The text was simple enough: “Reminder for Saturday 22nd at “2:00pm”: Trump flash mob!! il Capo.” It was a call to action to disrupt and try to shout down a meeting being held by a pro-Ron DeSantis PAC called Ready for Ron – Ready to Win at a local restaurant.
Sure enough, nearly two dozen Trump supporters decked out in Trump gear entered the restaurant, used their Trump banner as a large table cloth, and filled much of the smaller restaurant, in an apparent effort to deny tables and seats to the DeSantis group. Disrupters attempted to grill DeSantis supporters on rumors and odd claims they had seen online, and towards the end of the gathering, they proceeded to raise their banner and chant “Trump Trump Trump”, much to the discomfort of paying customers who were not there for either group. Eventually, restaurant management shut them down.
“Why they thought this was a good idea is beyond me,” said Carolyn Leff, who organized the event for the DeSantis friendly PAC, “if they thought behaving like that was going to attract voters to Donald Trump they really blew it. From the comments we heard from the restaurant’s regular customers, it only reminded voters of what they didn’t like about Trump and why they voted for Biden instead. Which for us was a great time to introduce them to Governor DeSantis instead!”
Sharon Vandenberg, an organizer with Patriot Gatherings, which features a number of supporters of both former President Trump and former Arizona lawmaker Liz Harris, appeared to lead the effort, and it did not appear to be coordinated with any official Trump campaign effort. But that made no difference to at least one attendee, who said she found the tactics repulsive.
“These sorts of things are why we lost in 2018, why Trump lost in 2020, and why we lost again in 2022, and I’m just so upset that instead of learning from our mistakes and getting better at reaching out in a positive way, these people are doubling down on driving people away. I used to love Donald Trump but I’m done with the losing and the losers.”