Voices of Trump voters

by digby

One of the men who hit a protester at one of Trump's rallies. He makes belts. 

At times he has looked at the belts that some people wear, noticing the cheap buckles, the fraying ends, the fake leather, and wondered how someone could buy a belt like that. And lately, it has not just been that question, but a lot of questions he has been having about the changes in the country. Gay marriage. How is that now legal? Baltimore and Ferguson. How could people burn down those buildings and shut down the roads? A Trump rally. How could someone think it was okay to shout obscenities and boo a man running for ­president? Decency. What happened to decency? And on the night of March 9, when he saw Jones shouting at Trump and others, he got up from his chair as Jones was passing, threw an elbow, and now he was regretting it not only because he was arrested the next day, but because the other person acting indecently was him. 

He looked at his flip phone, saw he hadn’t missed any calls from his attorney, and finished the first belt. 

Why, he has often asked himself, did he act the way he did? How could he have suspected Jones was a terrorist? He had never considered himself a bigot or a hateful person — far from it — and now, thinking about what happened, as he does every day, he clenched his jaw and shook his head. He said he had never been so humiliated in his life. All the newspaper articles, television clips and political ads suggesting he was a racist. But sometimes he felt he was the one who was actually the victim of racism. This wouldn’t have been news, he thought, if Jones had been white or he had been black. His case wouldn’t have dragged on for nine months. He wouldn’t have been kicked out of his fast-draw shooting club because he didn’t reflect its values. People wouldn’t be baiting him into racial arguments at the flea market. 

He finished the second belt, placed it in a plastic bag and zipped it closed. 

“Maybe I’m too defensive. Maybe I’ve lived too long,” he said. “Years back, maybe I should have just been put down like a trained dog you can’t have in public.” 

Since the rally, a friend of his named Ed Hood had tried many times to talk to McGraw about his defensiveness. 

“We’ve been talking about this since March,” Hood told him one time when McGraw was again talking about why he had elbowed Jones. “There’s somebody with an attitude that can make you angry enough that you might want to fight them. But don’t do it. You got to let the talk go by you.” 

“Eddie, I had a fear of what might happen next,” McGraw said. “I didn’t know what would mushroom. I didn’t know where it would go.”

“Yeah, that was your interpretation,” Hood said. 

“If I had run into Jones on the street, I would have said, ‘Go on home, boy, before you get yourself hurt.’ I wouldn’t have hit him,” McGraw said. “But under the circumstances.” 

“That public behavior is disappointing to you?” 

“Yes, it is.” 

“That people don’t act more orderly?” 

“It’s a disgrace. . . . It was a situation way beyond decency.” 

“It’s a misunderstanding is what it is.”

I especially like the fact that he was offended by alleged obscenities being shouted at a rally.

Here's one reaction to this article from another Trump voter:

The story about virtually the only case of a Trump supporter hitting a Hillary supporter at a Trump rally as the black guy was trying to disrupt Trump’s speech, this white elderly man has been punished for this and the Washington Post howls about this while not mentioning the many, many instances of Hispanic and black rioters attacking Trump rallies very violently. 

From the Washington Post. Unlike all the NYT articles, this piece of Fake News has only one reporter, not three or five. At least the Post won’t go bankrupt as fast.

The article goes on and on and on trying to pretend to be about how charming and nice the black young man who deliberately disrupted a Trump rally because he hates Trump voters. The very old man is illustrated as this evil, bitter man who deserved a year probation and $1,000 fine.

 (At the Trump rally which Jones, the black kid, planned to disrupt) McGraw sat in the front row, and Jones found an open seat in the back. The last time they saw each other, McGraw was elbowing Jones in the face at a Donald Trump rally, one of the first moments of violence in what would become a historically contentious presidential campaign.

So, the elderly man elbowed Jones. I went to the comments section which are nearly uniformly Democrats since everyone else has been banned in the last year there, including me. The Democrats nearly uniformly state over and over again that the elderly man struck or beat up the young black man. 

Instead, he was elbowed and fell which is quite different from being say, punched in the face. By making this event more violent in their chatter, illustrates how the Hillary voters have made themselves very unpleasant to deal with, very violent and yet touchy, whiners.

After Jones was pulled up from the ground by county sheriffs and escorted out of the coliseum and the rally was over, McGraw went even further. “We don’t know if he’s ISIS. We don’t know who he is,” he said. “The next time we see him, we might have to kill him.”

People are nervous. Any day, we expect assassins to attack. Many, many Democrats threatened to kill Trump one way or another. Rich people and famous people threatened Trump this way. It was amazing to watch. 

The rich and famous have stopped threatening Trump only because they know very well, they can be arrested and should be arrested. But they are 100% responsible for the fear and freaking out because they pushed hard to do the violent solution to this election.

Five days before the hearing, Jones was cradling a phone against his ear and typing another pizza order into a computer. “Rakeem!” his manager yelled as two pizzas were slid into a carry case and placed beside him at the front counter. “You’re out!”

Working the counter, he makes $7.35 an hour. On deliveries, it goes down to $4.25 an hour, but there’s always the chance for a big tip, and he hustled the pizzas to a faded Mitsubishi sedan with a cracked windshield. He’d bought it earlier in 2016 for $1,600 — most of his savings — when McGraw’s attack at the Trump rally left him feeling unsafe riding the city bus.

A minority male who is young and strong was scared of an elderly white man? What? I see a guy making up stuff for the naive reporter justifying stuff.

What if McGraw was serious about killing him? Considering the way the election had gone, what if a white-supremacist group decided to try something?

This is now ridiculous. Across the US, the rampaging mobs, the 13% of the population doing 50% of the murders and nearly the same level of all crimes are black people especially young black males. 

When people walk down the street they don’t cross to the other side if they see three elderly white men walking, they certainly get scared if they see three black young males and for good reason.

Where he comes from, a rough neighborhood in northwest Fayetteville, threats are sometimes carried out. A few of his friends were murdered when he was younger, and two years before, someone shot up his aunt’s trailer, killing his 3-year-old cousin sleeping inside.

Note how the Washington Post liar doesn’t mention that these are murders done by young black males. The threats that are carried out are black gangs. His murdered friends were probably drug dealers on the streets.

So in the days after the rally, he quit his job after the company’s name was published, stopped taking the bus, bought a car and found a new job in a different part of town delivering pizzas.

He was worried about getting in trouble.

There was a time when he thought differently, not just about Fayetteville but about America as well. He knew there were racists in his country and community, but he also trusted that its people were tolerant of diversity and wouldn’t vilify someone who went to a Trump rally and yelled out some words of protest. But since that night, he has thought about race constantly.

These lies are typical: the young black male went to the Trump rally WITHOUT FEAR because he planned to make himself very loud, very obnoxious and expected to GET AWAY WITH IT. The shock for him was to have an elderly man trip him up.

I see a bad end to all this. Jones was told by fellow black young buck males that he was cheated and they all want worse things to happen. 8 years of Obama has gotten them all into this frame of mind that the Republican Senate, Republican House and Republican President and soon, the Republican Supreme Court will cuddle them and let them run riot and allow them to do as they all please.

These days are now over. I want civility and self control and respecting people’s property and lower crime rates. And Obama brought disorder, riots and rising murder rates in cities which have large black populations. This dire situation is sad to see. And the pendulum of history is now swinging to the opposite side.