President Trump on Monday signed an executive order aimed at criminalizing the burning of the American flag, escalating a long-running political fight over free speech rights and testing the boundaries of established Supreme Court precedent.

“If you burn a flag, you get one year in jail — no early exits, no nothing,” Trump said at the White House signing ceremony. “And you will see flag-burning stopping immediately.”

The order directs the Department of Justice to investigate incidents of flag desecration and pursue charges “where prosecution wouldn’t fall afoul of the First Amendment,” according to White House staff secretary Will Scharf.

The move comes despite decades-old rulings by the nation’s highest court that explicitly protect flag-burning as constitutionally protected speech. In Texas v. Johnson (1989), the Supreme Court determined that incinerating the flag was an act of “symbolic speech.” A year later, in United States v. Eichman, the Court struck down the Flag Protection Act, reinforcing those protections.

Trump dismissed the rulings as misguided. “Through a very sad court, they called it freedom of speech,” he said. “When you burn the American flag, it incites riots.”

The president has for years railed against flag desecration, backing legislation and even a constitutional amendment during his first term that would have outlawed the act. He first floated the idea of an executive order in June during an appearance on The New York Post’s “Pod Force One” podcast, citing videos of protesters in Los Angeles burning U.S. flags while waving Mexican ones.

The new directive recalls Trump’s earlier executive actions against the destruction of national monuments during protests in 2020. White House officials contend that order curtailed vandalism, and Trump predicted the same outcome here.

But the executive order is certain to spark an immediate legal challenge, given the Supreme Court’s prior decisions — both of which saw conservative justices, including Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy, side with liberal colleagues in defending flag-burning as free expression.

The president framed the new order as a matter of public safety as much as patriotism. “We cannot allow flag-burning to tear apart our country,” he said.

(YWN World Headquarters – NYC)