I am concerned. Polls in the swing states this past week show the thin-skinned man-child is being seriously considered for president. I no longer see the electoral landslide for Clinton. The problem is that if he manages to pull off a win, it will pretty much guarantee the GOP will hold the Senate. (They will have the House regardless.) Trump will then put up the most ridiculous people for SCOTUS, starting with Scalia's replacement. The Huffington Post repored that a top contender would be the awful Peter Thiel, the billionaire who successfuly sued and shut down Gawker.
Then we will be completely boned.
Trump hates freedom of the press. He has said so repeatedly. When the Times wrote something he didn’t like last week, he said he wanted to sue them for “irresponsible intent”.
I’m not sure if he even knows what he is saying. I honestly think he is making up his own legal-sounding words.
If you print the truth, you are protected by the First Amendment.
Period.
I don't give a damn what your "intent" is.
Maybe I don't like you. Mabe I think you should be getting therapy rather than the nuclear codes. Maybe i think you are just a lousy businessman who spent his life leaching off of his inheritance, conning good people out of money, and scamming undeserved tax subsidies for yourself. It doesn't matter. If I print the truth about you, it doesn't matter my intent.
On a segment of Fox and Friends, Trump further explained his philophy to Gretchen Carlson's former harassers. They asked him what he would do to “stop people who are radicalized here”. I think they were looking for the standard race-baiting, immigrant-bashing conservative response.
Instead, Trump put the blame squarely on the First Amendment:
They’re all talking about it so wonderfully because, you know, it’s called ‘freedom of the press,’ where you buy magazines and they tell you how to make these same bombs that I saw” Trump said. “They tell you how to make bombs. We should arrest the people that do that because they’re participating in crime. Instead they say ‘oh no you can’t do anything, that’s freedom of expression.’”
OK, Trump. There actually are laws against incitement to commit violence, but it's a high bar to prove--as it should be. You should be grateful for that. If those laws were as loose as you want them to be, you would have been arrested twice already for making thinly veiled appeals for Hillary’s assassination.
The orange man-child has also repeatedly promised to "open up libel laws", so if someone writes something about you that is , in Trump's own words, "purposefully negative", then you should be able to "sue them and win lots of money." Just this past February, he said news organizations like the New York Times and the Washington Post will "have problems." He promised: "We’re gonna have people sue you like you never got sued before."
Many people on this site take their freedom of speech for granted. We are used to speaking our minds without fear of retribution by thin-skinned politicians. Sadly, I don’t trust that men like Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, or Peter Thiel will fight uphold our freedoms. With a Trump victory, I would also not expect much outrage from the apathetic populace. I fear the possibility that, in the near future, I could be looking back to my freedom of expression on this site with the same nostalgia I do when I remember my right to privacy before 9/11.