WASHINGTON, D.C. — Twitter on Saturday is peppered with tweets for and against Trump from Republicans attending and from Democrats criticizing and making fun of the participants. Reports from Fox News, BBC and an NBC reporter on Twitter show massive crowds with Trump 2020 flags and “Stop the Steal” and other signs related to the president’s legal battles and refusal so far to concede the election to former vice president Joe Biden, whose electoral college votes have surpassed the 270 required to win in counts so far.
People traveled from across the nation to attend the march, including from Florida, where a group of 250 members of the right-wing Proud Boys group from around the country, and promoters include the Republican National Hispanic Assembly of Florida with nine chapters around the state, assembled to travel to the nation’s capital.
Trump claims the votes came out of nowhere and cost him combat states like Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. However, he presented no evidence of systematic fraud, and the courts had already canceled many of the lawsuits brought by his camp.
Abraham Lopez, a national committeeman for the National Hispanic Assembly, said more than a dozen Trump-supporting groups are behind the rally, which has been called by various names: the Million MAGA March, the March for Trump or March for 45.
Other groups planning demonstrations include: March for Trump, Stop the Steal, and Women for America First, as well as more disparate groups like Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, Infowars.com, and Groypers.
Opponents see the march, from Freedom Plaza to the steps of the Supreme Court, as a desperate stunt to prolong Trump’s rule.
Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters, a progressive, left-wing group that monitors conservative media, was quoted by Politico as saying: “It is solely designed to create disruption, and possibly chaos.
It’s basically a giant online comment troll come into life.”
Lopez said many members of the National Hispanic Assembly are concerned about voting irregularities that have thus far been debunked by elections officials in various states.
“Our message is that every legal ballot should be counted and every illegal ballot should not be counted,” he said. “Nothing more and nothing less.”
He said his organization also supports Trump in pursuing legal options before conceding defeat to Biden. Many people who are comfortable with Facebook and Twitter fact-checking online content are not comfortable with members of the U.S. government fact-checking an election, he said.
Tarrio said that if Biden is named the winner after everything is said and done, he will accept it.
“There is nothing I can do,” he said. “I didn’t do enough, or grassroots groups didn’t do enough, or Trump didn’t do enough.”
He credited Biden with inadvertently boosting the Proud Boys’ profile when he challenged Trump to denounce the group during a debate. Trump told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by.”
“I’m super thankful of Joe Biden,” Tarrio said. “If he becomes the president, the best thing that he has done is promote my organization.”
Reacting to the reported Proud Boys coup, Tarrio said the man who claimed to have ousted him as chairman is not even a member.
“In order to have a coup, you have to be part of the organization to establish the coup,” he said.
Kyle Chapman claimed to have taken over the Proud Boys to lead it in a white supremacist and anti-Semitic direction. Though the Proud Boys are labeled as a “hate” group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, Tarrio denies they espouse white supremacist views.
Chapman, he said, was only briefly affiliated with the Proud Boys in 2017.
He left the organization the same year to start “his own thing,” Tarrio said. Chapman reappeared a month ago in an attempt to rejoin the Proud Boys’ ranks, but his membership was denied, Tarrio said.
“I think that is where his anger came from,” he said.
