President-elect Donald Trump is surely quite busy these days, what with all those cabinet positions to fill and all those businesses around the world he’s still running, but he still finds time to “tweet.” On Tuesday he took to Twitter to express his opinion that “Nobody should be allowed to burn the American flag — if they do, there must be consequences — perhaps loss of citizenship or a year in jail.”
Which strikes us as a pretty peculiar thing for a president-elect to write. In addition to the poor punctuation, and the strange notion that a loss of citizenship or a year in jail are roughly equivalent, it seems apropos of nothing in particular, woefully ignorant of the law, and a damned waste of time.
Some idiot or another is always burning an American flag somewhere, for some fool reason or another, but even in the aftermath of Trump’s election the problem doesn’t seem have reached a point that it’s likely to cause any flag shortages or other pressing problems. We quite agree that burning the American flag is one of those things that people ought not to do, but there are so many of those things it would be quite impractical to ban them all. The Supreme Court long ago ruled that burning the American flag is just one of those obnoxious things that the public will have to put up with to ensure the freedom of speech that makes the flag worth respecting, so Trump is going to need to get three fourths of states to ratify the first but probably not last constitutional amendment to restrict the First Amendment, and he’ll need go through all that rigmarole again if he wants to start stripping citizenship away from Americans, which seems more trouble than it would be worth just to jail a few easily-ignored jackasses.
It hardly seems worth “tweeting” about, given all the other chores Trump has to deal with, but we suppose he has his reasons. Over at The Washington Post the scribes are supposing that it’s because Trump is continuing to rile up his base of rural and small town supporters, noting that he’ll also soon be continuing his campaign rallies with them during an upcoming “thank you tour,” but they don’t offer any reason why he would need to do that with the election already won. Perhaps it’s because Trump just can stop playing to the adoring crowds, or wants them riled up enough to support all sorts of limits on free speech, or maybe he just didn’t have anything else to “tweet” about.
He wound up giving us and those scribes at The Washington Post something to write about instead of the questionable matter of a president-elect appointing government officials while running a world-wide business or the fact that Goldman Sachs has provided yet another Treasury Secretary, so we guess that “tweet” wasn’t a complete waste of Trump’s time.
— Bud Norman
The Central Standard Times 