Trump supporter tells Utah delegate: ‘You should die!’
CLEVELAND — Utah delegate Kera Birkeland went to the bathroom during the GOP convention proceedings Monday afternoon, as Donald Trump’s campaign sought to beat back a challenge on the floor.
When she opened the door of her bathroom stall, two women were standing in front of the door. She did not know them. Whether they knew who she was or just happened to see her tag identifying her as from Utah, she says that they immediately began to berate her.
Utah was one of 11 states supporting a motion on the floor to have a roll call vote of each state to approve or reject the convention’s rules package. These states trying to force the roll call vote wanted to send a few different messages. Some were anti-Trump. Some were angry about rules they felt diluted the influence of grassroots voters.
The two women standing in front of Birkeland were Trump supporters, however, and support for the roll call vote was generally interpreted by Trump supporters as anti-Trump.
Birkeland recounted her confrontation with the two women to Yahoo News on Tuesday morning. She said that initial reports that they had threatened to kill her were inaccurate. She did not want to exaggerate the incident.
And yet, according to her account, the women did use remarkably threatening language.
“You should die!” one of the women told Birkeland. Birkeland said she was looking down, trying to ignore the women, as she went to the sink to wash her hands, so she is not sure who said what. But they continued to yell at her the entire time she was in the bathroom.
One of them said the Utah delegation should lose any police protection they have. “You should all die!” the Trump supporter said.
Birkeland left the bathroom in tears but did not file a police report afterward. “Once the shock wore off, and I could think straight, I chalked it up to high tensions on the floor and wanted to move on. I was fine,” she said.
“I didn’t feel like they meant they were going to hurt me, just that they were upset,” Birkeland said. “It shook me and concerned me, not that they were going to hurt me but that there was that much anger and animosity.”
Birkeland said she and her husband have served as foster parents for several years. “We’ve taken in a lot of troubled youth,” she said. “I get that people upset and they go a little crazy. But even our most angry foster child never said, ‘You should die.’ ”
Another delegate, Amy Davis of Washington, said that while she was standing at a microphone waiting to be recognized by the chair to request a roll call vote, a young man with a Georgia name tag came and stood so close behind her that the backs of his hands were touching her rear.
“I turned around and said, ‘Excuse me, can you move back?’” Davis told Yahoo News. “He said, ‘I’m not touching you. And he stepped closer.”
The man continued to stand close behind her, and Davis said at one point he was blowing on the back of her neck. “It was not innocent touching. It was done to be bullying,” she said.
These incidents continue a growing pattern of threatening behavior and even violence among supporters and opponents of Trump. Trump supporters have pushed, shoved and punched protesters at rallies. And anti-Trump protesters outside rallies have attacked Trump supporters.
Trump himself has repeatedly seemed to condone or encourage physical violence. At one rally in St. Louis, he referred to the level of disruption that some protesters were causing at his rallies and said from the stage, “Part of the problem and part of the reason it takes so long is nobody wants to hurt each other anymore.”
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