A die-hard supporter of President Trump arrested for disorderly conduct after disrupting an Iowa event for Sen. Elizabeth Warren is a former junkie who served time in prison and has an extensive rap sheet spanning more than 27 years of crime.
Randal Thom, 58, of Lakefield, Minn., was arrested by police in Storm Lake, Iowa, on Saturday after wielding a selfie stick at supporters attending a campaign event for Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat who is running for her party’s nomination and hopes to take on Trump in 2020. Thom threatened attendees after the red “Keep America Great!” banner he had unfurled was knocked down.
It was far from the first run-in with the law for the Minnesota man, who has been to 46 Trump rallies stretching from Montana to South Carolina: Criminal data base searches reveal he has been convicted of at least 72 felony and misdemeanor offenses between 1989 and 2017.
His crimes included possession and sale of controlled substances, felony theft, forging checks, and trespassing. Traffic convictions include one for drunk driving, one for a hit and run, three for giving a false name to a police officer, and 11 for driving without a license, which was revoked at one point for failure to pay child support payments. He is also listed as having been charged with two criminal offenses in 1983 and 1984 when he was a U.S. Marine.
Today — three decades after his first conviction, for selling narcotics — he maintains he has a new drug of choice. “I am addicted to our president,” Thom told the Washington Examiner. “I believe in him that strongly. Some people say I might be a little too enthusiastic about my support with him, but I don’t think you can be too enthusiastic about something you truly believe in, especially if it’s a good thing.”
Of his checkered past, he said, “The main thing that happened to me is I got really angry at God. The devil and me, we ran.” He admitted, “I was a deep crack addict. I was very, very addicted to crack.”
Thom said that many of the offenses that led to him being in and out of jail from 1994 until 2011 were drug-induced. He said he had been a crack cocaine addict but is now sober. He also has had multiple charges dismissed, including for alleged assault and for driving while intoxicated. Charges of assault and disorderly conduct were dismissed in a 2015 case in which he was found guilty of trespass and “dogs and cats at large.”
Now, he is part of a group called “Front Row Joes,” a group of hardcore Trump supporters who travel from rally to rally in support of the commander in chief. He has a dog called “Donald J. Trump.” Last October, he was featured in a Minnesota local paper saying that Trump rallies were “really lovefests” and describing how he would engage protesters in “a frank discussion with them of why they hate Trump” and “maybe point out the truth what they heard wasn’t what really was said.”
Thom told the Washington Examiner he regretted his actions at the Warren event on Saturday, where he had planned to “troll” Warren and her supporters before matters, he conceded, went off the rails. “It was just an instantaneous response,” Thom said. “I regret that I didn’t probably do it in a little bit different way. It was a learning curve for me. I guess I’ve never been on that side of it.”
After the incident in Storm Lake, where Warren stopped on her first trip to Iowa after announcing that she was exploring a presidential bid, Thom was taken into custody and charged with disorderly conduct. In a press release, the local authorities said that Thom “reportedly became aggressive and attempted to assault others in the crowd.”
Thom, who scrapes a living as an exterior house painter and as a dog breeder, said that he plans to attend other Democratic events during the 2020 cycle, particularly in Iowa — along with as many Trump rallies as he can attend. He said that in the future he would handle himself in a more “professional” way by standing back from the action.
He claimed in a Facebook post after the event, however, that he was the one assaulted. “[B]y now most people have heard that i got tossed in the gray bar hotel for standing up at a elizabeth warren event. I got assaulted and my banner stolen so when i retaliated i got arrested,” Thom wrote. “The point i want to make. if you think that the 2020 re election is going to be a cake walk, you are damn mistaken.”
“[T]his crazy woman had a line of 3 blocks in des moines iowa,” Thom wrote, referring to an event the Massachusetts Democrat held hours after an event in Storm Lake, where he was arrested. “If you want to sit on your couch and be a keyboard warrior and not get out and get involved all the work that our President has done for us will be totally gone and wasted.”
“Moral of the story,” Thom wrote, “get the hell of the couch, get involved and do it now. the left is out of control and even tho they look nuts and crazy to us trump supporters. they are motivated to destroy our country.”
