Kyle Rittenhouse Changes his mind about not endorsing Trump after online pile-on

Not sure if he started to cry while the trump supporters were taking him to task. Must be the heat was to great and he was not armed.

“Kyle Rittenhouse” reverses course on not endorsing Trump after online pile-on

The Guardian

Man who killed activists in 2020 questioned Trump’s gun rights bona fides before backing down in face of hate tweets.

Acquitted killer Kyle Rittenhouse announced he would not be supporting Donald Trump’s attempt to return to the White House – but ultimately ended up politically endorsing him anyway after being inundated with vitriolic messages from the former president’s followers.

The flip-flop by Rittenhouse – who has fashioned himself as a gun rights activist after shooting two people to death in Kenosha, Wisconsin, during racial justice protests there in 2020 – followed an initial pledge to write in former congressman Ron Paul as his choice on November’s presidential election ballot.

In a video posted on the social media platform X, Rittenhouse argued that Trump had a “bad” record with respect to gun rights and explained he would instead back Paul.

The 21-year-old then spent the next several hours grappling with ire directed at him by proponents of Trump’s “Make America great again” (Maga) movement, who embraced Rittenhouse as a hero after the shootings in Kenosha and raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for his successful criminal defense. Among other insults, they taunted him with prison rape jokes and accused him of betraying Trump less than three years after the Republican met with him at his Mar-a-Lago resort and declared Rittenhouse “really a nice young man”.

One of the more typical comments responding to Rittenhouse’s temporary endorsement of Paul was from political commentator Joey Mannarino, who wrote on X: “If not for Maga, you would be rotting in a prison bending over for Bubba … Fuck you and the horse you rode in on!”

Another X user added: “I wish they would’ve let you go to prison so you could be the bitch you actually are.”

By Friday afternoon, Rittenhouse had gone back on X and wrote that he was “100% behind Donald Trump and [would] encourage every gun owner to join me in helping send him back to the White House”.

“Over the past 12 hours, I’ve had a series of productive conversations with members of the Trump’s team, and I am confident he will be the strong ally gun owners need to defend our … rights,” Rittenhouse also said. “My comments made last night were ill-informed and unproductive.”

Some commentators met the quick about-face with equally swift mockery.

“You stand for absolutely nothing and have zero backbone,” read one reply. Another said: “This time try not to murder anyone while you’re backpedaling.”

Rittenhouse was 17 when he traveled 20 miles from his home in Antioch, Illinois, as protests erupted after a white police officer shot Jacob Blake, who is Black.

Roaming Kenosha with other armed men claiming to be self-appointed security guards, Rittenhouse used a rifle to fatally shoot 36-year-old Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber, then 26. He also injured Gage Grosskreutz, then 27, and was charged with five felonies, including first-degree intentional homicide.

Rittenhouse contended to the jury which heard his case that he carried out the shootings in self-defense and had acted justifiably. At the end of a tumultuous trial, jurors found him not guilty of all charges against him, a verdict hailed by far-right politicians and pundits but decried by civil rights activists.