Armed Trump
supporters in Harrisburg.
'It's not over': Trump supporters protest Biden
victory in swing states
People gathered in capitals of Pennsylvania and
Michigan claim ballot fraud and condemn media
Edward
Helmore in Harrisburg and Lois Beckett in Lansing
Sun 8 Nov
2020 03.27 GMTLast modified on Sun 8 Nov 2020 05.15 GMT
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/nov/07/trump-supporters-protest-pennsylvania-michigan
As word
came on Saturday that the election had been called for Joe Biden, hundreds of
supporters of the defeated president began amassing at Pennsylvania’s state
capitol building in Harrisburg to protest.
It was a
split-screen simulcast of America’s intensified political division, as Donald
Trump’s defeat was jubilantly celebrated 130 miles east in Philadelphia, and in
cities around the country.
And just as
Trump has refused to accept the outcome, so too have many of the around 75m
people who voted for him, claiming instead that his loss was the result of
ballot fraud – a baseless assertion promoted by the White House – and media
manipulation.
“We need to
make sure every legal vote is found and to make sure this election is fair,”
the Yorktown state representative Mike Jones told a cheering crowd. “If we
allow this country to succumb to socialism, it will not because the left
overpowered us, it will be because good men and women did nothing.”
Many here
repeated a belief that the media and big tech had been against Trump since the
start, with Biden as something of a ride-along.
“The
election has been called by the media. The government has not certified the
votes, so anything could still happen,” said Mary Wallace, a Harrisburg
resident, adding: “I want nothing more than for Donald Trump to have four more
years.”
Wallace’s
words echoed those of the president on Saturday morning, when he said his
opponent “has not been certified as the winner of any states, let alone any of
the highly contested states headed for mandatory recounts, or states where our
campaign has valid and legitimate legal challenges that could determine the
ultimate victor.”
Contrary to
presumptions of Trump’s base as a white monolith, the Pennsylvania protest
attracted a diverse crowd, with many describing themselves as Hispanic, Asian,
and African American.
Many blamed
the media, again, for portraying them inaccurately, and said that Democrats had
made political assumptions about them based on race.
“I’m just
an American,” said Alysia McMillan, who ran unsuccessfully as a Republican
candidate for the Arizona house of representatives in August. Her politics, she
said, was frequently misconstrued by her ethnicity, which she described as
Black, White and Korean.
“White
liberals are always trying to apologize to us, but they’re just protecting
their own privilege. Malcolm X warned us about that. The Black Lives Matter
protests are another scam. It’s full of white people who want Black people to
fight their battles. The white guys turn up at BLM protests, burn down some
building, and then blame Black guys.”
Interspersed
among the crowd were members of militia groups, including Angry Viking Patriots
of America and the Pennsylvania Three Percenters. “I fully expect this to go to
the supreme court,” said Dylan Stevens, who goes by the moniker the Angry
Viking.
“This isn’t
about conspiracy theories, it’s about common sense … I fully expect Trump to
challenge this and he should.”
Stevens,
who has lost privileges to use social media, including Facebook, did not
dismiss the potential for violent clashes in the weeks to come.
“Sure there
are fanatics and extremists but we’re a well-regulated militia,” Stevens said.
In an address to the crowd, he added: “Somehow the word patriot has become a
four-letter word. Somehow, the media painted us – you! – as the bad guys.”
In
Michigan, another swing state that flipped for Biden after Trump’s win in 2016,
hundreds of Trump supporters gathered at the state capitol to chant “four more
years” and “we won”, even after major media outlets, including Fox News, had
called the election.
On the
steps of the capitol building, a local activist involved in multiple
anti-lockdown protests this year shouted conspiracy theories about “globalists”
through a megaphone and said that Trump wanted veterans and retired police
officers to volunteer and help keep the election results from being certified.
“Tyranny is
knocking on our door. It has kicked our door in. It is in our threshold and we
must push it back,” said Kevin Skinner, 34, one of the founders of an
anti-lockdown group Stand Up Michigan.
“The media
called it for Biden today. Big whoop, guys. We knew they were going to do
that,” Skinner said. “The media is the false prophet of Revelations 13. The
media is part of the kingdom of darkness and we are exposing them right now!”
Many people
in the crowd repeated stories about malfeasance in the ballot-counting process
that had already been debunked by local news outlets and by election officials,
including a well-respected Republican election official.
Some Trump
supporters said they were simply not sure whom they would actually trust to
tell them the legitimate results of the election. “I don’t know,” said one
55-year-old man from Ionia, there with his wife and two sons. “That’s a good
question.”
But some
pro-Trump protesters said they would accept the election results from
Republican officials.
“At a
certain point you have to trust your local party officials to say yeah, we’re
confident that it’s fair,” said Tom Barker, 54, from Detroit.
The prevailing
sentiment, so far as one exists, is that the America that Barack Obama once
described as clinging “to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t
like them … as a way to explain their frustrations”, and Hillary Clinton called
“deplorables”, had only been strengthened and supported by Trump.
“It’s not
over,” said Josephine Kolomov, 24, from South Carolina, in Harrisburg. “Trump
has stood up for us for four years, and now I want to stand up for him. I am
saddened [by the call] but I don’t think it’s over. Trump doesn’t give
up.”
Joe Biden has won …
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