by Jim Acosta
As we all later learned in March 2019, Special Counsel Robert Mueller finally wrapped up his investigation, informing Attorney General William Barr that he had concluded that the Trump campaign did not engage in collusion with the Russian government during the 2016 election. Further, Mueller said he could not prove that the president had obstructed justice. Despite Trump’s comment to NBC that he had fired FBI director James Comey over the Russia investigation, not to mention his pleas to Comey to drop the Flynn case as well as the false statements to the public about Don Jr.’s Trump Tower meeting, Mueller left the question of obstruction to Barr and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who elected not to take the matter any further. Then, in what seemed like a signal to the public that he had uncovered some wrongdoing on the part of the Trump team, Mueller made it clear in his report to the attorney general that his findings did not “exonerate” the president. That was mind-blowing. The president had not been accused of a crime. Yet he wasn’t “exonerated” either. A source on the Trump legal team told me the Mueller report was “better than we could have expected.” Their legal strategy, the source told me, of cooperation by providing reams of documents to the special counsel, while blocking Mueller from actually interviewing the president (he only offered written answers to questions), was a big, fat success. Rudy was suddenly a genius?
The White House celebrated by going on the attack, accusing Democrats and some members of the media of attempting to overthrow the government. For good measure, Trump once again called the press “the enemy of the people.”
“You guys are dead now,” a Trump surrogate told me, referring to the mainstream media.
Still, the end of the Mueller investigation hardly put the Russia story to rest. As there had been from the beginning of that saga, legitimate questions were still on the table. Most confounding of all is this: If there was no collusion and no conspiracy, why the hell was Trump doing all this? Why did Trump capitulate to Putin if the Russians never had the goods on him in the first place? Will we ever know?
But let’s be real, shall we? We don’t need a Mueller report to tell us what was staring us in the face in Helsinki. Looking back on that day, I will always see a humbling moment for America.
Don’t you?
11
The Rallies
The disastrous performance in Helsinki set an ominous tone as the country turned toward the coming midterms.
Ever since Trump’s election, we all knew these midterms were going to be an angry, messy affair. There was too much at stake for both Trump and the Democrats to have it any other way. Even so, I was taken aback by just how nasty it got. As a veteran of 2016, I thought I’d seen it all; in reality, 2016 was downright civil in comparison to what I would encounter on the campaign trail in 2018. Much as Trump’s attacks on the media had become more heated and vitriolic since the 2016 campaign, that anger and language had also filtered down to his supporters. As we were all about to find out, Trump’s irresponsible threats and insults directed at the media would have disturbing real-world consequences.
My assessment of the president during the summer of 2018 was that he was like a compulsive gambler at one of his own casinos, a man who just couldn’t pull himself away from the poker table, despite one losing hand after another. But the events that unfolded on Trump’s watch during the second half of 2018 had other plans. These events had a way of both magnifying the damage he was doing to the country and, at the same time, making life more difficult for him as his party tried to maintain control of Congress.
Nothing quite encapsulated the state of Trumpworld in mid-2018 like the campaign rallies for the midterms. These began in earnest during the summer and kicked into high gear in the fall. In the year and half since Trump’s election, the one constant to his presidency had been his rallies. Most presidents leave their campaign rallies in the rearview mirror after they win an election. At times during his presidency, it seemed that Trump had never left the arena. While he could be grumpy and downright angry around the White House, he came alive at his rallies, which seemed to give him the love he couldn’t find back in Washington. He drew his energy from the base of supporters who attended these campaign carnivals. Aides will tell you that the rallies are Trump’s happy place, with thousands of screaming supporters chanting “Build the wall” and songs of the Rolling Stones blaring in the background—despite a cease-and-desist order from the legendary band.
Of the thousands of people who attend Trump’s rallies, I’ve always found the vast majority to be good, law-abiding, though definitely very conservative Americans. These are the same working-class and middle-class Americans I have come across countless times as a journalist over two decades of covering everything from natural disasters to elections. As a product of a blue-collar upbringing myself, I’ve long felt I have a good handle on the people who show up at a Trump rally. My parents divorced when I was five years old, and my mom, who worked in the restaurant business starting at the age of twenty-two, raised my sister and me mostly by herself. (My dad stayed in the picture and helped raise us on the weekends, when he wasn’t working at the supermarket.) Watching my mom taught me a lesson in self-reliance that I carry with me to this day. I talk about my father all the time, but in truth, much of my strength comes from my mother.
All this is to say I get blue-collar folks more than they know. Indeed, I am more like them than the man they come to the rallies to see, a self-described though not entirely self-made businessman.
Looking back at what occurred during the 2016 campaign, I find it incredible that nobody got seriously hurt. Part of the allure for some folks who attended Trump’s 2016 speeches was the real prospect of actual violence. I witnessed fights break out at these events. Trump supporters sucker punched a protester. And the candidate saw no harm in fanning the flames. He was having too much fun making the protesters a part of the act, calling out to his private security to remove them from his events.
“Get ’em out!” Trump would growl into the microphone. And the crowd would go wild.
At one 2016 rally in Las Vegas, I watched in horror as Trump all but incited a melee in the crowd. When a protester appeared, Trump yelled out to security to “get ’em out,” and then remarked that he wished he could take matters into his own hands.
“I’d like to punch him in the face,” he said. “In the old days [protesters would be] carried out on stretchers,” he continued, as the audience cheered. “We’re not allowed to push back anymore,” he added, in a nod to his supporters’ grievances.
Punch him in the face? Protesters carried out on stretchers?
The next day, I checked with the hotel security office. Nobody there had witnessed the protester in question acting violently. Trump had made this up, a security officer told me over the phone, to play to the crowd. Reporters covering the campaign would ask one another, “Who talks like this?” We didn’t know what was happening. Surely these antics would end his campaign, we would tell ourselves. But Trump and his team had discovered that these were the moments that dominated the headlines and drove the news coverage. Shortly after the Las Vegas incident, Trump won the Nevada caucuses, and he lit up the Twitterverse by telling those assembled at his victory party in Las Vegas something I will never forget.
“I love the poorly educated,” he said. Yes, he said that.
A week later, there was more violence, at a rally on the campus of Radford University, in Virginia. It all started when protesters in the crowd began interrupting Trump.
“Are you from Mexico?” Trump asked one of them.
Off to his right, roughly two dozen Black Lives Matter activists were making their voices heard. Trump called for security to escort them out of the building.
“All lives matter,” Trump responded, baiting the activists.
As the protesters were being led out of the arena, a few Trump supporters gave them a hard time, which led to another altercation near our press pen, or, as we called it, “the press cage.” Journalists being jour
nalists, we all wanted to get a better look. At that moment, Time magazine photographer Chris Morris tried to leave the press pen to snap a few pictures and was immediately confronted by a U.S. Secret Service agent who told him to stay put. Morris, a veteran news photographer, was not going to take no for an answer and attempted to push past the agent, who then snapped. After the rally, I ran after Morris to ask what had happened.
“I stepped eighteen inches out of the pen, and he grabbed me by the neck and started choking me, and then he slammed me to the ground,” Morris told me.
The Secret Service investigated the incident, but Morris, ever the professional, said he was not interested in pressing charges. Still, within minutes, video of the violent scene was playing on social media all over the world. I saw firsthand episode after episode of violence at Trump rallies. Emotions were running so high that even a professionally trained Secret Service agent could succumb to the violent energy coursing through these events. I was beginning to worry that, before long, the unthinkable would happen at a modern-day political event. I feared there would be a riot at a Trump rally.
On March 11, 2016, that’s what happened. Trump’s advance team made plans for a rally to take place on the campus of the University of Illinois at Chicago, home to one of the most diverse student bodies in the country. Student groups and civil rights organizations made their plans as well: to peacefully protest what had become a divisive campaign. This rally was not going to go well.
Inside the venue, I remember scanning the crowd and thinking there were not very many MAGA hats on hand. Instead, there were hundreds of people who were very clearly going to protest Trump. This time, I didn’t see three or four possible demonstrators; I saw whole sections of the arena filled with people who had come to make some noise. Before long there was pushing and shoving on the floor of the arena. Then one of Trump’s aides came up onstage and approached the microphone.
“Tonight’s rally will be postponed,” he told the crowd.
The audience cheered because they had shut down the event.
I can’t tell you who threw the first punch, but within seconds after the rally was scrapped, a large fistfight involving roughly twenty Trump supporters and protesters broke out in an area behind the press cage. Americans were taking swings at their fellow Americans. Up in the stands, there was more brawling. In front of the cage, another fight broke out. This is Trump’s America, I thought. People are at each other’s throats.
Worst of all, there were not enough police inside the arena to break it up. About a half hour later, roughly a hundred of Chicago’s finest descended the steps from all sides to round up the fighters and lead them outside. This stopped the violence inside the venue. Outside the arena, there was more trouble. Trump protesters and supporters, separated by police officers in riot gear, were screaming at each other. And the cops, some riding horseback, were starting to crack down.
One of the reporters embedded with the campaign, Sopan Deb of CBS News, was arrested. Police charged Sopan, who was bloodied in the incident, with resisting arrest. Fortunately, the episode was caught on camera, and it was clear he had not resisted arrest; he was merely doing his job. The charge was later dropped. I feared what could potentially happen to the other young campaign reporters: Ali Vitali of NBC, Jeremy Diamond of CNN, and Jill Colvin of the Associated Press.
The clashes that night felt like a bad omen. Trump would go on CNN later that night to defend himself, telling CNN’s Don Lemon that the tone set at his rallies was not responsible for the violence in Chicago.
“My basic tone is that of securing our borders, of having a country,” he said, adding that his events were about “love.” Did you get that? The candidate who wanted to punch protesters in the face and once bragged that he could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and get away with it was all about “love.”
Trump accused the media of exaggerating what had happened in Chicago. But some of Trump’s rivals issued statements blaming him. “Tonight the seeds of division that Donald Trump has been sowing this whole campaign finally bore fruit, and it was ugly,” said then–Ohio governor John Kasich. “Any candidate is responsible for the culture of a campaign,” added Texas senator Ted Cruz, who also blamed the protesters. In the months that followed, Trump’s aides were unapologetic about the campaign Trump ran.
“I don’t have any problem sleeping at night. I just look at my bank account and go right to sleep,” his former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski once told me.
As the rallies continued to be volatile, the reporters covering the Trump campaign began to take precautions. As has been reported, our teams were assigned security guards to make sure we made it to our cars after the rallies were over. There were times when these body men were a bit too intrusive; sometimes they would try to follow us to the bathroom. But having that extra layer of protection was essential. Our camera crews were also targets for the hostility of Trump supporters, who would spot the CNN logos on our equipment and begin hurling insults. At a rally in Orlando held toward the end of the campaign, a dozen or so Trump supporters began to heckle me during my live shot. A couple of these rally-goers became irate, screaming obscenities at me. One lady smacked me with her Trump campaign sign. Another man said he wanted to kick my ass out in the parking lot. He was practically foaming at the mouth with rage, spittle flying from his lips. So, yes, I was grateful to have my security detail at that event.
But the most chilling moment came at a rally in West Palm Beach, Florida. At the end of Trump’s remarks, I remember seeing a sign lying on one of the press tables. When I picked it up, I couldn’t believe my eyes. The sign had a Nazi swastika on it next to the word media. I held up that sign during one of my live shots that night to show the world what had become of Trump’s rallies. The hatred he had spewed at the media for months was spreading like a virus. My thought was this: if we really had become something akin to the Nazis in the eyes of Trump’s most rabid supporters, what was stopping them from hurting one of us?
* * *
WHEN IT CAME TO TRUMP’S ACT AT THE 2018 RALLIES, NOT MUCH had changed in two years. The rallies felt like old times in a sense. Trump would get up, give a speech, and encourage the usual chants of “Build the wall” and “Lock her up.” He still reveled in the way he could push people’s buttons on issues ranging from trade to immigration. The rhetoric itself was largely unchanged. Similarly, the crowd was often its same rowdy self: yelling, aggrieved, and mad as hell. On the surface, the whole production seemed much like 2016, but appearances told only half the story.
For many of the journalists who lived them, the rallies of 2018 were far worse. After all, they followed months and months of repeated broadsides against the media from Trump and the White House, attacks in which journalists had been portrayed as some of the vilest, most dishonorable people alive. Trump’s supporters had spent the better part of three years (the last two from the White House) hearing what disgusting people we were. In that time, the verbal assaults had taken their toll, making some of us objects of vitriol on the right. Yet, for all that time, the only outlet Trump’s most rabid followers had had for this anger had been to post threatening or malicious messages on social media. Now they were standing mere feet away from us, and not surprisingly, they had no problem letting us know how they felt.
The sheer hostility from 2016 was still palpable at these midterm events, but there was something else troubling, a menace hanging over the arenas that made confrontation feel less like a possibility and more like a foregone conclusion. The tone had always been unfriendly and unwelcoming, but in 2018, we reporters became increasingly mindful of the fact that anything could happen at any moment.
One huge difference, for me, between Trump’s rallies during the 2016 campaign and the speeches he gave to supporters as president was that I had become a major target of the hostility. Sure, Trump supporters gave me a hard time during the 2016 campaign, but from the day Trump called me “fake news” at that Trump Tower press conference before his i
nauguration, everything changed. Ever since then, the acts of harassment and intimidation, including death threats, from his supporters had never really let up. Even today, they are as much a constant presence in my life as Trump’s tweets.
“If Trump is removed from office in any way, you are dead,” read one comment posted on my Instagram account.
“I would love to be looking into your eyes as I choke the last fucking breath out of you,” read another message, posted on my public Facebook account.
And now, as we hit the 2018 campaign trail, much of this attention began to exist in person as well as online. Because of my battles with Trump, Spicer, Sanders, and Miller, and the resulting coverage on Fox News, which often painted me as some sort of journalistic villain, the crowds at these rallies paid a lot more attention to me. Eagle-eyed Trump supporters would spot me within minutes of my arrival at an arena or convention center as we file in during the hours before the president takes the stage. Sometimes we would hear the taunts as we waited in line to go through security to enter the venues.
“Hey, it’s fake news,” MAGA hat–wearing Trump supporters would yell. “CNN sucks,” some would chant as we made our way into the event, a taste of the abuse to come.
To these Trump loyalists, I was somewhere between the bad guy at a pro wrestling event and an actual enemy of the people. How I was treated varied from one Trump supporter to another. Some came up to me and asked for selfies and autographs. Others would approach and stare without saying a word. Then there were those MAGA folks, ranging from a dozen to more than a hundred at a rally, who were much more hostile, hurling insults, giving me the middle finger, and sometimes implying or flat-out saying that bad things were going to happen to me.