Monday, August 25, 2025

Trump Signs Executive Order Banning Flag Burning (in rare incidences)

by Rod Williams, August 25, 2025-President Trump today signed an executive order that targets the burning of the American flag. The order does not outright criminalize burning the American flag but directs Attorney General Pam Bondi to prioritize enforcement against cases of "flag desecration" where existing laws were violated.

Those could include violent crimes, crimes against property, illegal discrimination, and other violations, per the order.

"If you burn a flag, you get one year in jail, no early exits, no nothing," Trump said while signing the executive order.

The executive order said that the administration will "act to restore respect and sanctity to the American Flag and prosecute those who incite violence or otherwise violate our laws while desecrating this symbol of our country."

"If the Justice Department, or another executive department or agency," concludes that a case where a flag was set ablaze violates state or local law, such as open burning restrictions, the federal body is directed to refer the matter to state or local authorities, said Trump in signing the EO. This executive order is mostly performative and doesn't do much, thank God.

In a landmark 1989 ruling, the high court decided that flag burning constitutes protected symbolic speech. Among those justices in the majority in that 5-4 was conservative stalwart Antonia Scalia, who said that as a jurist who believes in a pure texualist reading of the Constitution, he has made some tough calls in his career, especially in free-speech cases where his vote went against his personal principles.

"If it were up to me, I would put in jail every sandal-wearing, scruffy-bearded weirdo who burns the American flag," Scalia said. "But I am not king." (link)

That kind of reflects my view of flag burners. They disgust me, but in a free society people have a right to do things that disgust me. If you only support free speech when it is speech you agree with, you do not support free speech. 

Trump's EO does not overturn a Supreme Court decision; it can't and it really doesn't even attempt to. It is meaningless theater for the most part. It is nothing more than virtue signaling, but may have a mild intimidating effect, but not much more. 

For links to the quotations and some of the paraphrased text in the above, follow this link.


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