A Saturday evening campaign rally in Coachella by former president Donald Trump was punctuated by extreme heat, violent ideation, and reports of rallygoers stranded miles from their cars after the event ended.
The heat baked attendees at around 100 degrees for hours on end as they waited for Trump to begin speaking, with accounts of multiple instances of heat exhaustion or heat stroke reported.
Trump also called for a protester to “go back home to Mommy” to “get the hell knocked out of her,” in his latest instance of using violent language when confronted by demonstrators.
The protester was ejected from Trump’s rally. As the crowd jeered her, Trump said “Back home to Mommy. She goes back home to Mommy.”
Trump continued, imitating the imagined mother: “‘Was that you, darling?’ And she gets the hell knocked out of her.”
“Her mother’s a big fan of ours,” the former president finished before returning to his speech. “Her mother, her father.”
It was unclear what the protester was doing during the event, or what happened to her afterwards.
Trump has a long history of using violent language about hecklers at his rallies. During his 2016 campaign, he urged his crowds to “knock the crap” out of protesters and said of one, “I’d like to punch him in the face.”
At the end of the event, many attendees reportedly discovered they had been stranded by shuttle services several miles from their cars and were forced to either wait for alternative transportation or walk back on their own.
The abandonment by the shuttles echoed Trump’s 2020 campaign rallies, when his supporters were stranded at multiple events by the shuttle services and had to walk back to their vehicles alone, sometimes in freezing cold and snow.
Trump is almost certain to lose California, and that is not expected to change after his visit to the desert town perhaps best known for the annual music festival bearing its name.
Still, Trump took advantage of his visit to tear into the nation’s most populous state, bringing up its recent struggles with homelessness, water shortages, and a lack of affordability. Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, was previously the state’s junior senator and attorney general.
“We’re not going to let Kamala Harris do to America what she did to California,” Trump said, referring to the state as as “Paradise Lost.”
The former president lost California in a landslide in 2020.
Associated Press contributed to this report.