“I’m not a football fan, I’m not a sports fan, but I’m surely a Donald Trump fan”, Joe Hornick told WNBC.
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A police report provided to NJ.com further explained how police were alerted to Hornick’s flags.
Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump appears to have a passionate supporter in Joseph Hornick, a New Jersey man who faces a $2,000 fine or 90 days in jail for flying a flag emblazoned with the billionaire candidate’s name over his home. When officers arrived at his home on March 25, Hornick assumed they planned to take a report on the latest theft incident. According to Eugene Volokh at the Washington Post, Hornick is right: Banning political signs or placing similar restrictions on the content of signs violates the First Amendment, Volokh writes, though the city would be within its rights to apply content-neutral restrictions that applied to all signs.
For weeks, Hornick has displayed the blue flag with Trump’s “Make America Great Again!” campaign slogan on a pole outside his two-story West Long Branch house, at a busy intersection near Monmouth University, in a show of his support for Trump. That’s because in West Long Branch, the flags are considered political signs under a borough ordinance.
But West Long Branch doesn’t see it that way. The maximum penalty is a fine of $2,000, 90 days in jail or both. New Jersey’s presidential primary is June 7.
Hornick is scheduled to attend a municipal court hearing April 20. “And every time they rob me, I put the flag back up”. “I have the right to express myself”. “I will keep putting them up”, he said. “I will keep putting them up”, he said. “So I think that if he wants to put a flag up for whoever he wants to vote for, we should be allowed to do that”.
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“I’ve always been interested in politics, especially the people who shake it up a bit”, he said.
