We're immediately seeing how our nation's First Amendment will "change" under Trump. Anti-Trump protesters were “hired,” Trumpites say; public opposition to his administration is not just illegitimate, but itself a conspiracy by elites against his movement. His potential Homeland Security chief, David Clark, said the protests had no "legitimate reason" and "should be quelled."
Trump can't do these things himself. Bill O'Reilly, however, can do these things. Sean Hannity or Fox & Friends can do these things. By spreading the message that dissenters themselves are a conspiracy against Trump fueled by dark forces, they can help Trump not just demonize those opponents but take unprecedented steps against the press and the public.
A Trump administration may declare that they cannot allow the press access that is traditionally allowed because—as Trump has already tweeted—the press is "inciting" protests, or is simply not sufficiently pro-Trump. A Trump administration, stuffed with the likes of Peter Thiel, could quickly declare some types of reporting off-limits and subject to new, expansive anti-"libel" laws. A Trump administration may point to the protests as evidence not of dissent but of lawlessness, and indeed move to suppress them in the violent manner Trump told his rally supporters was appropriate for such "thugs."
Trump by himself doing such things out of thin air would, we might hope, be met with public revulsion; Trump doing such things while Bill O'Reilly proclaims them Good, from a set plastered with American motifs, would give all necessary justification for the same supporters that believed Clinton was corrupt, Benghazi was premeditated and Obama was inches from stripping their guns to believe that this seemingly freedom-oppressing act, too, was simply a necessary step to "preserve" freedoms.
Bill O'Reilly, who has written a book about Hitler and foists himself on the world as a wizened interpreter of history, likely knows this better than the others. But he was still on television last night pushing the notion that the protesters themselves were illegitimate. "Increasingly we are seeing people who want our system destroyed," he told his viewers, a propaganda-laden smear that he cannot possibly himself believe. But if it will serve movement purposes, he will say it anyway—much in the same way as Fox News executives tipped Trump to his debate questions, then feigned orgasmic outrage over the accusation that someone else acted similarly.
The protesters, of course, want the "system" to remain intact and are protesting Trump's threats to do away with large parts of it. They prefer the "system" to Trump and Ryan's plans for radical revolution, and are attempting to make that known to their government in a way specifically protected by this nation's founding documents.
But if pro-Trump press figures can convince their viewers that the dissenters are plotting to "destroy" America, they can build support to suppress that dissent outright.
It should also be noted that Fox News figures have, in the past, been eager to support radical acts in support of their own movement. The defining example would be the Bundy Ranch standoff, where an unheard of man who, television producers would later find out, had unhinged ideas about the nation led a team that held federal agents at gunpoint. He was feted by Sean Hannity, who found his armed actions fascinating. He was held up on the network not as militia crackpot threatening the lives of law enforcement—such declarations are reserved, in the Fox lexicon, for unarmed black protesters deemed not deferential enough to government figures—but as a patriot. As example of a "conservative" movement to dismantle the American system could do.
Donald Trump could not, by himself, become an autocrat, push through overtly white nationalist policies, or institute sweeping "reforms" limiting First Amendment protections.
But Bill O'Reilly could. And Bill O'Reilly, it seems, will try.