Lucky coincidence
Trump met with a "January Sixer" rioter. So did I.
Micki Larson-Olson drove from Abilene, Texas to see Trump's speech. She was in line beside me, so neither of us got in.
Then she got lucky.
I used a photograph of her in yesterday's blog post. I had no idea that she was all over the national news yesterday and again today.
Mikki Larson-Olson did something smart when we were turned away from the speech. She guessed that Trump might make an unannounced drop-in at The Red Arrow diner. Stopping by that diner is a good luck gesture for candidates. She was right. She was there and ready when his entourage stopped by.
She had made a boisterous, flamboyant, spectacle in line beside me, with her sequins and skin-tight bright blue lycra. She told me she needed to cover up her Q-oriented insignia but that she was "Q all the way." She was proud of having been a January 6 participant and proud of being found guilty and imprisoned. She said that the Representatives, Senators, and Vice President who stopped Trump from taking office were guilty of treason. They should all be publicly executed as traitors, she said. Hang Mike Pence? Absolutely.
I videotaped two 30-second clips of her, one expressing her support for Q, and the other in support of Trump and his stolen election claim. I did not expect to use them in my blog, and I was careful yesterday to include other people when publishing photos of people in line. I thought Republican readers of this blog would accuse me of cherry-picking kooks if I implied that Trump could be associated with people like her.
Well, I had that wrong.
She called out to him at the diner. She told him she was recently released from 161 days imprisonment for her actions at the Capitol on January 6. Trump came over to her, greeted her warmly, embraced her, signed her backpack, gave her his pen, and reassured her that she was a patriot. Trump said:
Listen, you just hang in there. You guys are gonna be okay. You just take care of yourself. You’ve been through too much. You’re going to wind up being happy.
Then another coincidence. As I was typing the words above for this post, the attached news story came onto my TV. I began to realize that there were multiple national news stories about her encounter with Trump. I filmed my own hotel TV.
Odd coincidences of this kind are the things that make "political tourism" worth the effort. Here I was, accidentally in line for several hours with someone who then became the country's most famous person for meeting Trump in Manchester, New Hampshire.
Trump's public embrace of her has serious policy implications. There are two narratives about January 6. One is that it was a bad day for American democracy. Even Republicans, including Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy, Lindsay Graham, and my own U.S. Representative, Cliff Bentz, all said that climbing the walls and breaking through doors and windows to overthrow an election is wrong. Trump is promoting an opposite narrative. Trump approves of the January 6 insurrection and the people who carried it out. This includes even the people who were doing openly illegal and destructive acts and were convicted of those crimes. Trump calls the January 6 invaders patriots. They are on his team and he has their back.