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Judge Tells Trump Free Speech Should Not Incite Violence — Lawsuit Goes Ahead

By Patricia Grannum
Published on: 04:49 PST, Apr 2, 2017

Donald Trump’s mouth keeps getting him into trouble and it’s serious business. A federal judge from Kentucky has thrown out his free speech defense against legal claims that he incited violence at a political rally when he was running for president, the Washington Post reports. The rally in question took place last year in Louisville. During the rally, Trump said “get em out of here” to his supporters in reference to protesters who had attended the pro-Trump event. Supporters forcibly removed the protesters which led to the filing of a couple of lawsuits.

Trump and his attorneys claimed that the current president did not intend to encourage his supporters to be violent. But Judge David J. Hale was having none of it. He ruled that the First Amendment, which protects freedom of speech, does not cover speech that incites violence. And he decided that that’s what Donald Trump did at his rally last year.

“It is plausible that Trump’s direction to ‘get ’em out of here’ advocated the use of force,” Hale wrote in his decision. “It was an order, an instruction, a command.”

This is just another sign that America’s judicial system is taking Donald Trump’s words seriously and he’s being judged based on those words. So all of the extreme statements he made during the presidential campaign are coming back to bite him.

As the Washington Post reports, recently a judge in Hawaii threw out an appeal from Trump’s legal team who asked that the court, in evaluating Trump’s second travel ban, disregard statements that the president made about Muslims during the campaign. Trump’s first travel ban was halted because of past statements, where he declared that he would halt all Muslim immigration to the United States. This was further reiterated by Rudy Giuliani who had stated that Trump had consulted him about the logistics of implementing a Muslim ban.

“So when first announced it, he said, ‘Muslim ban,'” Giuliani said in an interview with Fox News. “He called me up. He said, ‘Put a commission together. Show me the right way to do it legally.'”

If the judicial system is committed to taking Donald Trump at his word, no matter how bigoted and outlandish his statements, why can’t his supporters?

In lighter presidential news, Donald Trump and the New York Post were the butt of a hilarious April Fools’ Day prank carried out by a hacker yesterday. The app’s push notifications sent out an alert which said “Heil President Trump,” among other nonsensical messages.

“The push alert system for our mobile app was compromised this evening. Please accept our apologies,” the newspaper tweeted in an attempt at damage control.

The messages weren’t all political; some of them had a religious slant as well.

“In casting truth into the darkness of your shadow, you have gravely sinned,” one of the messages read. “Hear me now, for I speak as an angel in the words of God,” another one said.

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