A man wearing a Make America Great Again hat barreled into the press pit at Trump’s rally in El Paso, Texas, Monday night and started shoving reporters, knocking over their equipment, and yelled “fuck the media,” minutes after the president had lashed out at journalists.
About half way through his lengthy, campaign-style speech, Trump ridiculed the media for “refusing to acknowledge” his administration’s successes, invoking loud boos and jeers from the crowd.
“I guess 93% of the stories are negative. No matter what we do, they figure out a way to make it that,” the president said, rattling off topics, such as North Korea, the economy, and manufacturing, which he feels that the media has unfairly skewed.
As Trump went on touting how his successes, a man in a red MAGA hat suddenly burst toward the group of reporters and photographers who were covering the speech, pushing them over, knocking their cameras and tripods, and repeatedly yelling, “fuck the media.”
“I was trying to tweet and watch the president and all of the sudden the riser started shaking and two tripods in front of me fell on top of one another and then a guy almost fell on me,” Yasmine El-Sabawi, a producer with TRT World, a Turkish news channel, told BuzzFeed News.
A photographer dropped his camera as she and other reporters quickly tried to figure out what was happening.
“Then it set in that someone was here who wasn’t supposed to be here and then you saw the red hat and it sinks in and you get it,” El-Sabawi said.
The attacker “went straight for the BBC camera man,” El-Sabawi added.
Several members of the BBC who were at the rally shared their footage and accounts on Twitter.
In one clip, a BBC camera steadily trained on Trump’s podium suddenly falters and blurs. Eleanor Montague, the outlet’s Washington editor, tweeted that it was because he was “attacked by a Trump supporter.”
“The crowd had been whipped into a frenzy against the media by Trump and other speakers all night,” she wrote.
