The man who would be King... oh, is it POTUS? ...has already begun his attacks on Free Speech.
This began on November 29th with his attack on flag burning. There seemed no provocation... though there might have been a catalyst. The holy voices of Fox News apparently had a visual clip on someone burning a flag and TMWWBK (yes, The Man Who Would Be King) either spied an opportunity to inflame his base or self-stimulate but off he went.
Last year, during an appearance on CBS's Late Show (January 8, 2015), Trump told then-host David Letterman that he was "100 percent right" when Letterman said that flag burning represented freedom of expression and that people were allowed to do so. SCOTUS had ruled on this twice, once in Texas v. Johnson (1989) and then in US v. Eichman (1990).
A key vote in both decisions was conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia (who was widely praised by Republicans after his death in February, including by Trump). At one time, Trump clearly knew that the right to burn the flag, though unsettling and even disagreeable to many, was a right protected by the First Amendment of our Constitution. Now TMWWBK doesn't see it this way anymore.
Then came yesterday,which by all other standards started as an ordinary "post-2016 Election" day, with the usual shaking of heads: " Ben Carson for head of HUD, really? " or "Mike Flynn, Jr, continuing his fake news tweets, echoed in Twitterland by different delusional Mike Flynn equivalents, like Edgar Welsh (below) who entered a Pizza shop in DC with an A-15 and sundry handguns, having been persuaded by the Flynns that Hillary Clinton was running a child sex ring there - really?"
Edgar Welsh, proselytized by Lt. General Mike Flynn and his son, fired shots in a DC pizza parlor, based on allegations like those in the tweets made by the Flynns. A sample of Flynn tweets below.
Really, there was even more to come.
First, Trump's son-in-law's pathetic rag of a newspaper itself went rogue on the First Amendment and carried an op-ed urging the end to anti-Trump dissent. I had missed it earlier but on December 2, the Observer had printed the irresponsible op-ed, Comey's FBI Needs to Investigate Violent Democratic Tantrums by Austin Bay (a man who in another era would have been called "fringe.")
"It's time for the FBI to conduct a detailed investigation into the violence and political thuggery that continue to mar the presidential election's aftermath," shouts Bay, whose targets include Robert Creamer, Scott Foval, George Soros, Jill Stein and too many others to name, whom he calls political terrorists. Like his favorite candidate, Bay proclaims the protestors are professionals and paid for. But protest itself is his principal target.
"Street thuggery," he declares, "isn't protected by the First Amendment." Yes, it is ...the right of the people to peacefully assemble is stated in the First Amendment. Hmm....what he calls thuggery is what we in America normally call protests, protected by the Constitution.
But yesterdy was Trump's even bigger day to attack the First Amendment. TMWWBK himself, not just the surrogate picked by his son-in-law was in not so rare form, when he seemingly arbitrarily lashed out at Boeing, claiming its budget for the successor to the current Air Force One was wildly overpriced.
The numbers Trump used may have been false or misleading but the damage he did was real - a $1.48 billion initial loss to Boeing stock (by the end of the day, the market price recovered and the stock was up 8 cents).
What prompted this? Yes, it is an abuse of power, just as his anti-First Amendment tweets against SNL and CNN earlier in the week had been.
But Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo did some detective work and based on what seem his sound speculations, the attack on Boeing was not just an abuse of power, but an attack on the First Amendment. Here are John Marshall's speculations:
"The Chicago Tribune published an article about 20 minutes before Trump tweeted. That is, at least according to the 7:30 AM central time timestamp; Trump tweeted at 8:52 AM eastern.
The Tribune article by Robert Reed starts like this ...The brain trust at Boeing, among the city's largest companies and a global aerospace and defense powerhouse, must cringe every time President-elect Donald Trump riffs on foreign policy, especially when it comes to dealing with China. Boeing has a high percentage of its manufacturing in the US. But it is highly dependent on exports, especially to China.
Then the article recounts a speech Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg gave before the Illinois Manufacturers' Association on Friday in which he was mildly critical of Trump's plans both for the Export-Import Bank and more protectionist trade policies.
The Tribune story wasn't the first time the speech was reported on. The Puget Sound Business Journal wrote up the speech on Friday. But a Google search (which is obviously an imperfect measure) suggests that the Tribune story was the only published mention of the speech in the last 24 hours prior to Trump's tweet. It seems at least plausible that the Tribune story was the first or one of the first reports of the speech Trump or his team saw."
And so it was. The easily excitable Trump, TMWWK, may have heard that the head of Boeing dared to question Trump's divinely created plan, and so, off with his head - and maybe $1 billion or some in stock value, if need be? Or maybe, like his reach-out to the Taiwan president, this was premeditated.
Was your portfolio affected? Did pension plans around the nation quake? Does the head of Boeing have the right to freedom of speech?
Not in the vindictive, all powerful world of TMWWBK. No one does.
This is not our first warning. We should be afraid. Very afraid.
A wise woman once quipped, a man who you can bait with a tweet is not a man who should have nuclear weapons.
That is true. Nor should a man who threatens First Amendment Rights with his tweets be President of the United States.
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December 7, 2016
Addendum. The internet is buzzing with many reasons Trump doesn't want Air Force One. Here are some thoughts. One, he doesn't want anyone else to prepare his plane, lest government agencies have surveillance on him. Two, he probably wants the US taxpayer to pay for his own plane, at a premium. If these or other reasons figure in his thinking, he probably planned his attack on Boeing. We will surely see how this unfolds, should he become President.
One more thing. Trump attacked the flag burners again last night. http://abcn.ws/2hfklmd
