Passers-by gather to take photos in front of the Red Hen Restaurant on June 23, in Lexington, Virginia. White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Saturday that she was booted from the Virginia establishment because she works for President Donald Trump. | Daniel LIn/AP Photo The left loses its cool ‘When you’re violent and cursing and screaming and blocking me from walking into a movie, there’s something wrong,’ said one top GOP official.

Two senior Trump administration officials were heckled at restaurants. A third was denied service. Florida GOP Attorney General Pam Bondi required a police escort away from a movie about Mister Rogers after activists yelled at her in Tampa — where two other Republican lawmakers say they were also politically harassed last week, one of them with her kids in tow.

In the Donald Trump era, the left is as aggressively confrontational as at any time in recent memory.


What it means for 2018 — whether it portends a blue wave of populist revolt for Democrats or a red wall of silent majority resistance from Republicans — largely depends on one’s political persuasion. But there’s a bipartisan sense that this election season marks another inflection point in the collapse of civil political discourse.

Few disagree that Democrats are marching, protesting and confronting Republican officials with more intensity during the midterm elections than at any time in decades. The progressive fervor recalls conservative opposition to the previous president in his first midterm, when Democratic members of Congress were left running from disruptive town halls and ended up being crushed at the polls in November.

"If you see anybody from that Cabinet — in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station — you get out and you create a crowd. And you push back on them. And you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere,” implored California Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters at a Saturday rally, prompting an immediate conservative backlash on social media.

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The intense, in-your-face approach toward public officials is only expected to intensify, fueled by social media and what appears to be an increasingly polarized and angry electorate.

“It is part of a trend,” said Bondi, a close Trump ally who came face-to-face with protesters Friday at the Tampa Theatre before and after a screening of the Mister Rogers documentary “Won't You Be My Neighbor?”

“When you’re violent and cursing and screaming and blocking me from walking into a movie, there’s something wrong,” she said. “The next people are going to come with guns. That’s what’s going to happen.”

According to Bondi, she and a friend were confronted at least four times — while buying tickets, entering the theater, standing in line at the concession stand and then on their way out — and that activists were aggressive in each instance, with one yelling so loudly at her that he spit in her hair, either unintentionally or because he meant to expectorate on her. She said they also taunted her friend as “blue eyes” and asked him in a threatening manner if he was going to protect her, as though they wanted to fight.

The activists tell a different story.

“Pam Bondi’s version of events is inaccurate and don’t reflect what happened,” said Tim Heberlein, Tampa Bay regional director for the progressive group Organize Florida. He said he and a handful of fellow activists coincidentally ran into Bondi at the movie.

Heberlein said the videos the group released don’t comport with Bondi’s version of events. Bondi said the reason for that is that the activists released only the videos showing what happened as they were leaving the movie, when Tampa Police were there and everyone was on their best behavior.

Heberlein said the activists tried to talk to Bondi about her policies and political stances: support for Trump, and her longstanding opposition to Obamacare in the courts.

“This wasn’t a tactic to mobilize voters. This was a couple folks just going to see a movie. And the attorney general, our elected representative, is there,” Heberlein said. “There’s a lot more of an energized base around progressive voting, just people impacted by this administration’s policies, including Pam Bondi. People are aware and very hyper-cognizant about how it affects the state and how it affects them in their personal lives.”

In talking to POLITICO, Heberlein said he needed to be cautious about his remarks because Bondi is the “top law enforcement officer” in the state and she had called the actions of his group an assault. Earlier, to The Tampa Bay Times , he had more swagger: “If you refuse to meet with us, we're coming to where you're at. We're coming to where you're watching a movie or eating dinner.”

As Republicans complain about the confrontations, Democrats say it’s a simple reaction to the president’s radical policies. It’s little different, they say, than what conservatives did to Democratic lawmakers during President Barack Obama’s first midterm elections, when town halls became spectacles of shouting about Obamacare.

“This is certainly nothing new,” Rep. Dina Titus, a Nevada Democrat, said in recounting her 2010 loss. During the campaign, tea party activists would use bullhorns at “Congress on the Corner” events she hosted in front of grocery stores. “There was [also] a lady who followed me around everywhere. … I also recall that some of the tea party people spit on some of our members as they walked into the House to vote.”

Two years later, Titus ran again for Congress and won. And she said Republicans today have to face up to the legacy of aggressive protesting they unleashed eight years ago: “If you embolden this kind of behavior, you shouldn’t be surprised if it comes back to haunt you.”

What’s different now is the scope and scale of Republican officials — elected and otherwise, being confronted in public or semi-private venues.

The public shaming of party officials is more closely associated with Latin American politics. Last year, Venezuelan expatriates in South Florida engaged in what they called a “ social media manhunt ” of officials with ties to the regime, chanting them out of diners. The protest confrontations have been traced back to what were called “escraches” in the 1990s in Argentina, where victims of the former military dictatorship accosted their accused torturers in public confrontations.

Just in the past week, a number of senior Trump administration officials were subjected to the U.S. version of escraches in both Washington, D.C., and outside the city. On Friday night, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was told by the co-owner of the Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, Virginia, to leave. The owner did not want Sanders there in part because she works for an "inhumane and unethical” administration.

Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, who became the face of her boss’ “zero tolerance” immigration policy, was interrupted at dinner at a Mexican restaurant in downtown Washington several days earlier by protesters who shouted "Shame" and "If kids don't eat in peace, you don't eat in peace." Demonstrators also chanted outside her northern Virginia townhouse on Friday morning.

Stephen Miller, the White House senior adviser who is heavily involved in Trump’s immigration policies, tried to eat at an upscale Mexican restaurant in Washington on June 17 and had a fellow patron call him a "fascist," according to the New York Post.

“Hey look guys, whoever thought we’d be in a restaurant with a real-life fascist begging [for] money for new cages?” the diner at the restaurant growled at Miller, according to the Post’s witness. Unlike Nielsen and Sanders, Miller didn’t leave the restaurant.

In Bondi’s hometown of Tampa, state Rep. Jackie Toledo told POLITICO her children were harangued about their mother by a fellow patron at a Kahwa Coffee shop Saturday when he saw them wearing her campaign T-shirts while the family was canvassing for votes.

And Florida state Sen. Dana Young said she filed a police report after four unknown protesters staked out a Thursday evening meeting she had with a professional group at an area restaurant and, as she left, they began yelling at her about the Feb. 14 Parkland massacre, saying she had “blood on her hands” and calling her a “killer” or a “murderer.” She said they shoved smartphone cameras in her face and initially blocked her from leaving.

“It’s very concerning and very sad,” Young told POLITICO. “It seems that when these groups realize they can’t win an argument in a civil discussion of the issues, they believe it is perfectly acceptable to turn to bullying.”

Presidential historian Michael Beschloss lamented that the flare-ups are “a new disheartening sign of a country that is becoming more divided by the hour. It is almost beginning to sound like some of the things that happened before the Civil War. It’s a polarized country. But it is an extremely polarizing president.”

Former Democratic Rep. Tom Perriello, who lost his 2010 reelection in Virginia and was an unsuccessful candidate for governor last year, said the atmosphere was more toxic eight years ago for elected officials, many of whom were subject to death threats. He said today, however, Trump is to blame for the coarsening of public discourse and for “having torn up and jumped on so many social and political norms.”

“What we’re dealing with is an administration taking positions so extreme and dehumanizing that it’s almost required in polite society to distance yourself from people tearing families apart,” said Perriello, pointing to a POLITICO Magazine article about the social struggles of young Trump officials in Washington.

Trump, Perriello said, is “actively threatening, both in his rhetoric and his policies, the weak and the vulnerable, I think a different kind of response is needed. Now I happen to not think the politics of confrontation is most effective on that. But that’s a tactical question.”

Republicans contend the confrontational politics will inspire a backlash among a silent majority that is watching the left grow unhinged.

“There’s not more energy on the left. There’s more hatred,” said Toledo, the Tampa Republican who said her kids were bothered in a coffee shop. “I signed up for this. But my kids? I thought kids were off limits. Family is off limits. And it backfires when you attack families.”

Toledo, an immigrant from Peru, said she was also targeted by vile comments on Facebook when she spoke about empowering women and girls at Gorrie Elementary School in her district recently and said the Tampa mayor’s wife had even chewed her out over gun control while dressed in a full gown at the “Captain’s Ball” attended by elite Tampa society during the city’s Gasparilla Pirate Fest.

Even some Democrats are a little concerned about the effectiveness of aggressive protesting.

Former Pennsylvania Congressman Paul E. Kanjorski said the increasingly confrontational politics are counterproductive. In 2010, before he lost his seat to Republican Lou Barletta, Kanjorski cut back on holding town halls, which he used to enjoy, because it just became “cannon fodder” for opponents.

Nowadays, he said, he worries about the signal sent when the president’s spokeswoman is denied service at a restaurant or when the Florida attorney general is chased away from a movie.

“I don’t know why they picked on the attorney general from Florida. I don’t like her or her political positions, but she has a right to travel and be around without being harassed,” he said. “We’re limiting real conversation and discussion in this country, and it’s a problem.”

