Trump Declares Flag Burners Will Spend a Year in Jail: ‘No Early Exits, No Nothing’

President Donald Trump signed an executive order Monday targeting flag burning — an attempt to criminalize an act the Supreme Court of the United States has already repeatedly ruled is protected free speech.

With staffers and reporters gathered in the Oval Office Monday morning, Trump signed several executive orders. The last one focused on flag burning, which has been seen at protests pertaining to the murder of George Floyd, campus protests about the war in Gaza, and other political demonstrations in recent years.

Said Trump about the order:

This is very important. Flag burning, all over the country, they’re burning flags. All over the world, they burn the American flag. And as you know, through a very sad court, I guess it was a 5-to-4 decision — they called it freedom of speech.

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. You can do other things. You can burn this piece of paper. You can — and it’s — but when you burn the American flag, it incites riots, at levels that we’ve never seen before. 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.

The order posted on the White House website attempts to circumvent the Supreme Court precedent by declaring that the flag is a “representation of America,” and burning it “may incite violence and riot,” adding that “American Flag burning is also used by groups of foreign nationals as a calculated act to intimidate and threaten violence against Americans because of their nationality and place of birth.”

“Notwithstanding the Supreme Court’s rulings on First Amendment protections, the Court has never held that American Flag desecration conducted in a manner that is likely to incite imminent lawless action or that is an action amounting to ‘fighting words’ is constitutionally protected,” the order continues.

As noted in Mediaite’s reporting earlier in the day on this topic, decades of Supreme Court case law have been clear in not only finding flag burning to be expressive political conduct and therefore protected speech, but rejecting arguments by the government that flag burning itself is “imminent” incitement of a disturbance of the peace or other lawless action.

Regarding Trump’s comment that “a very sad court” in a 5-to-4 decision “called it freedom of speech,” it was not one court opinion but two, upholding decades of precedent, with conservative stalwart Justice Antonin Scalia joining the majority opinion in both.

“Even such a revered conservative as Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia agreed with his liberal colleagues on the ideologically neutral fundamental free speech principle at stake: genuine respect for the flag demands that we uphold the freedom for which it stands, including above all the freedom to criticize government policies, including through such dramatic symbolic expression as burning the flag,” New York Law School professor emerita Nadine Strossen told Mediaite.

Violators would get one year in jail, Trump said:

And what the penalty is going to be if you burn a flag, you get one year in jail. No early exits, no nothing. You get one year in jail, if you burn a flag, you get — and what it does is incite to riot — I hope they use that language…incite to riot and you burn a flag, you get one year in jail, you don’t get ten years. You don’t get one month. You get one year in jail. And it goes on your record.

And you will see flag burning stopping immediately. Just like when I signed the Statute and Monument act, ten years in jail, if you hurt any of our beautiful monuments. Everybody left town. They were gone. Never had a problem after that. It’s pretty amazing. We stopped it.

But this is something that’s, I don’t know, in a certain way it’s equally as important. Some people would say it’s more important because the people in this country don’t want to see our American flag burned and spit on, and by people that are in many cases, paid agitators. They’re paid by the radical left to do it.

You talk to these people, they don’t even know — half of them don’t even know what they’re doing. They say, “I don’t know, they gave me money to do this.” I see the same things that you do. They’re bad people. They’re trying to destroy our nation. That’s not working. Because I think our nation now is the most respected nation anywhere in the world by far.

Legendary First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams has litigated several landmark free speech cases and was highly skeptical Trump’s order could survive a constitutional challenge. (Disclosure: Abrams is the father of Dan Abrams, the founder and owner of Mediaite.)

“The suppression of controversial speech is often popular but just as often violative of core principles of free expression,” Abrams told Mediaite. “The Bill of Rights has not been amended since flag burning was held by the Supreme Court to be First Amendment protected and there is no reason to believe that President Trump’s latest effort at limiting speech will be sustained by the Supreme Court.”

Patrick Jaicomo, a civil rights litigator at the Institute for Justice, denounced Trump’s executive order, noting that “[y]ou can burn an American flag if you want in the United States of America, and the government cannot send you to jail at all, let alone for a year.”

“Don’t like it? Try to amend the Constitution,” he added.

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a nonpartisan free speech advocacy nonprofit, issued a statement from the chief counsel Robert Corn-Revere condemning the order as unconstitutional.

The statement read in full:

President Trump may believe he has the power to revise the First Amendment with the stroke of a pen, but he doesn’t.

Flag burning as a form of political protest is protected by the First Amendment. That’s nothing new.

While people can be prosecuted for burning anything in a place they aren’t allowed to set fires, the government can’t prosecute protected expressive activity — even if many Americans, including the president, find it “uniquely offensive and provocative.”

You don’t have to like flag burning. You can condemn it, debate it, or hoist your own flag even higher.

The beauty of free speech is that you get to express your opinions, even if others don’t like what you have to say.

Watch the clip above via CNN.

This article has been updated with additional information.