The Harassment of Trump Officials Offers ‘Real Message Clarity’ for 2018

Americans will remember liberals’ harassment of President Donald Trump’s appointees and choose either “a celebration of freedom” or “throwing eggs at people’s homes” in the 2018 and 2020 elections, Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) warned Tuesday night on “The Ingraham Angle.”

“One of the things this is doing, Laura, is it’s giving Republicans and Democrats a real message clarity as we move into the election season,” Huckabee, the former Arkansas chief executive, told Fox News host Laura Ingraham.

“Here’s the way I see it — quite frankly, for Republicans every day is the Fourth of July. For Democrats, every day is Halloween,” Huckabee said. “And America will get to decide, whose message do they want to follow? A celebration of freedom or throwing eggs at people’s homes?”

Such left-wing protests against prominent conservative officials aren’t new. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his family, for example, experienced a protest by 400 activists outside his home in 1995, The Washington Post reported.

The current controversy erupted after White House press secretary Sarah Sanders revealed Saturday that the owner of The Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, Virginia, asked her and her family to leave because she works for Trump.

Other Trump administration officials, including Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and adviser Stephen Miller, also were either denied service or asked to leave restaurants after facing protesters and heckling. Protesters also gathered outside Miller’s apartment complex Monday and handed out “Wanted” posters with his picture. Protesters also targeted Nielsen’s home.

The Sanders confrontation occurred after a rough week filled with backlash against the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance policy of immigration enforcement separating children from their illegal immigrant parents at the border. CNN reported Tuesday that Sanders will receive Secret Service protection as early as Wednesday, citing “two sources familiar with the decision.”

“I’m glad,” Huckabee said of the reports regarding his daughter’s Secret Service protection. “I think she needs it.”

Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) received bipartisan backlash after she called upon her supporters over the weekend to continue harassing and publicly confronting Trump administration members.

Waters doubled down on her calls for confrontation during an MSNBC interview, saying that “these members of his Cabinet who remain and try to defend [Trump], they won’t be able to go to a restaurant, they won’t be able to stop at a gas station, they’re not going to be able to shop at a department store.”

The California Democrat added that “the people are going to turn on them. They’re going to protest. They’re absolutely going to harass them until they decide that they’re going to tell the president, ‘No, I can’t hang with you.'”

But liberal radio host Garland Nixon rejected Waters’ rhetoric when he told Ingraham that his “first reaction to the vitriol is that it’s not good for the country, that it is a bad thing to do.”

“It’s bad for the party, and the Democratic Party should be focusing on policy,” Nixon said. “That being said, I think that the president has to take some credit — if that’s the right word — for this toxic environment we’re in. I think he has lowered the level of discourse.”

Although Rep. Sean Duffy (R-Wis.) admitted that he doesn’t like “all of Donald Trump’s language, either,” he highlighted that Trump “is not shutting down anyone’s speech” as liberals try to do.

“There’s a difference in speech versus taking action to shut down speech,” Duffy said. “They tried this in Wisconsin. Remember Act 10 and Scott Walker?”

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) faced intense protests from Democratic labor union workers in 2011 over the Wisconsin Act 10 bill, amid calls for a recount vote.

“They tried, they rallied, they were yelling, ‘Shame,’ spitting on [Walker]. And guess what? Americans, Wisconsinites … they didn’t like it,” Duffy noted. “Scott Walker got more votes in the recall than he did in the first election. This is going too far. We need to take the temperature down, and it’s leaders on both sides.”

Related: Ryan Tells Waters to ‘Apologize’ for Incitement; Ignores Censure Call

Nixon also urged Democrats to focus on policies instead of vitriolic rhetoric, saying, “I think we’ve gone to a style of politics in Washington, D.C., that is about people instead of policies.”

Ingraham concurred, noting that “there’s no debate. It’s public shaming of individuals who support Trump to try to have a job working for Trump. It’s the targeting of individuals — putting a ‘Wanted’ poster in a neighborhood, telling people to crowd around other people.”

Huckabee also noted that liberals “typically” have been targeting female Republicans and Trump administration officials “for the most part. I mean, for the most part it’s [first lady] Melania [Trump], it’s [adviser] Ivanka Trump, it’s Sarah, it’s [Florida Attorney General] Pam Bondi, it’s Kirstjen Nielsen, [Secretary of Transportation] Elaine Chao.

“What is it with these people? It’s misogyny. It’s sexism. It’s hatred of women. And I think that it ought to be pretty clear to America. I hope they see it. I hope they recognize it. And I hope they reject it,” Huckabee said.

“When this becomes personal, and people take it away from the public venues of a town hall or a speech in public at a university campus, and they start taking it to people’s homes … that’s the kind of thing we saw at lunch counters in the 60’s. And I thought we were never going to see that again. It’s pretty sad.”

PoliZette writer Kathryn Blackhurst can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter.