President Donald Trump on Monday argued that burning the American flag amounts to inciting a riot and needs to be outlawed to prevent “death,” before he signed an executive order that instructed the Justice Department to prosecute people who burn the flag.
“When you burn the American flag, it incites riots at levels that we’ve never seen before,” Trump said Monday before he signed the order in the Oval Office. “People go crazy. In a way, both ways. There are some that are going crazy for doing it; there are others that are angry, angry about them doing it.”
Trump’s order instructs his attorney general, Pam Bondi, to investigate flag-burning incidents and see whether people can be charged with other crimes like disturbing the peace or breaking environmental laws. The penalty would be one year in jail.
Even though polling has found that most Americans disapprove of flag-burning, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Texas v. Johnson in 1989, ruled that burning the flag is protected under the First Amendment as protected political expression.
Trump has rejected that constitutional right, contending that flag-burning needs to be outlawed to keep people safe:
“A very sad court — I guess it was a 5-to-4 decision — they called it freedom of speech,” Trump said Monday. “But there’s another reason, which is perhaps much more important: It’s called death, because what happens when you burn a flag is, the area goes crazy. If you have hundreds of people, they go crazy.”
