Bloody brawl erupts over Trump's Hollywood star hours after it was destroyed with pickax
A politically fueled brawl took place on the Hollywood Walk of Fame last week on the site of President Donald Trump's recently vandalized star. Although a man was kicked in the head and another left bleeding from his face, police have not arrested anyone or released details about what happened.
Fortunately, aspiring social media stars were involved in both sides of the fight, so a full retelling is possible.
The remains of Trump's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame had been covered with plywood and traffic cones and ringed with yellow tape by Thursday, less than 48 hours after someone obliterated it with a pickax.
Even destroyed and concealed, the star retained magnetic powers. The crowd on the sidewalk slowed and jammed around it, staring at the barricade as if at Trump himself.
After sundown, a man and woman wearing stars-and-stripes outfits approached the site. They had with them in their small entourage a videographer, a bodyguard and a cardboard cutout of the president.
"Thank you so much, Mr. President. I'm glad you could join us," Joy Villa said to the cutout after a camera started to record. She was a singer who made national news last year for showing up at the Grammys in a "Make America Great Again" dress - a much more elaborate get-up than the star-spangled tights she wore now.
The man posing on the other side of the cutout was Elijah Schaffer, and this was really his production. Schaffer runs a fledgling YouTube channel called Slightly Offens*ve, populated mainly with videos of him asking politically charged questions to people he meets on the street - sometimes until one of them attacks his film crew.
"The point of the channel is to use the Socratic method to get people to answer why they believe what they believe," Schaffer told The Washington Post on Saturday.
He titles his videos somewhat less introspectively: "PUNCHED by ANTIFA" and "Exposing the Sluts," for example.
Schaffer told The Post that Thursday night was his first "social experiment" in the realm of partisan politics. Thus his U.S. flag ball cap, Trump campaign pin and cardboard president.
To begin, he and Villa propped up Trump's cutout next to Trump's smashed star, took out their phones and waited.
The crowd on the walk was amiable, at first. A few stopped to take selfies. A group of schoolchildren laughed at what they clearly took as farce.
"Nothing but peace and love," the cameraman noted after several uneventful minutes. "Nothing getting interesting."
"I keep waiting for something to happen," complained a commenter on Schaffer's live stream. "For once things are pretty tame."
Eventually, a woman stepped out of the crowd and raised her middle finger at the cutout. She accompanied the act with a string of expletives, which drew a protest from another onlooker: "His policies are working!"
Slowly but surely, people began to polarize around the president's star. A man brought his son up to the cutout to make a speech about Trump's virtues. "This guy right here, he's a fricking man!" he said.
When a passerby mumbled something against the president, Schaffer's cameraman goaded him: "Is that all you have to say? That's some pretty mindless babble."
After not quite half an hour, the event seemed over. "We're going to end the live stream now," the cameraman announced as he zoomed in for one last shot of Shaffer, Villa and faux Trump.
It was in this shot that The Real Snake Boy made his debut.
Real Snake Boy is his Instagram name; he never gave his real one. Schaffer said he had seen him in the crowd earlier and assumed he was drunk.
Now Real Snake Boy walked into the camera frame, wrapped his arms around the cutout and began to fondle it. He put a hand between the president's cardboard legs, looked directly into the camera, and said: "When the president said 'grab them by the pussy,' grab 'em by the f-- pussy."
"This is good footage," someone said from behind Schaffer's camera.
The Instagrammer appeared to be in his element. Over the next several minutes, Real Snake Boy took his shirt off, did push-ups on the president's star, led the crowd in a chant of "F--- Trump," spelled out his Instagram handle to a local TV news crew and called Schaffer's cameraman a "white boy."
Schaffer and Villa were grinning throughout.
"Therealsnakeboy1!" Schaffer told his viewers. "Light him up boys! At him. DM him. Send him whatever. Send him everything! Therealsnakeboy1, right now. Please go on Instagram. Therealsnakeboy1! At him! Real talk -"
He stopped when he noticed that a boy behind him had raised his middle finger into the camera frame.
"Are you flipping me off?" Schaffer said. Then someone swatted the camera away.
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