When Matthew McDaniel showed up to President Donald Trump’s October 21 rally in Pendleton, South Carolina, wearing a blue Foxtrot Delta Tango T-shirt—military code for “Fuck Donald Trump”—he knew there was a chance things might turn ugly. He had seen the viral video of 29-year-old Blake Miley getting punched in the face at Trump’s event in Youngstown, Ohio, only nine days prior, and heard reports of MAGA supporters getting physical with protesters in other parts of the country. “I was a little nervous about it,” he later told me.
But the 47-year-old Navy veteran insists he didn’t attend the rally intending to make a scene. “I was just gonna go check it out and just see what they said, and I hadn’t really made up my mind if I was gonna say anything or not,” he said. Then, as the president began to talk about “criminal aliens,” about 30 minutes into his speech, something in McDaniel snapped. “I got up, I got out of my chair, I said, ‘You’re the criminal!’” he said. “After that, I couldn’t really say anything. I was being choked.”
Videos from the rally show a man pulling McDaniel into a headlock and taking him to the ground, where he was held down as other attendees punched and kicked him. “It’s hard to swallow, and I got some bruises here and there, and the side of my head’s pretty bruised up. They got me pretty decent,” he said. As law enforcement pulled McDaniel to his feet and escorted him out of the venue, Trump praised the attack from the stage. “Wow man, I loved that,” the president said. “Who’s the guy that threw the punch? You know, you remind me of Evander ‘the Real Deal’ Holyfield. The guy stood up, and he just let that little—and he got whacked.” Alone outside, McDaniel got into his car and drove himself to the emergency room, where he spoke with police and filed an assault and battery report.
McDaniel lives in Pickens County, South Carolina—widely regarded as the reddest county in the state—and had considered himself a conservative for most of his life. That changed after his time in the military. “My thing is, defend the Constitution,” he said. “That’s what my focus is. And if I go out to events, I’m bringing my flag and saying, ‘Defend the Constitution.’ We’re supporting everybody’s rights. I took an oath to defend that. That’s what’s important to me.” McDaniel now considers himself an “independent who happens to support Democrats, based on the fact that I think it’s a numbers game, and they have got to reestablish power. That’s got to happen. It’s the only way I feel like our democracy is gonna move forward.”
In the lead-up to the midterm elections, now less than a week away, President Trump has been barnstorming the country and urging his supporters to “pretend I’m on the ballot.” But his speeches have focused less on energizing voters to back the beleaguered Republicans than on his discursive thoughts about crowd sizes, Muslims, and butt stuff. Opponents of the historically unpopular president, however, have taken him at his word: His rallies have drawn a steady stream of protesters, even in some of the reddest places in America.
On October 7 in San Antonio, Texas, Trump’s speech was interrupted nearly a dozen times by protesters shouting from the stands. It happened again in Clarksville, Tennessee, on October 10, and Youngstown, Ohio, on October 12. Eleven people were escorted out of the October 19 rally in Park City, Kansas. Five more were removed on October 20 in Greenville, North Carolina, followed by at least another 12, including McDaniel, in Pendleton on October 21. On Monday night in Corinth, Mississippi, a rally attendee took advantage of a break in Trump’s speech to scream, “Shove that ballroom up your fat ass!”
“They say courage is contagious,” McDaniels told me. “As more people are having the courage to speak up and say something, more people are gonna have to start speaking up and saying something.”
Trump, who once fantasized about punching a protester in the face himself, has responded to his hecklers in typical presidential fashion: He has called protesters “fat,” “scum,” “really unattractive,” and “low-class”; told them to “go back home to mommy”; and repeatedly claimed that they are “paid protesters,” rewarded with $250 each. But as Michelle Jones of Ottawa, Kansas, screamed before she was removed from his rally in Park City, “I’m not paid, I hate you for free!”
“If my courage to stand, even in a sea of red at a Trump rally, gives one other person courage to use their voice to stand, to say, ‘I can do this if she can do it,’ that’s what I want,” Jones told me.
“I’m not paid,” Danielle Edwards, from Augusta, Kansas, confirmed. “None of us were paid. And if he’s lying about that, something so small and minuscule, what else do you think he’s lying about?” Edwards voted for Donald Trump in 2016, but attended the Park City rally with her husband and children as a registered Democrat. “I’ve never seen a living president, and so I was like, ‘Well, I’ll go see what it’s like.’ And I just, the more I sat there, the more I realized how much I didn’t like him, and I don’t want to have anything to do with him,” she said. Like McDaniel, Edwards hadn’t attended the rally with an explicit plan to protest, but as Trump told his audience to support incumbent Republican Senator Roger Marshall, she stood up and yelled, “Vote Adam Hamilton!”—the Democratic nominee—before security escorted her out.
“There’s something so powerful in it. I got out, and I just felt like I conquered the world. One, because he heard me. Two, I was glowing. I have a picture. I think I’m absolutely radiant. I was like, ‘Jeez, I look really good! I should tell the president to fuck off more often!” Edwards said. “I wanted to teach my kids about our constitutional rights. We have freedom of speech, we have the right to protest … and we have the right to disagree with him without being hurt.”
Layden Duncan, a 20-year-old Democratic Socialist running for City Council in Greenville, South Carolina, said he attended the rally in Pendleton with a friend to exercise his right to free speech, as well. “I was assaulted for free,” he said. He stood up and called the president a fascist, was grabbed by the collar, and as he was being escorted out, a rally attendee hit him in the back of the head. “We knew that there was a chance of us getting roughed up, and we talked about it before, and I said, ‘That’s just a chance that I’m willing to take,’” he said. “I knew that if I didn’t go, and that if I didn’t get in the building, and that if I didn’t yell at President Trump, that I would regret it the next day, and I would regret it for the rest of my life.”
“I went into that rally fully expecting to be physically assaulted,” said Jeffrey Doshier, a 30-year-old veteran of the Kansas National Guard, who attended the Park City rally. “I had made peace with that possibility going in, but what I felt compelled to do was bigger than any threat to my safety or physical well-being.” Like McDaniel, Doshier had seen the video of Miley’s assault in Ohio, but rather than scaring him away, he said it made him more committed to attending a Trump rally and demanding the release of the Epstein files. “I felt this obligation that someone like me, this straight white male veteran of the armed forces, needs to show up because optically that is important,” he said. “I did what I did because I love this country, despite its flaws, and I believe it’s a country that’s worth fighting for, even if that means standing up to the president of the United States.”
Though these protesters say they weren’t paid, some report an unexpected benefit from their brief moment of fame. “Maybe I’m a paid protester now,” Edwards said, “because people keep asking to buy me coffee or a beer!”
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