Over the weekend, Donald Trump expressed in a speech his belief that public criticism of judges and Supreme Court justices who rule in Trump’s favor should be illegal.
Trump took this position expressly, twice, in his speech, albeit in a stream-of-consciousness riff. His basic point was that public critics of Trump-appointed judges who make rulings Trump approves of are “working the refs.”
Trump first claimed this is illegal. (“I really think it’s illegal what they do, with judges and justices. They’re playing the ref.”) Later in the speech, he said it ought to be illegal. (“Remember the term. Playing the ref with our judges and justices should be punishable by very serious fines and beyond that.”)
In the middle of these two statements, he managed, in typical Trumpian fashion, to strip away any pretense of intellectual consistency by (1) saying that “working the refs” is wonderful and brilliant, because it was done by his friend, Bobby Knight, the former Indiana basketball coach who endorsed him, leading to Trump winning Indiana by a landslide, and (2) immediately making his own criticism of judges who rule against him. “The New York court system is totally corrupt,” Trump said.
A law against criticizing judges would be highly problematic, of course, but that is obviously not what Trump wants, since he sandwiched his calls for such a law around criticism of judges who ruled against him. Trump wants to ban criticizing judges who rule the way Trump wants them to rule.
Trump would almost certainly not be able to pass such a law through Congress, and even if he did, it would stand little chance of surviving a clear First Amendment challenge. The Republican-controlled Supreme Court has shown a willingness to bend the law in favor of Trump and the conservative agenda to a sometimes-shocking degree, but an outright ban on criticism of judges would disregard the plain text of the Constitution to a degree that would be hard to imagine.
What matters here is that Trump has revealed once again his utter lack of respect for democratic values. He admires dictators. He believes any election he loses is illegitimate. He believes his political opponents and critics are per se criminal. And he has made this plain so many times that every fresh new piece of evidence of his dictatorial ambitions, each of which ought to be totally disqualifying on its own, barely attracts attention of the political media any more.
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