On January 26, 2016, I showed up at the gym at the University of Iowa to get a first-hand look at the Republican presidential front runner, Donald J. Trump. Little did I know at the time that the man standing directly in front of me at the rally was carrying a deadly concealed weapon. And he was about to use it.
There was something odd about the whole event. Watching Trump on stage was like watching a Las Vegas stand-up comedian, telling really bad jokes while implying he could have you beaten up. “Where’s my football team?” he demanded, calling members of the university’s team to join him on stage. “Look at the size of these guys!” he said. “They’re monsters!” He added, “They endorsed Trump.” “My football team”? What was he saying? Had the billionaire candidate actually bought Iowa’s football team?
Trump rambled on about the “fake news media” and criminal Mexicans pouring across our southern border. A protester in the audience shouted, “Fascists out of Iowa!” Trump responded, “You wanna let the football team take care of it?” The implication seemed to be that if he just said the word, Iowa’s offensive linemen would flatten the guy. Trump resumed speaking and somebody interrupted him with a whistle. “Get the hell out of here!” Trump shouted as if calling for backup. “Get him the hell out!” Trump’s security swiftly whisked the anti-fascist out of the room.
Then, to my horror, the guy one foot in front of me, pulled out a tomato and tossed it at the stage! And there I was, with my press pass around my neck, a member of the “fake news media”, an “enemy of the people”, about to get tackled by Trump’s “monsters”. Fortunately, the would-be assassin’s aim was poor and I was not implicated. But Trump has remained ever on his guard against deadly flying tomatoes.
On October 16, 2016, at a rally in Cedar Rapids, Trump incited members of his audience, “…if you see someone getting ready to throw a tomato, just knock the crap out of them, would you?”
Trump’s Cedar Rapids threat was cited in recently released transcripts of an October 2021 deposition in a civil suit alleging that the Trump security team beat up protesters outside Trump Tower in 2015. The former president testified that the use of force was necessary because his team was on high alert “To stop somebody from throwing pineapples, tomatoes, bananas, stuff like that.”
Admittedly, getting hit by a flying pineapple would be no joke, although I don’t know how you could smuggle one pineapple past security, let alone more than one. Trump argued, “They were going to throw fruit. And you get hit with fruit, it’s—no, it’s very violent stuff.” He added, “You can get killed with those things.”
Maybe, as a lifelong junk food addict, Trump’s pathological fear of produce is that, to him, anything nutritious is a kind of anti-matter. I mean, what if a protester threw kale at Trump and some of it got in his mouth?