Trump supporter’s truck vandalized with swastika
GREENWICH — Carl Higbie went for a workout at his local gym Monday morning and returned to the parking lot to find that someone had vandalized his red pickup truck.
A fistsize swastika was scratched into the paint job on his Ford F250, not far from the bright blue “TrumpPence” bumper sticker that adorns the rear window. He later filed a police report about the vandalism.
Higbie, a prominent supporter of President Donald Trump who briefly served in his administration, says his truck has been vandalized before. Someone threw a rock at it while he was driving, he says, and on another occasion, someone doused his Trump sticker with a milkshake. It was scratched with an obscenity another time.
Higbie said it’s possible that someone recognized him and went after his
truck as a personal attack. But he believes it was the bumper sticker itself that attracted the vandal’s attention.
“This is the first time I reported it,” said Higbie, a former U.S. Navy SEAL who served in Iraq, and who has a history of controversy. He has faced condemnation, in Greenwich and elsewhere, for comments branded crude and bigoted.
He went to police headquarters Wednesday, wanting an official record of the latest act of criminal mischief. “It’s happened so much, it’s got to go on record,” said Higbie, who hoped a suspect would be apprehended.
“I want to put this person on every network,” he said. “I’m happy to discuss anything with anyone, anywhere. But this is unacceptable.”
Higbie acknowledged he had a provocative track record as a broadcaster and commentator.
“I don’t like gay people” he once stated on an Internet program. “The black race ... is lazier than the white race” was another comment from Higbie that drew intense criticism.
He resigned from a post in the Trump administration — where he was chief of external affairs for the Corporation for National and Community Service — in 2018 after a CNN online report about his controversial comments. The report revealed racist, sexist, antiMuslim and antiLGBTQ+ remarks that he had made in 2013 while hosting an Internet radio show called “Sound of Freedom.”
Higbie subsequently apologized and said he was attempting to be a radio “shock jock.” He reiterated those apologies this week — “It was stupid stuff.”
When Higbie organized a panel discussion through America’s Voice Network at Greenwich Town Hall early this year, he was met with a storm of criticism.
The event for the online network, where he works as a news show host, was billed as a “conversation about current events with panelists from the left and the right” on topics such as immigration, gun control, taxes and foreign policy.
U.S. Rep. Jim Himes, D4th District, declined an invitation to attend, citing Higbie’s earlier comments.
“Mr. Higbie is entitled to his noxious views, including the racism and homophobia that ended his work with the Trump administration,” Himes said at the time. “But Mr. Higbie is not entitled to the benefit of the doubt in terms of what sort of spectacle he may be planning. While I hope the community will meet Mr. Higbie’s hate with the scorn and rejection it deserves, I will not add legitimacy or in any way normalize Mr. Higbie’s bigotry. I would hope that all other elected officials, regardless of party, would make that same choice.”
But the vandalism on Higbie’s truck drew criticism from a local organization that opposes Trump and his policies.
Nerlyn Pierson, cofounder of Indivisible Greenwich, which was founded in the wake of Trump’s election, said she condemns criminal acts.
“I can unequivocally say that committing or supporting violence against someone for their beliefs is never acceptable. Trump has created a toxic environment of divisiveness and hate that unfortunately has trickled down into society and daytoday encounters,” she said in an email. “No one should applaud violence against those who stand with Trump and his presidency, nor applaud violence against those who stand up to fight Trump and his politics of hate.”
At police headquarters, a report was taken, and a police supervisor said there will be a followup.
The keying of the truck will be investigated, as all reports of vandalism are, police spokesman Lt. John Slusarz said.
“Just like any other incident, it will be investigated. We will be looking to see if there’s videotape, doorbell cameras, surveillance,” Slusarz said. Anyone caught causing the damage would be subject to a charge of criminal mischief, he said.
Higbie, who works as a construction supervisor in addition to the a parttime broadcast job, says he understands the hostility that Trump arouses, but he said it should not permit criminal acts.
“There’s no doubt Trump has lit a fire on the left. But your level of anger can’t justify your level of crazy,” he said. He said the latest act of vandalism was a “variant on a hate crime.”
The former Navy commando said he would not be intimidated by critics — and he said he receives a steady stream of hate mail and threats online. Higbie said he carries a gun with him on a regular basis — legally, he noted — for self defense.
“I have a disdain for violence, after years in and out of war. But I will never surrender my beliefs to the mob, and I will defend myself, never back down. I would use the lowest level of force, and I hope it never comes to that. But I am exponentially prepared,” he said. “Force will be met with force.”
Higbie said the “toxicity” argument that antiTrump critics express is selfserving and said he found the Nazi analogies wrongheaded. “This is typical of the far left, they don’t like something Trump does and they call him a Nazi,” he said.
The latest incident in Greenwich is part of a broader trend, with animosity flowing from the nation’s capital to Main Street, U.S.A., propelled by social media and an outrageprone media environment. The vandalism that hit Higbie’s truck in Greenwich appears to fall in line with the refusal of service at a Virginia restaurant to Trump’s spokeswoman, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, or the attempt to identify Trump’s financial backers in other parts of the country by politicians and activists.
“I would say the polarization that has set in within the last 10 years is extreme — there’s so much emotional intensity on both sides,” said Professor Gary Rose of Sacred Heart University in Fairfield. “People who scratch swastikas on cars, or accost people in restaurants, they come out of the woodwork during periods of intensity like this. They feel like they have cover. There’s a sense they’re doing something that many support . ... Tribal, that’s a good work to describe it.”
Rose, a political science professor, said there have been other periods of extreme turbulence in the contemporary period, but the latest round of hostilities feels more personalized, more directed at individuals.
“Those protests about Vietnam, or the urban riots of the ‘60s, were policy issues. Now, it’s hatred of the individual, or hatred of Trump,” Rose said, “It’s personal.”
Higbie said a repair shop would buff out the scratch marks at a minimal cost. The vehicle was at the shop Thursday.