The Wright State University student who jumped a barricade and rushed at Donald Trump has deleted a tweet saying that he would be “smacking fire … and see how his wig cap hold up” if he ever got into a Trump rally.
Secret Service agents prevented 22-year-old Tommy DiMassimo from reaching Trump. DiMassimo, who is due in court Wednesday to face charges of inducing panic and disorderly conduct, claimed on CNN Sunday that there wouldn’t have been any “point” in assaulting Trump, because he was about six inches shorter than the “giant man,” and it “would have accomplished nothing.”
“He said he could understand, though, how people might have perceived he was planning to attack Trump, and that he hadn’t expected so many Secret Service officers,” CNN reported.
An examination of tweets saved late Saturday night compared to his timeline on Sunday before the CNN interview went live shows that DiMassimo only deleted a few tweets he made in the last week. While the others were innocuous replies to an apparent friend, one tweet must have concerned him enough to scrub, before he got his moment in the spotlight.
“Let me into a Trump rally I’m smacking fire into and see how his wig cap hold up,” DiMassimo tweeted March 6. He has since deleted the tweet.
DiMassimo’s tweets indicate that he’s a huge hip-hop fan, and the expression “smacking fire” is urban slang for giving someone a full smack to the face. Before its deletion, it was quoted in only two Internet reports, according to Google. A twitterer asked him about it a few times, but DiMassimo ignored the tweets.
Read the deleted tweet:
Tommy DiMassimo’s deleted tweet
Confronted by critics at his Twitter account “MARLON BANDO @Younglionking7,” DiMassimo argued, “Every protest I’ve participated in has been nonviolent.” He also said that he wasn’t “attempting to harm Donald Trump.”
But on Monday, DiMassimo also claimed he “risked life,” which would have been unlikely if his intent was only to grab Trump’s “podium away from him and take his mic away from him” to “send a message” decrying “truly just violent white supremacist ideas.”
After being released on Saturday, a defiant DiMassimo posed for a selfie with three young women and directed an “F-bomb” at Trump in one tweet, and also claimed he had given a spit-covered handshake before the rally.
Before the rally, DiMassimo tweeted that his “goal was martyrdom,” and when someone asked DiMassio to “punch him plz,” he responded, “We gone see.”