Inside Look: The Trump Rally Riot In Chicago

Like many others, I watched last week’s events at the Donald Trump rally in San Jose, California. Many conservatives expressed shock and horror at the violent images coming out of the Bay Area. Bulging crowds of young men waving Mexican flags and burning American flags. A blonde woman being cornered against a wall and then pelted with eggs and debris. Bystanders being sucker punched and smacked with bags of rocks from behind. And all throughout, the San Jose Police Department officers standing by in plain sight, totally inert.

I was not shocked.

Months earlier, back in early March, Donald Trump announced that he was holding a rally in Chicago, Illinois. I heard about the event from friends minutes after it was announced. I quickly reserved tickets. At that point, more than five thousand people had already RSVPed a protest event on Facebook at the rally. The number of protesters surprised me, and I noted the potential for conflict.

The rally was scheduled to be held on a late Friday afternoon at the University of Illinois at Chicago Pavilion. There was no entrance fee. Chicago, and especially UIC, were provocative choices of venue. Chicago is a heavily Democratic and heavily non-white (around 70%) city. UIC’s student body was around 30-40% white in 2014. Around a third of the campus is Hispanic, primarily Mexican. A friend of mine with no illusions about race and religion who attended UIC told me in no uncertain terms that the student body was 15% Muslim. This shocked me at first, but he insisted. The campus is apparently a favorite for Chicago’s significant Muslim population.

If you take a look at the superb Racial Dot Map of the United States and zoom into Chicago, you’ll notice that UIC is located in a highly mixed neighborhood, and precariously close to black neighborhoods to the west and Hispanic neighborhoods to the north and south.

I kept all of these demographics in mind the day of the rally. I dressed myself in new running shoes, a black track suit and a black baseball cap without markings. I intended to look neutral and be agile. At that point, there had been no major mob violence at a Trump rally yet, but all the signs were pointing to a flare-up in Chicago. Better safe than sorry.

I arrived several hours before the rally began to scout out the area and grab a space near the front of the stage. Police were out in full force outside the entrance, horses, vans, armor and all. A long string of protesters waving identical signs with a mustachioed Fuhrer Trump on them were standing outside and shouting. I hung around them for a while. Most were black or Mexican, some of an indeterminate non-European flavor. I didn’t notice any East or Southeast Asians. The few whites were clearly people who had either just smoked marijuana or were planning to do so soon. A number of older, chubbier whites stood around yelling into megaphones or holding signs.

An obese man squeaked his way through the crowd and offered me a free copy of the Socialist Worker’s Party newspaper. I declined.

As I made my way to the entrance, I suddenly realized how long the line was. Hours before opening, I had to make my way to the opposite end of the block just to reach the end of it. News crews and police patrolled the crowd all the way to the front doors.

I entered the stadium and made my way to the front, where I was surrounded by Trump supporters, but quickly realized at least half of the stadium – the back especially – was composed of shouting and chanting protesters.

Both inside and out, the contrast between the Donald Trump supporters and protesters was stark. Chicago’s ethnic mash-up, racial segregation and political polarity were all in clear display at the Chicago Trump rally. The Trump supporters were nearly uniformly white. Red caps abounded. Almost all of them seemed to have driven to UIC from the suburbs of Chicago or the outskirts of Chicagoland, if not from farther afield. Elderly people and children signified the huge number of families attending together.

The protesters, on the other hand, were nearly uniformly non-white. Except for the smattering of rainbow-haired white Marxists and elderly professors, all were black or brown. Black Lives Matter was in full force, with their female leaders in black shirts and black lipstick leading chants. Skinny Mexicans with bandannas and hunch-backed leers made their way around the area in groups. I saw several groups of Muslim women wearing headscarves and even full burkas. I didn’t see any children with any of these diverse groups. Most, I assumed, were UIC students or their friends.

I stood at the very front of the stage, just meters from where Trump himself would have spoken, for hours. The atmosphere in the stadium was tense and uncomfortable. The five thousand RSVPed protesters were not merely virtue signalling. They had indeed showed up and were constantly making a scene in the hours before Trump was supposed to show up. Chants and shouts would break out from behind – primarily “Ber-nie!” – then get booed and counter-chanted from the Trump supporters in the front. Nobody seemed to be smiling.

Walking around, I noticed that every person I looked at was constantly trying to blankly lock eyes with me or other people. The polite, non-intrusive Midwestern culture seemed to be on pause. I realized they were all sizing each other up, trying to figure out what side someone was on. This was not a feeling I had experienced in America, let alone Illinois, before, but here it was.

You could practically see the thought processes in people’s eyes. Red hat. Check. My side. Looks brown, though. Could be a protester. Be suspicious. Hmm. Then someone else. Black. Muslim friend. Don’t stand near them. Don’t say anything. Just respect their rights. Keep both eyes open.

The crowd at the front was mainly made up of Trump supporters, but there was a palpable sense of weakness every time chants erupted from the back. The other side seemed to be more numerous, and suddenly the big stadium seems cramped and small. I heard two young men near me discussing the New World Order. One man in the middle of the crowd jumped up, pointed to the media pen in the center of the floor, and shouted: “Hey look! It’s the lying liberal media!”

The crowd immediately erupted into boos. There was still at least an hour to go before Trump came on.

Anxiety kept building. Protesters shouted, screamed and left the stadium, but more people seemed to be pouring in nonetheless. Trump was meant to go on at 6pm, but 6pm came and went and still no Trump. Around half an hour later, a surrogate went up to the podium and announced curtly that, due to security concerns, the rally was postponed indefinitely. I only learned this later though. At the time he said it, the mixed crowd erupted into a such a cacophony of loud cheers and boos I couldn’t make out what was being said.

Uncertainty gripped the crowd almost immediately. Trump supporters weren’t happy before, but now looked dejected and defeated. Shouting got louder in the back of the stadium. A black man stormed the stage and began shouting “Racist!” and “Fuck you!” at the Trump supporters at the front of the stage as they shouted expletives back. Two Secret Service agents grabbed him and pulled him away. The same man started a fight as he was led out through the general admission floor. It later turned out he was a Chicago city alderman. Go figure.

Some people were shuffling out, but the crowd at the front was confused and staying in place. A young white man ran up from the back and angrily tried to get the Trump supporters to, as he put it, “March on them outside!” Nobody budged. Ultimately, columns of dozens of Chicago police officers entered from all sides and began escorting the crowd out. Scuffles broke out as Trump supporters endured a gauntlet of hooting and taunting on the way out.

At this point, it was clear that every second person in the stadium was a protester or agitator. At other Trump rallies, there had been isolated protesters making a scene. In Chicago, the protesters might very well have been the majority. They did not treat the white, Trump-voting minority with tact and respect. They violently shut them down and loudly celebrated that fact with expletives and spittle.

The scene outside was even more chaotic. The agitators from inside linked up with the protesters outside and formed a continuous crowd interrupted only by police and Trump supporters who tried to get past them without having their hats or signs torn away. Mexicans stood on trash cans and short walls and shouted “We stopped Trump!” A giant Mexican flag was unfurled in the crowd. Then I saw a giant Soviet flag. I saw a gaggle of blacks try to attack some white teenagers, then scream and struggle with the police as they separated the two groups.

Since most of the Trump supporters had driven to the event, they filed towards the large parking garage adjacent to the Pavilion. Many made it inside, but couldn’t make it out. The victorious protesters crowded the entrance and blocked it with their bodies. Some ran inside and began vandalizing cars with Trump-themed bumper stickers on them. What looked like a Black Lives Matter contingent stood at the bottom of the garage and competed in a shouting match with some Trump supporters in the floors above. Expletives and debris flew up and down. Later I learned some protesters had run into the highway nearby and blocked traffic.

The police slowly and unenthusiastically herded people away from the stadium.

Absorbing the scene outside, I witnessed an incident that will stick with me to the grave. A tall, blonde white man in a pristine, all-white tuxedo was standing with a large sign that said “Catholics 4 Trump.” Perhaps he thought he’d engage in constructive dialogue and debate today. A five-foot-tall Mexican with a harsh accent and a face covered with a black bandanna leapt up to him. He gesticulated angrily at the sign and shouted centimeters from the tall man’s face: “Fuck you! You ain’t no Catholic!” He spat and moved on, cursing, and shouting. The man in the white tuxedo smiled sheepishly.

Trump never tried to hold another rally in Chicago, although he did win the Illinois Republican primary. To this day, it was the only one of many colorful Trump rallies that was canceled outright due to violence. Disorderly and thuggish crowds appeared at Trump rallies in Costa Mesa and San Jose in California, but they were limited to the outdoors.

The inside of the UIC Pavilion the day of the aborted Trump rally was a preview of America’s combative, low-trust, tense, multicultural future. Another article appeared on Social Matter detailing the writer’s uplifting and happy experience at a Trump rally in nearby Indiana. I have no doubt at all that the rally attendees were overwhelmingly white in Indiana. Indiana is not the planned future of America, though.

There is another plan being foisted on the United States, and it looks like the riot in Chicago.

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