Trump doesn’t hesitate to incite his supporters against minorities and the news media, and that exploded into violence against a Colorado TV reporter on December 13, 2024.
Patrick Thomas Egan (photo, left), 39, spotted a reporter in a TV station car, followed him 40 miles to the station, then jumped out, chased, and tackled the reporter, demanded his ID, put him in a headlock, and began strangling him.
Station employees intervened before the reporter, Ja’Ronn Alex (photo below), was seriously injured. Egan, who worked as a taxi driver, is in jail facing felony assault and hate crime charges (see story here).
Before the assault, Egan pulled alongside Alex at a stoplight and said, “Are you even a U.S. citizen? This is Trump’s America now! I’m a Marine and I took an oath to protect this country from people like you!”
The oath he referred to goes like this:
“I (state your name) do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to the regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God.”
I guess the first question to ask Egan is who ordered him to save America from Alex, an ethnic Pacific Islander who was born in Detroit. The answer, of course, is Trump.
(Trump wasn’t commander-in-chief, only president-elect, on December 13, 2024, when Egan embarked on his ethnic cleansing crusade. However, that subtle distinction might be lost upon people with weak intellects.)
There’s probably more to this story than has been reported so far. Usually in cases like this, the perpetrators have ties to white supremacy groups or are active on esxtremist websites. Hate crimes generally don’t come out of thin air.
When I was growing up in the 1950s, racism was everywhere. It’s more closeted now, but what Trump has done is give people like Egan permission to be openly racist. He’s not telling them to act out their racism, as Egan did, but that’s implicit in Trump’s rhetoric.
Egan is a stupid man. He didn’t take an oath to “protect” America from people like Alex; read it, that’s not what it says. The Marines would never order him to do something like this. Now a civilian, he has no orders or mission. The only person who suggested he do this was another civilian named Donald Trump.