Gagging a mad dog

Can the courts tell a former president to STFU?

Department of Justice prosecutors have asked U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chuktan to issue a narrow gag order to confine TFG’s public discussions about people involved in the prosecution of Trump’s Jan. 6th case, coming up in March.

The fear, of course, is that if the former president continues as he has, he will taint any hope of preserving an impartial jury pool, that he will continue to intimidate witnesses, and that he will once again incite his followers to violence as he did on Jan. 6, 2021.

Trump, the perennial victim, has told his followers that with this DOJ request, his First Amendment rights are being denied because of course he would.

Reality is something far more sinister. As Paul F. Rothstein, Georgetown University law professor told the New York Times,

Everything about these cases is making new law because there are so many gaps in the law. The system is held together by people doing the right thing according to tradition, and Trump doesn’t — he jumps into every gap.

What precedent is there for such a gag order? None. Zero. Zip — and so we once again see, as Prof. Rothstein says, TFG finding the weaknesses in our system and exploiting them to the nth degree.

I am a journalist. Gag orders make me nervous, but in these unprecedented times when you have a historic figure who refuses to play by the rules, maybe it is time to change those rules. There’s no reason to believe this stops with TFG.