When push came to shove at the RNC
On the last day of the Republican National Convention, when the oven of Cleveland’s afternoon was on its fourth day of bake, I finally caught up with Corey Lewandowski. It was a cheerful moment in the air-conditioned privacy of a workspace lounge, out of the way from the main convention bustle, where capacious chairs — green-leather Chesterfields — seemed to enclose more than just support.
It was good to talk. He grew up a two-base hit away from the Jack Kerouac monument in his hometown of Lowell, right around the corner from the ancient and beat little caboose of the Paradise Diner, which I’ve always known to be the goldhearted source for Jack’s surname in On the Road.
There was a lot to catch up on, more than just how I planned to read new work in the October night again at the next Lowell Celebrates Kerouac! fest; we hadn’t seen each other since literally some hours before the Michelle Fields hoax — otherwise known as #Grabgate — put intense media floodlights on his role as Donald J. Trump’s campaign manager.
It happened in the ballroom of Mr. Trump’s National Golf Club in Jupiter, Florida, where following a press conference the then-Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields approached Mr. Trump after having been warned to stand back by the Secret Service. She later alleged that Corey — the maverick who brought the Trump campaign to the center of the world’s attention, beating out 16 other top contenders in a historic sweep — viciously manhandled her and threw her back so she “nearly fell to the ground.”
Video and eyewitness testimony later exonerated Lewandowski, but not before the scandal unnecessarily took needless attention from the campaign. It gave the frenzied Trump-haters in the media some juicy gossip to masticate on; those starved and hungry dogs are still gnawing on its desiccated bones.
At the RNC, everyone I know was looking for Michelle Fields all week. It was a challenge. Maybe it’s dumb junior-high antics, but imagine the thought of walking past her and feigning some kind of aggressive mat slam — without touching, of course, or breaching the locus of her personal space — while a conspirator locks it down on video. Funny, right? That’s just too irresistible for a lot of people to not have dreamed about doing.
It turned out that investigative reporter Charles C. Johnson spotted her first. She was walking on Cleveland’s Prospect Avenue away from the convention checkpoint with her fiancé, Daily Caller editor Jamie Weinstein. Johnson may or may not have planned to fake a yankdown, but what actually happened to him caught everyone by surprise.
He approached the couple from behind, and flanked them on their left. The moment that he was spotted Weinstein went feral, resembling a rabid hyena on the attack as he shouted unprintable vulgarities and lunged forward in an actual assault. Weinstein struck Johnson on his upper left arm, with both hands, in what appeared to be a momentary fit of rage he could not control. The whole assault was captured on video.
Unlike Fields's grazing of Mr. Trump with her pen, Johnson did not touch or break the personal space of either one of them. He says he actually approached them just to ask a question.
“I was going to ask why they have a history of making so many things up and what they are going to do now,” he later told me.
Twitter reacted by suspending Johnson’s account within a day. His crime? To share a video showing him being assaulted by a journalist.
We all know what would happen if a redhat in the media shoved someone like that — it certainly wouldn’t be the blackout pass that the press dogs gave to Weinstein. Every TV lizard would demand that Mr. Trump “disavow,” while Twitter would set up hashtags with emojis to rile everyone to fight for “justice.” It would become another campaign talking point.
Twitter waited until the approximate middle of Mr. Trump’s Thursday-night acceptance speech to suspend Johnson’s account — and you can just see the panicked lot of them, in front of a 21:9 CinemaWide TV, gearing up to click Suspend at just the right moment when the talk of defending America’s borders was too much triggering to bear. The execs at Twitter might’ve had a little junior-high fun themselves in nixing Johnson’s account at the RNC’s apex, but we all know who is winning. It isn’t the lying dogs of the media, whom no one respects. And it isn’t the languished schoolboys playing around with free speech and politics at Twitter — or the shareholders they’re ultimately accountable to.
So sitting back that afternoon with Corey, watching the video on his iPhone at the very moment it went viral on Twitter, it was hard not to feel like this instant was the complete and final culmination of something that had been pushing forward and lashing out all through the campaign. It was a heavy capstone to finally quash and bury that ugly vein of nastiness, a basic vindication of something that we knew, like the end of an old movie where the truth shines on and good conquers evil after all — and like that satisfying feeling that swells inside when the credits roll, it hit us instantly and there was nothing else to say.
