McGraw-Jones Assault Case Resolved

In March, John Franklin McGraw, 79 years old and white, cold-cocked Rakeem Jones, 26 and black, at a Trump rally in Fayetville, NC, right in front of TV cameras, while Jones was being dragged out of the rally by 5 Cumberland Contry sheriff's deputies. Later McGraw was on more video, babbling about how "we may have to kill him next time." For 9 months I had been wondering what, if anything, was going to happen to McGraw because of the incident.

Yesterday in a courtroom in Cumberland County, NC, McGraw pled no contest to assault and battery and delivering a threat, was given a suspended sentence of 30 days and a year's worth of unsupervised probation, and had to pay several hundred dollars' worth of court fees.

And --

-- McGraw and Jones hugged it out in the courtroom.

From the stories about yesterday's hearing and the resolution of the case, I got a little more context about McGraw's comment: "We may have to kill him next time." When McGraw said that, he was talking about Jones being an ISIS supporter. Apparently the only evidence McGraw ever had that there might be a connection between Jones and ISIS was that Jones was protesting the Trump rally.

Today in court McGraw said, "We got to heal our country.”

Yeah. Heal our country. Before the election, some Trump supporters were talking about armed resistance by militias if Hillary won. Now, some of them are talking about "healing our country," while others keep on yelling, "Lock her up!" Would McGraw be talking about healing if Hillary had won? I don't know. Maybe he would. I don't know the man.

On the Yahoo News page linked above, with the story about yesterday's hearing, there's a map I wasn't able to cut-and-paste, showing 20 locations where there had been violence at Trump rallies. I wonder how many more incidents there have been that we don't know about, because they didn't happen right in front of live TV cameras.

I wonder why more people aren't talking about Trump's responsibility for the violence, and for crazy ideas such as that Rakeem Jones was working for ISIS, and a whole lot of other crazy ideas.

I also wonder whether McGraw has begun to feel like Trump has screwed him, lied to him and manipulated him, or if he will eventually begin to feel that way. I don't know. It's very hard for me to imagine what goes on the mind of anyone who ever had any respect for Trump or considered him to be a good choice for President.