Larry Bushart: The Man Who Spent 37 Days in Jail for a Single Trump Meme
A rural sheriff's office tramples on free speech while the mainstream media ignores the story.
Photo via Unsplash, Martin Podsiad Splinter larry bushart
When I first saw headlines from independent media sources involving the case of Tennessee’s Larry Bushart, a man who was arrested and spent more than a month in jail in September and October (with a $2 million bond!) because he posted a single Donald Trump meme on Facebook, my BS detector was going off wildly. “Surely,” I thought, “there must be more to the situation here.” Surely the guy has done something else that is being glossed over; surely there is more context that is missing; surely when I look closer into it there will be some extra detail that will serve as a halfhearted justification for why a small-town sheriff locked this guy up, something for defenders to glom onto. Otherwise this would be a bigger story covered by bigger news outlets. But no: What you find instead in the case of Larry Bushart is one of the most plain and egregious examples of police overreach and punishment of free speech you’ll hopefully ever encounter. The injustice of it is both frightening and deeply relevant to our current sociopolitical landscape … as is the curious indifference of national news, who seemed to largely miss the story entirely.
Larry Bushart is a resident of the small town of Lexington, Tennessee (Henderson County), roughly halfway between Nashville and Memphis. A 61-year-old former police officer himself–another aspect of this story that is deeply strange–Bushart retired from the Tennessee Department of Correction in 2024. Perhaps unusually for his age, field and local demographics, Bushart also seems to be pretty strongly liberal in his political beliefs. In retirement, this led to something of a second career as a prolific social media political poster and garden variety troll, and he regularly shared political memes and reposts across various social media accounts. On. Sept. 10, following explosive news reports on the assassination of right-wing political commentator Charlie Kirk, Bushart posted various memes and opinions on his own page about Kirk’s beliefs and statements. Expanding his horizons, he seemingly spotted a Facebook group called “What’s Happening in Perry County,” with a thread on a candlelight vigil for Kirk in the town of Linden, another small town less than an hour away. In that thread, he posted the Donald Trump meme that would quickly land him in hot water.
This is the meme in question:
The intent could hardly be more obvious. In response to the outsized attention and shows of mourning being given to Kirk’s (absolutely heinous) shooting death, Bushart was highlighting how little right-wing figures like Donald Trump otherwise care about gun violence incidents, demonstrating the hypocrisy of performatively caring about one but not the other. The meme used a direct quote from Trump following a school shooting at Perry High School of Perry, Iowa in January of 2024, in which eight students and staff members were shot, and Trump responded to the incident within 36 hours saying that “we have to get over it.” Honestly, this is political troll 101-level stuff, the kind of meme that would be posted thousands of times all over Twitter and Facebook. There was nothing unusual in the least about the meme–it was boilerplate “point out the hypocrisy of your political opponent” material, circulating at that moment in the same way that Kirk’s own quote about “it’s worth to have the cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment” was circulating at the same time. It’s the jaded way that terminally online and politically inclined Americans respond to these kinds of tragedies, a standard background operating part of the internet experience.
And then police showed up that evening to arrest Bushart, and the story takes a leap into unprecedented, ridiculous waters. He was slapped with charges of “threats of mass violence on school property and activities” and spent the next 37 days in Perry County, Tenn.’s jail, with an insane $2 million bond until the charges were finally and mercifully dropped following public outcry. Here’s the official mugshot and charge.
How could the local sheriff and his office possibly have justified such an arrest and blatant assault on free speech? Just how long might this man have rotted in jail for posting a single meme, if a public pressure campaign hadn’t seemingly secured his release? And just how much cash will Bushart ultimately extract from the inevitable civil rights lawsuit that will follow?
The Police vs. Free Speech
The Sheriff of Perry County, Tennessee, is a man by the name of Nick Weems. Almost as active and politically inclined on Facebook as Larry Bushart was, he often railed there about who he saw as his political enemies. According to a report from The Intercept, which broke much of the story surrounding Bushart, Weems also responded to the assassination of Charlie Kirk with a rant that would seem to be deeply relevant to Bushart’s eventual arrest. He wrote: “Evil could be your neighbor. Evil could be standing right beside you in the grocery store. It could be your own family member and you never even know it.”
That attitude seems, to me, to be the crux of this entire situation. A local sheriff saw or was made aware of some speech he didn’t like, from a person tangential to his community, and he decided that the thing he saw was “evil” and took immediate, unilateral action against the free speech he didn’t like. In doing so, the sheriff’s office invented its own justification under the guise of “threats of mass violence” that didn’t exist in reality. And when eventually confronted by more and more local Tennessee citizens with the obvious errors and bias involved in the arrest and charges, that sheriff simply doubled down and dug himself in deeper and deeper. What’s even more incredible is that they pressed ahead with these charges against a fellow former police officer, the brotherhood of privilege that usually exists between cops and ex-cops suddenly disappearing.
The entire Perry County Sheriff’s Office seemed to quickly fall in lockstep. In the warrant affidavit for Bushart’s arrest, Investigator Jason Morrow is quoted specifically saying that the Trump meme is the source of the complaint, and that by posting it on the Charlie Kirk vigil thread, “This was a means of communication, via picture, posted to a Perry County, TN Facebook page in which a reasonable person would conclude could lead to serious bodily injury, or death of multiple people.” In the earliest subsequent reporting about the arrest, Sheriff Weems would go on to say that Bushart’s meme had essentially terrified the local Perry County community into fearing threats of violence against the local high school, and that “investigators believe Bushart was fully aware of the fear his post would cause and intentionally sought to create hysteria within the community.”
Most anyone should be able to acknowledge that this is patently absurd, that man posting a meme like this on a Charlie Kirk vigil thread was in no way attempting to threaten the safety of a high school. When he was arrested, Bushart had legitimately no idea what the charges were even referring to. Indeed, this is where the story gets that much dumber, because it turns out that much of it may have ultimately been the result of a series of stupid misunderstandings that the sheriff’s office was simply too proud to correct.
You may have noticed that there are multiple “Perrys” in play here. By sheer coincidence, the Donald Trump meme that Larry Bushart posted was in reference to Trump speaking on a school shooting in the small city of Perry, Iowa. The location of the Charlie Kirk vigil, meanwhile, was in the small town of Linden, Tennessee, located in Perry County, TN. The school mentioned in the Trump meme: Perry High School. The school that Bushart was theoretically in some way threatening: Perry County High School of Linden. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a national civil liberties group representing Bushart in what will likely be a civil liberties lawsuit, has essentially theorized that the entire arrest was predicated on this surface level misunderstanding.
How does this happen? Well, when there’s seemingly zero investigation by police before seeking a warrant and arresting a man who posted a meme online, it turns out that mistakes can be made. Bushart was arrested literally just a few hours after he originally made the post, in response to supposed “hysteria” and panic that no one can find evidence for having existed. Case in point: FIRE filed various open records requests with the Perry County High School district, seeking communications from the sheriff’s office that would have informed them of this supposedly serious threat. They found no contact at all–nothing to suggest that the school had been warned or contacted about the supposed shooting threat. The Perry County Sheriff’s Office has simply continued stonewalling both FIRE and news organizations looking for comment. Perhaps we’ll finally hear more whenever Bushart eventually takes them all to court.
Legal Reprisals and a Disinterested Media
On Oct. 30, the day before Halloween, the charges against Larry Bushart were quietly dropped and he was released from jail, with no public statement from the sheriff’s office, or acknowledgement of why the charges were dropped. He had been held for 37 days.
“Thanks to all and any supporters out there,” said Bushart in a short statement as he departed. “And very happy to be going home. I didn’t seek to be a media sensation, but here we are. Yeah, that’s about all I can say right now.” The day of his release, he went right back to posting on his still publicly visible Facebook profile, before stopping abruptly–one wonders if legal counsel has advised him against it.
UPDATE: Larry Bushart, the liberal ex cop jailed for 37 days over a Trump meme in a Charlie Kirk vigil group, is preparing to sue. (His lawyers say the sheriff failed to provide docs)
Also: county commission just abruptly canceled their meeting where a protest had been planned against Sheriff Weems
— The Tennessee Holler (@thetnholler.bsky.social) Nov 20, 2025 at 3:08 PM
It is very likely that an outpouring of grassroots public activism was ultimately to thank for Bushart’s release, organized in venues such as the Justice for Larry Bushart Facebook page. A perusal of that page is both fascinating and a rabbit hole that could quickly lead a person astray in its own way–it is overflowing with rage, activism and unverifiable accusations and rumors about figures like Sheriff Nick Weems. But its members were seemingly relentless in standing up for Bushart as a case where a person’s First Amendment rights had been trampled in a way that goes far beyond even what we typically see in an increasingly authoritarian and repressive social landscape.
This, to me, is what makes the relative lack of coverage of Larry Bushart’s story by big national/mainstream media sources so interesting. The sensationalism is absolutely there, so why didn’t more major news organizations latch on to this story? In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, as the likes of J.D. Vance were embracing cancel culture and instructing Americans to report each other to employers for any negative social media posting about Kirk, we’ve seen many stories about American citizens losing their jobs or being banished from communities for expressing opinion related to Kirk. But Larry Bushart wasn’t just fired (he did lose his job as a medical driver while in jail), he was arrested and jailed for more than a month, with the sheriff’s office that arrested him stating themselves that a single meme was the entire impetus for doing so. How did this not blow up into front page news all over the country?
Look through the archives at CNN, and you won’t find a single hit for Larry Bushart’s name. Do the same on NBC News or ABC News, and it’s zero hits as well. On Fox News? Haha, sorry, I don’t know why I felt like I should even suggest the possibility. The New York Times, meanwhile, spared a couple of paragraphs in a single story when Bushart was released from jail. It just feels like there’s a palpable level of disinterest here in what I personally feel is a deeply, terrifyingly relevant story.
The case of Larry Bushart is a canary in the coal mine, particularly when it comes to people living in rural communities, stories that are perhaps more likely to get overlooked via media giants. It evokes the frightening possibilities of zealous, politically motivated policing in this kind of community, in police departments headed up by individuals who feel emboldened by the Trump administration’s increasingly authoritarian crackdowns. How many small town sheriffs out there are giddily embracing the dawn of American fascism because they can’t wait to use their offices to punish their perceived political enemies on a local scale? How many of those sheriffs will be relying on the never-ending, flood-the-zone pace of political news coverage in America to obscure these kinds of arrests and absurd charges, to ensure that they don’t get the kind of public response that forces them to stay their hand? How many other cases like Larry Bushart (that don’t feature a white, senior citizen former police officer) are we in the media missing?
Because rest assured, not every case like this will end up turning out so well. Not every person arrested and jailed for a meme will likely get a big, active Facebook group full of activists fighting for their release. Some of them will slip through the cracks, resulting in lives ruined out of pure, partisan spite and hatred. One can only hope that if Bushart’s civil rights lawsuit subsequently makes him rich, the resulting story will be spread far and wide enough that it will discourage more senseless prosecution of this nature. If I never have to write another story about a person being arrested for posting a Donald Trump meme on Facebook, it will still be too soon.
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