It’s going to be a long road to November 2020. Heading into the next presidential election, incumbent and candidate Donald Trump is continuing to run on the hate fumes that propelled his campaign to the top in the 2016 presidential election. That hate turned into a 29-year-old supporter of his named Dallas Frazier confronting some anti-Trump demonstrators assembled outside his Ohio rally this week with numerous punches to the face. Frazier was taken into custody on the scene, and he has since been charged with assault. The victim, meanwhile — 61-year-old Mike Alter — got checked out at the hospital, according to a reporter who was on the scene.
Frazier apparently lives about an hour away in another state, and considering his obvious wah wah I’m a tough guy attachment to the persona of Donald Trump, he might have come all that way just for the rally. Birds of a feather flock together as they say… The driver of the vehicle that Frazier arrived on the scene in was reportedly also handcuffed, although it’s unclear what if any charges he’s actually facing. Alter told local media:
‘These guys pulled up in the pickup truck, everyone was yelling back and forth at them… What the hell? He just started whaling on my head.’
Check out a video of the incident. A cop comes in to arrest Frazier right away:
@CincyPD confirms one arrest made tonight. Dallas Frazier is charged with assault after punching a protester. I spoke with the man assaulted. He’s getting checked out at the hospital.
Police have *not* confirmed Dallas is a Trump supporter. Several witnesses told me he is. @WLWT pic.twitter.com/Z2todkEdIu
— Jatara McGee WLWT (@jatara_) August 2, 2019
Fittingly enough, as Frazier was taken away, those on the scene started shouting:
‘Lock him up!’
It’s an edited version of the chant that’s rung out at Trump rallies too many times to count targeting Hillary Clinton with
‘Lock her up!’
Trump has consistently directly confronted protesters with the rhetoric that he’s spewed at his rallies, sometimes urging his supporters to physically take them on. On one infamous occasion in the lead-up to the 2016 election, he claimed that he’d pay the legal bills of any supporters who faced legal repercussions for assaulting a protester. On numerous other occasions — like the incident also surrounding 2016 when a white assailant told media after assaulting a black protester that if he came back, they “might have to kill him” — the president’s supporters have turned his implicit and explicit drives towards physical violence into reality.
Protesters also emerged inside the arena Trump was speaking at in Cincinnati this Thursday, which the president responded to by saying those assembled “must have a Democrat mayor” and urging law enforcement to “come on.” In other words, he was again turning protests into evidence of some kind of metaphysical struggle between good and evil or whatever, riling up his supporters in the process.
The list of these kinds of incidents associated with his 2020 presidential bid is only growing, even though it’s so early there’s not even a presumed Democratic presidential nominee yet. At a rally he held in Orlando as a sort of formal public kick-off, a supporter was taken into custody after physically harassing what turned out to be a journalist who was filming the scene. On other occasions, other supporters of the president have tried to harass reporters on the scene for the rallies, leading the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) to express “concern about the safety of journalists covering Trump rallies, where they have been the target of derision and abuse from the president and his supporters,” in the description of the Guardian.
Featured Image via screenshot
