British Airways flight 191 from London Heathrow to Austin departed two hours late on Monday when passengers got into a fight because one of them was wearing a MAGA hat.
Both passengers were seated in premium economy. One woman demand that the other remove her pro-Trump hat. When she was refused, the pair began fighting. This apparently happened at first in the gate area and continued in the cabin after boarding. Flight attendants reported this to the captain who called authorities. The women were not immediately arrested, but they were not permitted to fly.
According to police,
Shortly after 12.45pm on Monday, 28 October, police at Heathrow were made aware of an incident involving two women waiting to board a plane in Terminal 5. A woman in her 40s and a woman in her 60s made counter allegations of affray. Enquiries are ongoing.
British Airways, for their part, “apologised to our customers for the delay and got them on the way as quickly as possible.”
It’s a little weird this happened on the Austin flight. There aren’t a lot of Trump supporters here. Austin went for Bernie in the Democratic primaries in 2016 and 2020. I can see the woman objecting to the hat being triggered – she’s probably never seen one in person before.
Over the summer, one woman got a drink in American Airlines first class and somehow thinks she got less-than-usual service because of her MAGA hat. She must not fly American very often. On United a man in a MAGA hat was removed from the aircraft, but in his case it was for self-upgrading. And here’s a woman in a MAGA hat during the pandemic refusing to wear a mask and using a racial epithet on Frontier.
@alexbarkley4
This election is incredibly close, and I don’t know anyone who actually knows what will happen to any degree of certainty. In 2016 I was confident that Hillary Clinton would win on the theory that Trump would underperform Mitt Romney with women and minorities, and you don’t become President by underperforming Mitt Romney. I was wrong. In 2020 things were closer than I expected, but went the way that I expected.
Now? Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania are just too close to be certain, and North Carolina is in play. One likely scenario is that Pennsylvania is the tipping point, and Kamala Harris will regret passing on that state’s governor as her VP nominee because the left wing of her party wouldn’t accept him as a Jew and supporter of Israel. But she could just as easily run the table on swing states.
Shortly after the 2016 election, when President Trump was first elected, a United pilot made a pre-departure announcement that passengers had to keep politics off the plane. The whole cabin cheered. No matter what happens on Tuesday, I think we’ll all be grateful to stop getting candidate and fundraising texts.