Does Trump Understand the Concept of ‘Free Speech?’

Yesterday, one of my readers sent me a comment about a column I wrote in which I used the Cambridge Dictionary definition of insurrection to argue that Trump should not be charged for violating the law (18 U.S.C. 2383) which makes it a crime to engage in a rebellion. The reader claimed that if I had used the ‘legal’ definition of insurrection, that I could not have argued that Trump wasn’t guilty of violating the federal law.

So, this morning I went to the federal code to get the ‘legal’ definition of rebellion.

Guess what? There is no ‘definition’ of rebellion or insurrection in the federal code. The words are used in 18 U.S.C. 2383 without any attempt to explain what they mean. In other words, to figure out whether Trump or anyone else engaged in a rebellion or an insurrection on January 6th, 2021, the Cambridge English Dictionary’s definition of those two words will work just fine.

Which brings me back to the latest attempt by Trump and his legal team to mount a response to the growing pile of indictments by claiming that all he was doing before and during January 6th was exercising his 1st-Amendment ‘right’ to engage in ‘free speech.’ And Trump not only insists that he can say anything he wants to say without being held accountable in any way, he has also announced that he will disregard any court…