President Donald Trump has again roiled the public debate over free-speech rights with his comments this weekend about football players who take a knee during the national anthem - but lawyers said calling for those players to be fired probably didn’t cross any legal lines.
“Even the president has a First Amendment right to be obnoxious,” said Justin Dillon, a former federal prosecutor now in private practice. “What would be a problem is if he went beyond using the bully pulpit and actually ordered the government to take action against any of these teams or their players.”
Dillon said the public debates raging over free speech - many of them sparked by the president’s comments - often confuse someone’s right to free speech with whether their speech is right.