Near the beginning of presidential candidate Donald Trump’s rallies, he likes to call attention to a small penned-off area in the middle of the room to which we journalists are relegated.

Then, with everybody looking at us, he complains about the media. It’s a part of his stump speech, and three months ago it resulted in harmless boos and jeers from a crowd thousands strong, but Monday night in Grand Rapids, Michigan the exercise took a sinister turn when, briefly but unmistakably, the audience cheered at the idea that journalists ought to be killed, a suggestion from within the crowd.

Here’s what happened: Trump brought up Putin, who said last week he welcomed warm relations with the Republican front-runner.

“He said nice things,” Trump said. “All of a sudden I’m hearing things like ‘Oh isn’t it terrible that Putin’s saying n—’. That’s not terrible, that’s good! That’s like a good thing not a bad thing. He can’t stand Obama, Obama can’t stand him, they’re always fighting, wouldn’t it be nice if we could get along with, like, people?”

Cheers came from the crowd. Trump went on:

“Then they said, you know, he’s killed reporters, and I don’t like that. I’m totally against that. By the way I hate some of these people” – he pointed at the group of us journalists – “but I’d never kill them.”

Laughter ensued, and that was when someone called out that journalists should be killed. It wasn’t Trump, of course; it was just one person among 9,000. The video feed that was broadcast didn’t pick it up. But plenty of us heard it, and we heard how others nearby responded: They seemed to like the idea. A cheer grew, louder and louder, as we reporters continued to scribble in our notebooks.

“I would never do that,” Trump said, smiling. (You can watch it for yourself here and hear the crowd cheering but the original audience member’s rallying cry isn’t discernible).

He continued, pretending to toy for a moment with the idea of killing one or two after all:

“Ah…let’s see…meeeeh— no, I wouldn’t. I would never kill them. But I do hate them, some of them are such lying, disgusting people, it’s true. It’s true. But I would never kill them and anybody that does I think would be despicable.”

During this period of half a minute, I became aware that I was sitting in a room full of people cheering about the idea of my death, or the death of someone in my profession. My face grew warm, my heart fluttered with fear, but I tried to show nothing, to just keep watching, keep listening, and stay alert.

Trump, meanwhile, continued and almost in the same breath added: “But you know nobody said: ‘They say he killed reporters.’ I said ‘really’? He says he didn’t, other people say he didn’t, who did he kill? Well we don’t know but we hear that.”

So after praising Putin, and, with a vaudevillian show of charity, dismissing the idea of killing journalists, Trump concluded the “media commentary” portion of the evening by questioning the legitimacy of serious claims of oppression and violence against journalists in Russia.

(You can read about the 56 journalists killed in Russia since 1992 here via the Committee to Protect Journalists)

Over the span of two minutes, he had primed the crowd, focused its hostility and given its members a generous license to disdain, to disrespect, even to hate. His ribbing no longer felt harmless. It felt like a warning to those of us planning to spend our evenings these next two months fenced off in and highly visible in the middle of a Donald Trump rally.