Defend the 1st Amendment — because Trump won’t
If Donald Trump were capable of graceful elocution, this might be how he’d phrase his feelings about those he perceives to be America’s internal enemies:
“There are citizens of the United States, I blush to admit, born under other flags but welcomed under our generous naturalization laws to the full freedom and opportunity of America, who have poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life.”
In fact, those words were delivered more than a century ago by another U.S. president, Woodrow Wilson, whose views on unfaithful foreigners in our midst and on the perfidious press prefigured those of Trump. Indeed, it was Wilson who exhorted Congress to give the Justice Department greater powers to prosecute seditious speech and censor the press in the interest of “public safety.”
In 1917, Wilson signed the Espionage Act into law, and it is this constitutionally dubious legislation that some observers fear will give Trump the power he desires to harass — or, worse, legally silence — his critics in the Fourth Estate.
One expert who raises this possibility is Floyd Abrams, the First Amendment lawyer celebrated for successfully defending the New York Times’ right to publish the classified Pentagon Papers pertaining to the war in Vietnam.
Trump is well-known for his assertions that the “fake news media” is “an enemy of the American people.”
Interestingly, those sentiments might ultimately serve as a defense for journalists, as they show Trump’s pattern of extreme personal sensitivity to any criticism at all. It would not be difficult to demonstrate that any clampdown had less to do with public safety than with Trump’s ego.
But what about the legions of aspiring miniTrumps, the elected officials across the land who observe the president flout the rule of law and regard it as a green light for their own authoritarian tendencies?
Texas offers a chilling example in the actions of Fort Bend County Sheriff Troy E. Nehls. The sheriff was outraged by reports of a pickup truck seen with a sticker on its rear window reading, “F—- Trump and f—- you for voting for him.”
Nehls posted a picture of the truck on a personal Facebook page, bragging that a county prosecutor had agreed to charge the truck’s owner with disorderly conduct. That created an avalanche of publicity, and the Republican county prosecutor denied that the case would be prosecutable. A woman who shares the truck with her husband was arrested — not for the sticker but for an unrelated outstanding warrant. The American Civil Liberties Union has offered her help.
The national mood is such Nehls’ little escapade got shut down pretty quickly. But you have to wonder about other instances where someone’s First Amendment rights will be trampled.
This is exactly why, as Abrams says, the public needs to reaffirm both its understanding of and respect for the First Amendment.
We live in interesting times. Too many people — from Trump to sheriffs to possibly your neighbor — believe it’s legitimate to outlaw or suppress expression contrary to their own views.
That’s un-American, if anything is. You may find it offensive. You may find it personally insulting. But protected speech must remain protected, or the America we love will cease to be.