This is What Happened When I Brought a Donald Trump Piñata to a Trump Protest

On Tuesday, I began my summer internship with OC Weekly. Almost immediately, the Mexican-in-Chief had a task for me and my fellow intern, Chris: Pass out posters of the notorious Trump donkey show cover drawn by legendary cartoonista Lalo Alcaraz to protestors at Trump’s Anaheim Convention Center rally. Yeah!

I attended last month’s Trump rally in Costa Mesa as a protestor; for the Anaheim one, I planned to do intern grunt work and hawk the posters. And then my uncle messed it all up by bringing me a Trump piñata as a surprise.

Trump piñatas, of course, are the must-have item of the year for Latino families (sorry, Frozen piñatas). It’s a genius idea, really: In our culture, piñatas are a fun entertainment which end up being destroyed, so why not have the figure in question be Trump? I can’t think of any other villain that’s gone so mainstream so fast in the piñata community, which shows how hated he is by raza. I wasn’t planning on bringing one to the Trump rally, but no way was I going to reject my tío’s gift. So I did what any self-respecting Mexican would’ve done: I stuffed it full of Mexican candy.  

It was a pretty plain version, so I decided to give it some definition: drew a snarl where his mouth should be, added some eyeliner to his soulless eyes, and drew a pretty swastika on the white of his shirt, underneath his wispy tie. I walked into the convention center with the posters, the piñata and Mexican candy to hand out, in a token of friendship. But Trump supporters weren’t happy at all. Shouts of “Illegal,” “Build the wall”, and “Go back to Mexico” were thrown at me when people saw the piñata (Hey, pendejos: I’m an American citizen, but I identify with undocumented folks because of my mother). Some people thought the posters were a depiction of Hillary Clinton and gladly took them, but when they figured out it was Trump getting the donkey, they all got upset and began tearing up the posters or giving them back. Some people complained to security and said what I was handing out was “pornographic,” so I got the boot to the cheer of Trump supporters. Trumpbros: biggest babies on Earth.

I then spent about an hour outside the Convention Center handing out posters, because that was my job, you know?

Outside, people’s reactions to the piñata was far more positive. People took pictures with it, and asked if I was going to let them smash it. Of course! What else are piñatas for? But I had a job to do first: hand out the Lalo posters to whoever wanted them. Chris and I ended up handing out at least 400 of them, and they made appearances in the Los Angeles Times, NBC News, and FOX News—BOOM.

Finally, though, it was time. At about 12:30—right about when Trump was leading his seals inside the convention center in chants of “BUILD THE WALL. BUILD THE WALL,” I lifted the piñata in the air.

“¡What do you guys want to do to this piñata!” I yelled, to the cheers of the crowd. Quickly, a guy came from behind, leaped into the air, and delivered a crushing roundhouse punch, knocking Trump to the ground. People did the rest. Trump’s body got ripped apart almost immediately. Candy started flying everywhere, and adults turned into kids trying to grab as many mango-chile lollipops and Tomis as possible. As what usually happens after people destroy a piñata, people began grabbing the body parts that weren’t destroyed—a leg, an arm, and the head—and began shaking them to get any last candy inside. The crowd loved it.

I ended up grabbing the head, first hanging it on the side of my belt strap and then on the back of my backpack. But I eventually placed it on top of an American flag, then a Mexican flag, because I wanted to keep it as a memento for my Mexican-in-Chief. 

But what I didn’t know was that conservatives were freaking out about our piñata fun. KFI-AM 604 morons John and Ken said our”beheading” of the Trump piñata was “ISIS-inspired”—never mind those assholes had a whole campaign back in 2009 titled “Head on a Stick” where they had thousands of people chant that at rallies from Fullerton to Corona, and had graphics on their website of bloody heads on pikes (and let’s not forget the gross sound graphic they’d gleefully play on the air of putting a new head on a stick—we don’t forget, cabrones). Meanwhile, Orange County Register reporter Chris Haire tweeted that a “Trump piñata…got decapitated,” a line that made it into the paper’s final story, which said “at least one Donald Trump piñata was decapitated and its head used as a makeshift soccer ball,” making it seem as if there was an army of Mexican beheaders destroying poor Trump piñatas and doing stuff narcos do.

Nah, bruh: there was only one piñata at the whole event. My piñata. The Weekly piñata. These pendejos obviously have never hit a piñata in their life. We didn’t decapitate shit; a head is all that’s usually left of piñatas. And OF COURSE people would play a quick futbolito with a piñata head; it’s round, and it’s there. We do it whether it’s Trump, Wolverine, or pinche Elsa.

Man, Trumpbros complain about everything! As my boy Aaron Rodgers says, R.E.L.A.X.