Donald Trump's Las Vegas rally sounds like an insane, terrifying, Hitler-y evening
As has often occurred in the past few months, protestors interrupted a Donald Trump campaign speech last night as thousands of raucous supporters looked on.
And, as has also often occurred in the past few months, certain members in the crowd dealt with the protestors through name-calling, racism, profiling, violence, and invocations of Hitler.
Donald Trump’s event at the Westgate Las Vegas Casino and Resort on Monday evening descended into a familiar kind of animalistic chaos, according to dueling reports from BuzzFeed and NBC News writers who were in attendance.
After protestors interrupted Trump’s speech with shouts of “Black Lives Matter” and “Muslims Matter,” security swooped in, but not before Trump supporters yelled at them and reportedly threatened them with violence and death. Among the phrases shouted at protestors: “Kick his ass,” “Shoot him,” and “Sieg Heil.”
Yahoo Politics additionally reported that, for good measure, several in the crowd celebrated the ejection of protestors by shouting, in unison, “Hail Trump.”
BuzzFeed’s McKay Coppins captured video of security swarming one of the protestors, including a clip where you can clearly hear someone yelling at the prone, surrounded man, “Light the motherfucker on fire!”
ThinkProgress interviewed one of the protestors, a labor organizer and civil rights activist named José Macías, who explained that he interrupted Trump over several of his incendiary comments about Mexican immigrants.
“My family is Mexican and I hear him saying we’re rapists and that we come here to steal and we don’t work,” Macías told ThinkProgress. “That’s really offensive. My family are hardworking people who want to give back to this country. I wanted to be here and speak out because a lot of people don’t have a voice, or they are scared to do it.”
Yahoo spoke with another of the protestors, a black Pentecostal minister and Black Lives Matter supporter named Ender Austin III. Austin was the apparent target of a call to “Light the motherfucker on fire” as casino security forcibly removed him from the building. The taunt, he said, recalled the racist rhetoric toward blacks in the 1800s. But Austin wasn’t just reminded of the slave-owning South:
“I heard ‘Hail Trump!’ several times as though it were a Nazi youth or Hitler Youth group meeting or something of that nature,” Austin told Yahoo. “I heard a lot of rhetoric that definitely put me in the mind of Nazi Germany, not 2015 America.”
Austin was handcuffed and detained by police outside the casino but was not arrested. “What disturbed me mainly was that they met someone who was definitely loud and hopefully disruptive, that was absolutely my intent, with a lot of force, physically assaulting me,” Austin told Yahoo. “No one ever came and said, ‘Hey, you need to be quiet or leave or anything like that. I was met immediately with force.”
This isn’t the first time that a Trump rally has devolved into this specific kind of madness after a protest. Most notably, Black Lives Matter protestor Mercutio Southall was roughed up, kicked, punched, and called a monkey and the N-word after interrupting a Trump speech in Alabama last month. Southall told The Daily Beast that he is prepared to sue the Trump campaign for doing little to stop the violence, and for failing to condemn the participants.
“[P]articularly given the history of incidents such as this at other places,” Southall lawyer’s said to the Beast, “I would say that Trump has a moral and very possibly a legal responsibility to do what he can to ensure people’s safety.”
Count José Macías among those unsurprised that little was done to protect him.
“Sadly, this is what we see in nearly every Donald Trump rally,” Macías told ThinkProgress.