside the recently renamed Trump-Kennedy Center, the Oscar winner noted that the “beloved Citadel of the Arts has become a symbol of what is happening.”
“The center has been effectively silenced after artists refuse to bow to ideological demands and the racist erasure of history,” Fonda noted while shouting out the employees who’ve been impacted by the shakeup under the Trump administration. “As a cover, Trump is shutting it down for at least two years, supposedly, to make repairs. And he even suggested it may be necessary to take it down to the studs. What’s he going to do, build another ballroom where he can dance and, like Nero, fiddle while his country burns?”
The committee decided to fight back on Friday, as they “felt it was time to expose the range and depth of the attacks on the bedrock of our democracy,” Fonda said. She encouraged not only the press, but the American public as well, to “stand tall against authoritarianism that is taking a hold and consolidating very fast.”
Fonda took a moment to also address the ongoing war in Iran. While the actress acknowledge that the Middle East conflict was “not a focus ” for the committee, she expressed concerns about how the military operation might impact free speech.
“I want to say that the First Amendment suffers greatly in times of war, as the government works to crush internal dissent,” she noted. “Our parents, our forefathers fought and died for these rights, for these freedoms. We must not sit by quietly and watch them taken away. If we wait to act, if we hesitate out of fear or the feeling that it it doesn’t affect us, it may be too late. The tools we have now to resist, including the right to vote, may not be here, may no longer be available if we don’t act now.”
Later on Friday, Fonda echoed her rallying cry for the public to push back on Trump’s “authoritarianism” while speaking with MS NOW’s Jen Psaki on “The Briefing.”
“[We’re] worried that people and the press don’t see clearly enough, the breadth and depth of these attacks,” the actress shared. “And we have to understand what’s happening. This is not normal. This does not happen in a democracy, and we have to call it what it is, and we have to end it.”
Watch her speeches above.
