The Big Picture –
By Glynn Wilson –
You may have already heard the news that President-elect Donald J. Trump is planning a “victory tour” across the country to thank his supporters for helping with his election. Sources say he may be in for a big surprise when he lands in Mobile, Alabama, the home town of his pick for Attorney General, Jefferson Beauregard “Jeff” Sessions III. Sources inside the local activist community are planning a special greeting for Trump and Sessions: Burning Nazi Swastika flags and Confederate battle flags.
Why?
You see, in case you live in a cave with no internet access and do not pay attention to the news, Trump is also taking fire for recent remarks claiming that anyone who burns an American flag should be arrested and prosecuted and have their citizenship revoked. Never mind that the United States Supreme Court ruled long ago that flag desecration is considered perfectly legitimate free speech under the First Amendment, and that it is unconstitutional to punish someone by stripping their citizenship.
Clearly the law does not matter to Trump, or his pick for Attorney General, a lawyer who used to be a federal prosecutor (although it is arguable whether he was any good at it).
Of course five minutes after Trump’s staff called it a victory tour, they changed their minds thinking that would not send the right message, and changed the name of it to a “Thank You Tour.”
The first event is scheduled for 7 p.m. Thursday in Cincinnati, Ohio, in the U.S. Bank Arena, the site of a previous Trump campaign rally. There is already a
Protest Trump Victory Tour Cincinnati Facebook page to greet the president-elect.
Every news outfit in the land, fake and real, is all abuzz about this tour, wondering where the Make America Great plane will take Trump next.
Some sites are reporting that he will only visit swing states where he won critical electoral votes, such as Ohio and Iowa, along with Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Florida, states President Barack Obama won twice.
But we figure on his way to Florida, Trump will not be able to resist a stop in Mobile, where the city gave up on trying to collect on the bill from Trump’s last campaign appearance Aug. 21 at Ladd-Peebles Stadium.
Mobile mayor doesn’t plan to seek reimbursement from Donald Trump rally
The Trump transition team has yet to provide details on the full scope of Trump’s post-election tour, but George Gigicos, the director the campaign’s advance team, told reporters that the president-elect would be traveling “obviously to the states that we won and the swing states we flipped over.”
Now newly-elected presidents have a long tradition of planning pre-inauguration tours that they feel symbolize the best elements of their successful campaigns, according to some news outlets. When Barack Obama was first elected in 2008, for example, he made a point of retracing part of the train route that Abraham Lincoln took from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Washington, D.C., after his first election in 1860.
In Trump’s case, his decision speaks not only to a desire to revisit the states that elected him, but also to keep his unique populist movement mobilized in the initial weeks and months of his presidency, according to wire service stories.
Swing states that Trump won over include Iowa, Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. But if Trump intends to go to all the states that voted red, then Arizona, Georgia, Indiana, Missouri, North Carolina, Montana, Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia, and Wyoming should all be expecting a visit.
“We’re working on a victory tour now. It will happen in the next couple of weeks,” Trump’a advance team director, George Gigicos, confirmed to reporters at Trump Tower on Friday.
“I don’t have a problem with it at all … (because) he has a lot of work to do to unify the country around his presidency,” Allan Lichtman, Washington, D.C.-based political analyst and history professor at American University, told the Washington Post. “I don’t know if it will work or not. As it is with his entire life, I think this is all about his ego.”
Meanwhile, the Republican president-elect’s tweet about flag burning rattled civil liberties and legal experts, according to the Post and other news outlets.
“Trump won rural America, where support of the flag is a big issue,” said Scott Reed, a longtime Republican strategist who served as Bob Dole’s campaign manager in 1996. “A lot of those homes that had Trump signs out front were also flying American flags. This is clearly part of his base politics.”
But one has to wonder what Trump and Sessions think of burning Conferate Battle Flags and German national flags displaying the Nazi swastika? Surely the president of the United States would not want to legally protect the flags of an upstart Confederacy that nearly ripped the Union in two, or the flag flown by the killers of World War II, where thousands of American soldiers had to fight and die to stop the spread of fascism around the world.
Or could they? If left up to Sessions, he might very well think the Confederate flag needs legal protections. What about the Nazi flag?
Stay tuned for the reaction to this news. Remember you heard it here first. This should be fun to watch. We will be there to cover it live via video.
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Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump on Twitter tweeted at 5:55 AM – 29 Nov 2016: “Nobody should be allowed to burn the American flag – if they do, there must be consequences – perhaps loss of citizenship or year in jail!” It got 72,215 Retweets and 209,080 likes.
