March 12, 2016

My Dad Was at the Trump Rally in Chicago. Here’s What He Saw.

James Patterson

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A Donald Trump rally in Chicago turned violent Friday evening just hours after a man was bloodied at an earlier rally in St. Louis. Several fights broke out at the rally at the University of Illinois at Chicago Pavilion before a Trump staffer, citing safety concerns, announced the event had been postponed about 30 minutes after the scheduled 6 p.m. start time.

Trump had this to say about violence at the canceled rally in an interview with MSNBC’S Chris Matthews:

My dad, James Patterson, was at the rally. Here’s what he told me about what he witnessed.

Thousands of people showed up to the rally. About a third of the attendees or more were anti-Trump demonstrators, he said, but that only became clear once he had passed through metal detectors and security pat downs and made it inside.

I think most people were very strategic in not having their signs out—people weren’t protesting in the line. I didn’t know who was a Trump supporter and who wasn’t until I got in. And then, it almost seemed just by luck, a lot of the students were organized on the same side of the building that I was on. There were a lot of Latino students. There were a lot of Muslim students. There were a lot of black students there. There was some demonstrating going on prior to the time Trump was scheduled to come out. The Trump supporters started to shout “Trump!” And the counter protesters were creating their own counter protests. “Dump Trump!” “Stop Trump!” “F**k Trump!” And to some extent they drowned out the Trump supporters. But It was on both sides where people got out of hand and tried to get in people’s faces. There were little skirmishes. I probably saw two or three skirmishes that were clearly altercations between Trump supporters and anti-Trump supporters.

He also says it was clear that a lot of the anti-Trump demonstrators were Bernie Sanders supporters.

It was a lot of UIC people there clearly. And a lot of them were Bernie supporters. Especially after it was announced that the rally was canceled, cheers just broke out and people were excited. And in addition to saying, “We stopped Trump!” people were saying “Bernie! Bernie! Bernie!” And they started pulling out their Bernie signs and some of them were wearing Bernie badges. So it was very clear to me that there were a lot of Bernie supporters in the crowd. To some extent it was almost like a mini Bernie rally at points. It was clearly a Bernie crowd.

My dad said that as far as he could tell, Sanders supporters and Trump supporters were the only clearly delineated groups at the rally. He had seen posts on Facebook about counter demonstrations but says he made the decision to protest as soon he heard Trump would be in town. “You can’t have this man come to your city and let his hate go unanswered,” he told me.

Hundreds if not thousands of other people apparently felt the same way.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

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And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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