President Donald Trump on Monday signed an executive order instructing the Justice Department to pursue prosecutions of individuals who burn or desecrate the American flag, describing the act as “provocative” and a threat to public safety.
“If you burn a flag, you get one year in jail, no early exits, no nothing. You get one year in jail, and it goes on your record and you will see flag burning stopping immediately,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “Some people would say it’s more important than protecting our monuments, because the people in this country don’t want to see our American flag burned and spit on by paid agitators.”
Trump recognized that burning the flag could be a constitutional issue related to freedom of speech; however, he cautioned that it is also a dangerous act that might provoke a riot.
“Flag burning all over the country,” Trump said before signing the order. “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 5-4 decision — they called it freedom of speech,” he said.
The order sets up a direct clash with decades of Supreme Court precedent. In Texas v. Johnson (1989) and United States v. Eichman (1990), the Court ruled that flag burning is a form of symbolic speech protected under the First Amendment. Those rulings struck down both state and federal laws banning desecration of the flag, holding that the government may not prohibit expression simply because it is offensive or unpopular.
Legal experts say Trump’s directive could spark a new round of court challenges, likely testing whether the current Court would revisit or overturn the earlier decisions. Critics argue the executive order is unconstitutional, while supporters say it reflects the importance of defending national symbols.
“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,” Trump continued. “Go ahead with your burn, baby, burn protests, but the flag will be off-limits.
“You can do other things,” he continued. “You can burn this piece of paper. You can. 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,” Trump said.
