Anti-Trump Protesters Attack Democracy in San Jose

Conor Friedersdorf

In San Jose on Thursday, a volatile crowd outside a Donald Trump rally assaulted numerous attendees. They punched a man in the face, knocking him to the ground; bloodied another man by bludgeoning the side of his head with a duffel bag; trapped a woman against a glass door, pelting her with an egg and other objects; snatched a cap off a man’s head, lighting it afire on the street soon afterward; and perpetrated other hateful acts against total strangers, with many fellow protesters cheering them on and a brave few fervently pleading for nonviolence.

The bad actors in San Jose should be arrested, prosecuted, jailed, and broadly condemned. In addition to attacking fellow human beings, they did violence to the shared right to assemble. They assaulted the American inheritance of a politics that is decided peaceably at the ballot box by the people, not in the streets through force or intimidation.

By using the preferred approach of the Donald Trump supporter who infamously sucker punched a peaceful protester, another execrable actor who ought to serve jail time for his inexcusable thuggery, San Jose’s violent anti-Trump protesters offered a reminder that beyond left and right, conservative and liberal, pro-Trump and anti-Trump, there is a broad majority of Americans who intuitively understand the peril of abiding violence in politics—who understand that it would ultimately empower the most thuggish, ruthless, impulsive sociopaths—and that it is vital to stand together on that point, now and forever after, if on nothing else.

All that would be true regardless of the horse-race implications of Thursday’s violence. It is nevertheless worth noting the likely effects of the violence. The San Jose anti-Trump protesters, like the violent anti-Trump protesters in Costa Mesa before them, more likely helped than hurt the odds of Trump being elected president.

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/06/anti-trump-protesters-attacked-all-of-us-in-san-jose/485444/