Trump: Flag Burning Should be Illegal, Maybe Punished by a Year in Jail or Forfeiture of Citizenship

The media is screaming about this, but failing to note that Hillary Clinton proposed outlawing flag burning in 2005.

Below, Chris Cuomo lectures a Trump aide on the unconstitutionality of anti-flag-burning laws -- completely forgetting that he notoriously claimed that a "Chaplinsky rule" in the Constitution made it okey-dokey to criminalize speech if it offended someone.

It's amazing that this illiterate dum-dum dares to lecture people on what the Constitution says. He's so damn smug in his towering ignorance.

Update: AllahPundit notes that a lot of Trump defenders are offering (as we once did for Bush) a lot of 11th-dimensional chess-type explanations for Trump's outburst, claiming he's playing the long game from wicked angles you can't even see -- trying to deflect from this, prepare the battlespace for that, and generally troll and bait his opponents into making some sort of error.

The most obvious explanation (which Allah notes) is that Trump saw something on "the shows" about flag-burning, decided he didn't like it on a purely gut level, and tossed out his tweet to the world.

Well, it turns out that Trump tweeted at about the time FoxNews had on a segment about flag-burning.

Now, I don't buy the "Trying to Deflect from News He Doesn't Want You to Pay Attention To" explanation (given that a much simpler explanation exists and accords with what was on TV at the time). But it's wrong to say there's no bad news to deflect attention away from -- probably.

Chris Christie is giving a press announcement today, without taking any questions from the media.

I am guessing -- without knowing -- that this has something to do with Bridgegate, or simply noting that he's decided not to seek re-election in 2017.

Eh, would Trump care about that? Probably not really. Still, it does seem there is likely to be some indirectly-affecting-Trump bad news later.

posted by Ace at 11:48 AM

| Access Comments