Forget windmills—tomatoes are the real killers! Bananas and pineapples, too. That’s according to Donald Trump, the world’s foremost nonsensical expert on the world’s most deadly inanimate objects. As The Daily Beast reports, transcripts from an October 2021 deposition have the former president defendant a comment he made during a February 1, 2016 campaign stop in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where he told his supporters: “If you see someone getting ready to throw a tomato, just knock the crap out of them, would you?”
When asked about his reasoning for encouraging attendees to commit violence, Trump swore that his team had been notified that protestors were planning to infiltrate the event, and “They were going to throw fruit. And you get hit with fruit, it’s—no, it’s very violent stuff. We were on alert for that.”
After a brief discussion confirming that a tomato is indeed a fruit, Trump made it clear that being assaulted with produce was no laughing matter. While he allowed that he was half-joking with his “knock the crap out of them” bit, he still contended that flying tomatoes are “very dangerous stuff… You can get killed with those things.”
Asked whether he was trying to “incentivize people to engage in violence,” the former president responded: “No, I wanted to have people be ready because we were put on alert that they were going to do fruit.”
Trump continued with another tomato tirade: “And some fruit is a lot worse than—tomatoes are bad, by the way. But it’s very dangerous. No, I wanted them to watch. They were on alert. I remember that specific event because everybody was on alert. They were going to hit, they were going to hit hard.”
While Trump couldn’t say whether any tomatoes—cherry, beefsteak, or otherwise—were confiscated that day, he did confirm that, yes, he believes that security should take action if they witness any illicit fruits in the crowd.
“Well, a tomato, a pineapple, a lot of other things they throw. Yeah, if the security saw that, I would say you have to—and it’s not just me, it’s other people in the audience get badly hurt—yeah, I think that they have to be aggressive in stopping that from happening. Because if that happens, you can be killed if that happens.”
The more you know.
(Via The Daily Beast)