Is it legal to insult the President?

[samclem]

Bricker. I appreciate your attempting to impart facts into the discussion, but since I warned the other poster to keep politics out, it would have been better to let the whole thing drop.

I know that you don’t agree and were only trying to give the Straight Dope. While that’s appreciated, in General Questions it’s not always the thing to do.

samclem GQ moderator

[Gary_Robson]

@alphaboi867

Lets say for some reason I meet the President of the United States face to face; instead of saying “Hello Mr President” or making small talk I say something along the lines of “You’re a f_cking moron”. Can I be charged with anything?

Don’t worry only about Federal laws. In a lot of places you could be charged under local laws for the obscenity.

[Bricker]

@samclem

Bricker. I appreciate your attempting to impart facts into the discussion, but since I warned the other poster to keep politics out, it would have been better to let the whole thing drop.

I know that you don’t agree and were only trying to give the Straight Dope. While that’s appreciated, in General Questions it’s not always the thing to do.

samclem GQ moderator

I actually composed my reply before I read your rebuke… but, noted!

[Freddy_the_Pig]

Actually, as I read more about this, I’m less confident of my original answer.

A similar case arose in New Hampshire in 1942, when a citizen of that fair state addressed a town marshal and

did unlawfully repeat, the words following, addressed to the complainant, that is to say, ‘You are a God damned racketeer’ and ‘a damned Fascist and the whole government of Rochester are Fascists or agents of Fascists,’ the same being offensive, derisive and annoying words and names."

The Supreme Court sustained the offending gentleman’s conviction, finding

There are certain well-defined and narrowly limited classes of speech, the prevention and punishment of which have never been thought to raise any Constitutional problem. These include the lewd and obscene, the profane, the libelous, and the insulting or “fighting” words–those which by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace.

To my knowledge this has not been overturned. In Cohen v. California SCOTUS struck down a California conviction of a man who wore a “Fuck the Draft” jacket in a courthouse, but it distinguished the case by noting the words weren’t addressed to a particular individual:

While the four-letter word displayed by Cohen in relation to the draft is not uncommonly employed in a personally provocative fashion, in this instance it was clearly not “directed to the person of the hearer.”

So perhaps calling the President, or anyone else, a “fucking moron” could get you in trouble after all.