As most people will have deduced by now, a lot of the Trump team agenda is going to be derived in some way from the Project 2025 handbook.
One of the objectives specified in that handbook is the banning of pornography.
Let’s start with a reality check. Nobody can ban pornography. That is like trying to ban the consumption of alcohol, or prostitution. Societies that try to ban those services end up with corruption, laws that people mock privately (and sometimes publicly) and a bigger problem with organized crime.
Organized crime loves a commodity or service that is illegal, but for which an inelastic demand exists. Prohibition was a bonanza for the Mafia and organized crime.
There is also the little matter of the First Amendment, which authoritarians really like when they think somebody is trying to shut down THEIR speech. They often interpret “freedom of speech” to mean “freedom from consequences”, but that is another discussion for another time.
IMHO, the Trump administration cannot try to ban pornography by passing specific laws to ban it. Such laws will fall foul of state constitutions, and the First Amendment.
However, they can try to ban it by harassment laws. An example of this would be passing a law that prohibits credit card processing companies from processing any transactions for “erotic” businesses or entities. This is similar to the laws that many cities have which prohibit “Sexually oriented” businesses. (Those laws don’t really work either. Humans are ingenious).
I expect that while pornography cannot be banned, laws may be passed to try to stop commercial activity where the product or service is deemed to be “pornographic”. Erotic novels and spicy romance novels will certainly fall into that category, based on the classic “I’ll know it when I see it” judgment call beloved of censorious nitwits.
My prediction is that large platforms, when pressured via new laws (or the threat thereof) will swiftly ban any erotica from being sold on their sites. Smaller sites will also mostly ban it, because their payment processors will cut them off if they think they are selling anything erotic. We can expect sites like Medium to fall into line. Any business entity who is based in the USA, or whose revenues mostly originate in the USA, will be falling into line.
This is not going to be a worldwide phenomenon. Most European countries regard the American hang-ups about sex as both amusing and damaging. The EU has a track record of telling the USA to get lost when it tries to impose stupidity, and the EU also has far more stringent data privacy laws (with an incoming US government that regards all opposition as illegitimate, I expect surveillance in the USA to become more overt in the next few years).
I expect that in order to sell my stories and novels, I will need to move this site to an ISP located either in the EU, or in one of those Wild West offshore tax havens, and access the site covertly. I will pull the trigger on that move whenever I detect that the climate is about to change.
We are heading into censorious times. Everybody buckle and up and do what you have to do to survive.