The disruption forced Trump to pause his remarks

Feb 13th, 2019 | By
Category: Notes and Comment Blog
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NPR had more on the BBC camera guy assaulted by a Trumpist at Trump’s “rally” in El Paso. It raises some vexed questions.

The BBC’s Ron Skeans was working in the area of a raised camera platform at Trump’s campaign event when, he says, a “very hard shove” came out of nowhere. At the time, Trump was touting recent economic numbers to a roaring crowd in the El Paso County Coliseum.

Skeans’ colleagues say the apparent attack came after repeated verbal assaults on the media during the event. The BBC says it is “clearly unacceptable for any of our staff to be attacked for doing their job.”

NPR frames it very cautiously, as NPR always does, because hey it’s national pr so it has to talk to the Trumpists as well the people who don’t favor assaulting journalists. “Colleagues say”; they could be wrong. “The apparent attack”; maybe it was an accident, or maybe camera guy imagined it, or maybe he’s lying. “Came after”; could be just a coincidence. But caution or no caution, Trump is what he is and his fans react to them as they do. We see his insults and lies about people he wants to damage day in and day out on Twitter, and we know he’s not just talking for the sake of talking. He wants people to hate the people he hates, and he wants people to do harm to the people he hates, including, in my view, violent harm. He tries to pretend otherwise when he’s in a corner, but pretending is all it is. Trump is profoundly stupid, but he’s not so stupid that he thinks a constant barrage of insults and fear-mongering from a president cannot possibly inspire anyone to violence.

“I didn’t know what was going on,” Skeans said, according to the BBC, describing the moment when his camera suddenly skewed down and away from the stage. Video footage showed a Trump supporter yelling obscenities as he was restrained and taken away from the area.

The disruption forced Trump to pause his remarks. Shielding his eyes to see better, the president asked, “You all right? Everything OK?”

He then flashed a thumbs-up in Skeans’ direction.

His concern is touching.

Other BBC staff members who were at the event said the Trump supporter went after a group of news teams and that the cameraman had seemingly taken the worst of it.

The crowd had been whipped up into a frenzy against the media by Trump and other speakers all night

When you whip people into a frenzy for hours, there’s a real possibility that one or more of the people so whipped will become violent. Frenzies tend to reside next door to violence; that’s part of the meaning of the word. Frenzies are not a thing to mess with, especially with crowds.

Trump has repeatedly called the news media the enemy of the people and accused journalists of creating fake news in an effort to make him look bad.

On Tuesday afternoon, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said, “President Trump condemns all acts of violence against any individual or group of people — including members of the press. We ask that anyone attending an event do so in a peaceful and respectful manner.”

This is possibly the worst thing about Trump and the Trumpers, this utterly revolting cynical pretense that they’re not doing what we can see them doing every hour of every day. Trump systematically and with malice incites loathing of and rage at various individuals and groups, he oversees an administration that works hard to damage and injure those individuals and groups, and when called on it he and his people look at us with big round eyes and claim to condemn the very things they’re doing out in the open where we can see them. Of course Trump doesn’t condemn all acts of violence against any individual or group of people — including members of the press; he loves those acts of violence, he incites them, he encourages them, he laughs gleefully at them, he looks forward to seeing more of them.

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