Yellow alert (banana)! Red alert (tomato)!

At a rally in Florida during the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump said the election would decide whether the United States would remain a free country or “we become a corrupt banana republic controlled by large donors and foreign governments.”

Throughout his presidency, critics assailed Trump’s leadership style as that of an authoritarian running a banana republic. But thanks to an October 2021 videotaped deposition released last week, we know how terribly wrong his critics were. Trump could never be associated with a banana republic because he’s afraid of bananas, tomatoes, pineapples and other fruit being thrown at him.

Federal guidelines recommend that adults eat at least four to five servings of fruits and vegetables per day. Like each of us, Trump doesn’t want those servings hurled at him. But it’s his obsession with flying fruit as deadly projectiles which sounds fruit loopy.

The testimony comes from a civil lawsuit brought by protesters alleging to have been assaulted by Trump’s security detail outside his New York offices in 2015.

Pointing to a pattern of candidate Trump encouraging violence at his rallies, the lawyers focused on a Feb. 1, 2016, campaign speech in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where Trump told supporters, “If you see someone getting ready to throw a tomato, just knock the crap out of them, would you?”

In the deposition, that comment led to this exchange between an attorney and Trump:

Q: “That was your statement.”

Trump: “Oh, yeah. It was very dangerous.”

Q: “What was very dangerous?”

Trump: “We were threatened.”

Q: “With what?”

Trump: “They were going to throw fruit. We were threatened, we had a threat.”

When Trump is asked how he became aware that people were going to throw fruit, he answered that they were told, and “you get hit with fruit, it’s — no, it’s very violent stuff.”

After attorneys agree that a tomato is a fruit, Trump says, “It’s worse than tomato, it’s other things also. But tomato, when they start doing that stuff, it’s very dangerous. There was an alert out that day.”

Later, the once-most-powerful man in the world said that “we were put on alert they were going to do fruit.”

“And some fruit is a lot worse than — tomatoes are bad, by the way,” he said. “But it’s very dangerous. No, I wanted them to watch. They were on alert. I remember that specific event because everybody was on alert. They were going to hit — they were going to hit hard.”

Asked if it was all right for his security or audience members to use physical force to stop the assault of flying fruit, Trump, the most feared Republican in the country, answered, “To stop somebody from throwing pineapples, tomatoes, bananas, stuff like that, yeah, it’s dangerous stuff.”

Those of you tempted to laugh have never seen the damage a perfectly thrown kumquat can do to the human body. And well-aimed plums have done more to topple governments and alter the course of history than all the armies led by kings and generals.

What’s important to grasp is that ahead of the Cedar Rapids rally, Trump’s security detail had picked up — ahem — “intelligence” that plotters were stocking up on produce so they could infiltrate his rally and “hit hard.”

One of the most chilling scenes in the movie “Malcolm X” is when the assassins sit around a table piled with guns they are preparing and loading. The vision terrifying Trump was of protesters sitting around a kitchen table divvying up the arsenal of tomatoes, bananas, pineapples and other dangerous fruit with which they were going to attack him.

Twice in his deposition, Trump mentioned pineapples which, given their size, may truly be one of the most dangerous fruits. But other than Patrick Mahomes and Aaron Rodgers, who has the arm strength and accuracy to use a pineapple to take out a presidential candidate?

It should be noted that no tomatoes, bananas, pineapples or other dangerous fruit were confiscated from protesters at the Feb. 1, 2016, Cedar Falls rally.

It should also be noted that tomatoes, bananas and pineapples were not among the weapons used by Trump supporters on Jan. 6, 2021, when they attacked the Capitol.