Hundreds of President Trump’s supporters marched into a high school gymnasium Monday and began blistering their new perceived enemy: CNN’s chief White House correspondent.



“Fake News Jim!” they chanted loudly at Jim Acosta as one woman confronted him near his seat in the press pen and then as he positioned himself in front of a camera for a live hit.

“Go home, Jim!” they added later — a taunt that sounded especially menacing when aimed at a reporter with a Hispanic surname and a father who fled Fidel Castro’s Cuba.

These were tense moments. But before long, Acosta made his way to the metal barricade separating the media from the angry horde assembled at the latest Donald Trump rally. He posed for selfies, first with a kind woman who genuinely seemed to want one, and then with others who appeared more eager to share the moments ironically on social media.

Then something even stranger happened: Acosta began signing autographs. A slip of paper here, a campaign sign there. Even the bill of one “Make America Great Again” hat. Eventually one of his most persistent hecklers — a young man with a long, scruffy beard, wearing a MAGA cap backwards and a MAGA flag as a cape — engaged Acosta in a friendly conversation. By the end of the exchange, the Trump fan was begging Acosta for an on-air shoutout.

“I think it helps calm them down,” Acosta replied when asked why he indulged the same people who had been jeering him. “If I were to say no, it could make it more venomous.”

These scenes, hours before Trump’s event here for South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster, would be notable on any day. But they were particularly surreal and conspicuous coming on the same day that White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who over the weekend had been asked to leave a restaurant because she works for Trump, called for civil debate “without fear of harm.” (One rally-goer waved a sign bashing CNN and MSNBC, praising Trump-preferred Fox News, and proclaiming loyalty to Sanders: “We love Sarah.”)