"Like some bizarre parody of a Trump rally, a belligerent man in a 'Make America Great Again' hat was booted off a plane in Shanghai Sunday..."

"... defiantly waving as a crowd of passengers jeered in the terminal: 'Lock him up! Lock him up!,'" WaPo reports . “Obvio...

"... defiantly waving as a crowd of passengers jeered in the terminal: 'Lock him up! Lock him up!,'" WaPo reports.

“Obviously, the hat provoked some of the stuff,” said Alexis Zimmerman, who was flying back to Newark from a business trip... “He wanted to sit in the whole row by himself,” Zimmerman said.

Her video shows him leaning back in his seat — hands folded behind his red hat, feet propped on someone else’s arm rest — while a woman in crutches and many others stand in the aisle, snap photos and glare....

The man said he was a diabetic, Zimmerman said. But at one point, passengers said, he also dared the flight crew to cuff him and drag him off the plane — reminding other passengers of last month’s infamous deplaning, amid a barrage of in-plane horror stories that have plagued United and the rest of the airline industry in recent years....

“He was trying to explain to the crew and captain … because he had points, he felt he deserved an upgrade,” he said. “So this was his way of getting it.”

The Trump angle is interesting, and (unsurprisingly) the video shows the incident beginning after things had cranked up, but I'm not surprised if passengers behave badly, given the incentive of special treatment (upgrades) and nervous fear-of-litigation payoffs. 

IN THE COMMENTS: Matthew Sablan said:

Does the author know what a parody is? Where's the comic exaggeration? What is funny about "lock him up?" That's not parody; that's irony.

"It’s unclear whether Chinese police did jail the man or who he was." -- If we don't know who he was... what's the story?

Ah! This is why I have a tag "MSM reports what's in social media." The story is that something's in social media. And that's the end of it. La la la. How funny!

I mean, the guy sounds like a nutjob, if we believe everything that these people reported.

I mean... really? The guy wearing the MAGA hat engages in every leftist stereotype, even the cackling "I wasted your time!" like a cartoon villain?

"The man remained defiant until the end — jeered in multiple languages, surrounded by police, he finally walked down the concourse and out of sight to an unknown fate."

WHY is his fate unknown? You're a Goddamned News Reporter. If you're going to report this, at least have the bleepin' nerve to do your job and follow up on the story to find out WHO this guy is, WHAT happened to him, etc. As it is, this sounds like an urban legend, or maybe the Chinese disappeared the MAGA Man. Who knows? Who cares! WaPo got to publish a 5-minute hate.

Why don't we hear from the female passenger he berated, or the one he called a lesbian?

So many questions that a decent reporter could solve.

MSM is just traipsing along after social media, thinking that's what we must want. It will do that, then suddenly reel around and yell at us for not wanting to receive our news as curated by professional journalists.