Dave Wasserman on 2022 redistricting

Trump says he feared being pelted with 'very dangerous' fruit at rallies

Former president Donald Trump said he feared protesters would hit him with tomatoes, pineapples and other “very dangerous” fruit at his campaign rallies, declaring in a sworn deposition that “you can be killed if that happens.”

Trump’s comments about the potentially lethal effects of projectile produce were made public Tuesday with the release of excerpts of 4½ hours of videotaped testimony in a lawsuit filed by a group of protesters who allege that Trump’s security guards assaulted them in 2015.

“I wanted to have people be ready because we were put on alert that they were going to do fruit,” Trump said in the October 2021 deposition, according to a transcript of the proceedings. He added that “tomatoes are bad” and that “some fruit is a lot worse.”

“But it’s very dangerous. … I remember that specific event, because everybody was on alert. They were going to hit — they were going to hit hard,” he said.


https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/04/27/trump-says-he-feared-being-pelted-with-very-dangerous-fruit-rallies/

Madison Cawthorn's Problem Is That He Picked a Fight With a Koch Brother Mini-Me

The hits just keep on coming on Rep. Madison Cawthorn, the tree-punching MAGA troll from the newly insane state of North Carolina. Geez, it’s like a guy can't get pulled over (again) for a motor-vehicle violation or stopped (again) at an airport while carrying a gun without it ending up all over the newspapers and on TV. And mysteriously, every time it happens (again), the local news somehow gets ahold of the details of Cawthorn’s entire rap sheet.

And now, a questionable stock thing? And Senator Thom Tillis wants to bring the House Ethics Committee down on his ass? How’d that happen? Isn’t it enough that Cawthorn made those infamous remarks about cocaine-fueled sex orgies among his fellow Republicans? Can’t a brother get a break?

On the surface, as far as his politics go, Cawthorn isn’t any different from Lauren Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Greene, or any of the other Bedlamites in the Republican caucus in the House of Representatives. So why has he turned into Velcro for almost every kind of public scandal? The answer may lie in the fact that, unlike those two, Cawthorn has made some dangerous enemies back home, the kind who want the wingnut playground all to themselves, and who have the money to buy their way in.

To understand what’s happened to Cawthorn, you have to go back to last fall. Art Pope is North Carolina’s Koch Mini-Me, a wealthy conservative sugar daddy who is probably the person most responsible for the newly insane state of North Carolina becoming newly insane. He bankrolled the Republican takeover of the state legislature, as Jane Mayer detailed in the New Yorker in 2011:

Now House R's are getting involved in Musk trying to buy Twitter

The US Capitol is being evacuated. WTF

Wtf! Playwright David Mamet is a rw nut job?

Trump will be back on Twitter shortly, thanks to Elon Musk