Scenes from a Trump Rally
"[Trump] needs to drain the swamp of judges, too. I don't care what he does. I'm behind him 100 percent. Put it this way: If he became a dictator, and they said, 'We want him in forever,' he's my man. He's in. I'll never vote against him ... I love his power ... It's the power that does something to me."
There's a lot of ugliness in this report from the Florida Rally on Saturday, but this is just ... sadly typical.
Traffic was still backed up as people passed by the scrum of protesters and supporters and walked off through the flickering lights. The young Muslim girl in hijab was still there. She was from Orlando and had protested circa Occupy, and she conceded she wasn't prepared for the reception she'd gotten that afternoon, one that darkened as the day faded and made her want to withhold her name, for fear the night would stretch on forever online.
During the speech, she'd stood among the Trump supporters who watched on the big screen and listened through the loudspeaker. After, she'd moved together with the bloc of protesters who converged to greet the Trump supporters leaving the speech. Her head covering was noticeable, even in the crowd.
Later that night, she texted me a video of people walking in parallel to her, yelling, just a few blocks away outside Keiser University. She said they'd followed her from the rally, and their clothes and conversation suggest as much. The people looked familiar, in the same way that a composite does, in that way that all white people yelling racist things have a sneer that verges on archetype.
"Leave," a woman shouted on the video, flipping her off. "You don't like America, get the fuck out ... You are a disgrace to America," the man walking next to her said.
They mocked her camera. "You can jack off to that later, the man drawled. "I've got a big ol' white American redneck dick."
The woman in the hijab told him where to stick it.
"I can put it up your little tight ass," he countered, "and I won't be hittin' that clit, 'cause it already got removed."
All the allegedly "good" Trump voters seem to be fine with this sort of thing. They never say a word about it.
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