President Donald Trump did not offer a word of comfort for victims of police brutality, nor for those who have lost their lives in the COVID-19 pandemic, during his rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, last weekend.
That would have required compassion or empathy.
But rail against an imaginary issue like flag burning? Sure, why not?
It was another cheap and easy chunk of red meat tossed to the anemic crowd on Saturday night: "We ought to come up with legislation that if you burn the American flag, you go to jail for one year!" he said, addressing Oklahoma's two Republican senators, who basked in his attention.
It wasn't the first time Trump has injected flag burning into the national political conversation.
In 2016, he suggested that anyone who burns an American flag should be imprisoned and lose their citizenship. Last year, when two Republican senators introduced a constitutional amendment to ban flag burning, he tweeted his support: "A no brainer!"
A couple of weeks ago, in a call with governors, he brought it up again, according to The Washington Post. If states would pass a "very powerful flag burning statute" with "strong punishment," he promised to "back you 100%" and mused that the current members of the Supreme Court's conservative majority "will accept that."
There's just one problem with Trump's fantasy of jailing flag burners.
The Supreme Court has ruled _ more than once _ that flag burning is a constitutionally protected form of speech.
"If it were up to me," the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said in 2015, "I would put in jail every sandal-wearing, scruffy-bearded weirdo who burns the American flag. But I am not king."
Indeed, as painful as it must have been for him not to be king, Scalia cast the deciding vote in the landmark 1989 5-4 ruling that declared that flag burning is protected under the First Amendment.
Even as ardent a conservative as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky has said he supports the rights of flag burners: "No act of speech," he wrote in 2006, "is so obnoxious that it merits tampering with our First Amendment ... Surely we are strong enough to withstand a few degenerate attention-seekers."
As angry as this country makes me at times, I would never burn an American flag. That form of protest is not my style.
But if I happened to find myself alone with a box of matches and a Confederate flag?
It's quite possible my inner arsonist would burst into view.
