So late this afternoon the phone rang at my office — the Hamilton County Democratic Party in Cincinnati OH. The caller asks for me by name. I’m the Executive Director (of a staff of just me) so usually its me answering the phone.
He quickly rattles his name off and says he represents the Citizens for Trump Foundation. He tells me “we have been monitoring your social media accounts and you have been posting many things critical of Donald Trump.” I say yea. Do you have any idea who you just called?
He say’s “don’t you want to make America Great Again”? I ask again and ask him who he is.
He says “you need to cut it out or we’ll have to do something.” I ask again who he is and his response is “you have been warned” and he hangs up.
Now in 10 years I’ve taken a lot of crank calls, people who disagree. This was different. Polished, professional, I was just someone on the list. This was no crank call.
Yes I do post lot of stuff critical of Trump on Facebook and occasionally here (under different user name). But never in 10 years on this job have I been personally threatened. I was stunned, I don’t have caller ID, never needed it and before I could do *64 another call came in, an elderly woman wanting an absentee ballot.
Strange times we are in.
The phone calls that come to that office are often an interesting gauge of the tenor of the political times. During the Obama years you could always tell when he had done something particularly effective because the volume of crank calls would increase. There was one guy who persistently left voice mails that escalated to calling for Obama to be lynched. He wound getting a visit from the Secret Service and I never heard from him again. The night the Affordable Care passed someone tried to put a rock through the large front window. It’s a double pane window and they only got through the first pane. That incident wound up on the local news, even made the NY Times, Washington Post and Rachel Maddow. I’m doing now what I did then, made sure the story got out.
What I took from that call yesterday is that Trump supporters are feeling threatened, they can see he’s in trouble and may go down. If or when that happens things may get ugly.