Amazon Sold Clothing That Wishes Death on Donald Trump and His Whole Family

So much for setting a new tone, huh?

Embiggen as necessary. That would be a screenshot from Amazon where someone was selling clothing that said ‘The Only Good Trump is a Dead One.” We first learned of this monstrosity, here:

The cut off text in Starbuck’s post was simply tagging in some members of the Trump family so they would be more likely to see the post.

We independently verified everything Starbuck is saying at the time. However, as we are writing this now, the search no longer works. We can’t verify whether the product is gone completely, or merely hidden. For instance, if someone bought one of those shirts, would they still get it? Or is their order cancelled? We don’t know, but it does seem that you can’t find it at all, any more.

Mind you, there is nothing criminal about this, although we suspect that whoever made these shirts will get a knock on the door from the Secret Service. But it is ultimately not a crime. This is not a threat in the sense that it expresses an intent to harm any of the Trumps or a conditional threat such as ‘do this or I will harm you.’ Nor can this be called incitement. We have talked enough about the law of incitement that you might be sick of hearing it, so we won’t go over the law again. If you really, really want to understand the law of incitement, this post talks about it in detail, but a requirement of incitement is that it has to be designed to produce imminent lawless action, as in pretty much ‘right now.’ Even if could argue that the author of this shirt is advocating for violence against a member of the Trump family—and that is credible—it is at most advocating for violence at some unspecified point in the future. That simply doesn’t count.

But saying ‘this isn’t criminal’ and saying ‘these are products we want to sell’ are two very different sentiments. We think the best policy is a broad degree of freedom of expression for the company, but we also support some bright line rules like ‘no wishing death on a mere political adversary.’ Indeed, this is worse than that. We’re not sure how common the name ‘Trump’ is but even if it is one family in America, it still represents a wife who mainly stays out of politics, several children who have been politically active but also at least one son, Barron, who has stayed out of the political arena. And there are ten grandchildren who range from four to seventeen years old. Are they really going to pretend that the four-year-old kid is bad? It’s psychotic.

So, it’s good that Amazon has now pulled the product but how did it get this far? The offending phrase was literally also the brand name, so how did that become an approved brand name? Amazon should answer these questions.

For the record, if someone wanted to wear a T-shirt calling for the death of Hamass members, to give an example, we would be cool with that. We would even approve of them spelling it incorrectly with one S. *evil grin*

Maybe that is how the product disappeared: Mass reporting.

Yeah, one question we heard the other day was whether Trump will ever become a respected former Republican president. For instance, when George W. Bush was in office, he was the current Republican Who Is Just Like Hitler^TM, but today there is a ‘strange new respect’ for him, with leftists often saying that he was a better man than Trump. So, is there any chance that ten, twenty years from now, we will start to see a strange new respect for Trump? Or is that impossible with him?

Only time will tell, we suppose.