AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — A federal trial is set to begin Monday over claims that supporters of former President Donald Trump threatened and harassed a Biden-Harris campaign bus in Texas four years ago, disrupting the campaign on the last day of early voting.

The civil trial over the so-called “Trump Train” comes as Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris race into the final two months of their head-to-head fight for the White House in November.

Democrats on the bus said they feared for their lives as Trump supporters in dozens of trucks and cars nearly caused collisions, harassing their convoy for more than 90 minutes, hitting a Biden-Harris campaign staffer’s car and forcing the bus driver to repeatedly swerve for safety.

“For at least 90 minutes, defendants terrorized and menaced the driver and passengers,” the lawsuit alleges. “They played a madcap game of highway ‘chicken’ coming within three to four inches of the bus. They tried to run the bus off the road.”

The highway confrontation prompted an FBI investigation, which led then-President Trump to declare that in his opinion, “these patriots did nothing wrong.”

Among those suing is former Texas state senator and Democratic nominee for governor Wendy Davis, who was on the bus that day. Davis rose to prominence in 2013 with her 13-hour filibuster of an anti-abortion bill in the state Capitol. The other three plaintiffs are a campaign volunteer, staffer and the bus driver.

The lawsuit names six defendants, accusing them of violating the “Ku Klux Klan Act,” an 1871 federal law to stop political violence and intimidation tactics.

The same law was used in part to indict Trump on federal election interference charges over attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election in the run-up to the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol insurrection. Enacted by Congress during the Reconstruction Era, the law was created to protect Black men’s right to vote by prohibiting political violence.

Videos of the confrontation on Oct. 30, 2020, that were shared on social media, including some recorded by the Trump supporters, show a group of cars and pickup trucks — many adorned with large Trump flags — riding alongside the campaign bus as it traveled from San Antonio to Austin. The Trump supporters at times boxed in the bus, slowed it down, kept it from exiting the highway and repeatedly forced the bus driver to make evasive maneuvers to avoid a collision, the lawsuit says.

On the two previous days, Biden-Harris supporters were subjected to death threats, with some Trump supporters displaying weapons, according to the lawsuit. These threats in combination with the highway confrontation led Democrats to cancel an event later in the day.

The lawsuit, which seeks unspecified monetary damages, alleges the defendants were members of local groups near San Antonio that coordinated the confrontation.

Francisco Canseco, an attorney for three of the defendants, said his clients acted lawfully and did not infringe on the free speech rights of those on the bus.

“It’s more of a constitutional issue,” Canseco said. “It’s more of who has the greater right to speak behind their candidate.”

Judge Robert Pitman, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, is set to preside over Monday’s trial. He denied the defendants’ pretrial motion for a summary judgment in their favor, ruling last month that the KKK Act prohibits the physical intimidation of people traveling to political rallies, even when racial bias isn’t a factor.

While one of the defendants, Eliazar Cisneros, argued his group had a First Amendment right to demonstrate support for their candidate, the judge wrote that “assaulting, intimidating, or imminently threatening others with force is not protected expression.”

“Just as the First Amendment does not protect a driver waving a political flag from running a red light, it does not protect Defendants from allegedly threatening Plaintiffs with reckless driving,” Pitman wrote.

A prior lawsuit filed over the “Trump Train” alleged the San Marcos Police Department violated the Ku Klux Klan Act by failing to send a police escort after multiple 911 calls were made and a bus rider said his life was threatened. It accused officers of privately laughing and joking about the emergency calls. San Marcos settled the lawsuit in 2023 for $175,000 and a requirement that law enforcement get training on responding to political violence.

___

Lathan is a corps member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.

Michigan was due for a significant step back. Everybody in college football knew it, including the Wolverines’ millions of fans. The team won all 15 games last year en route to a national championship, then lost 13 draft picks and head coach Jim Harbaugh to the NFL. Some regression was inevitable.

Saturday was still a hell of a jolt, though. The Texas Longhorns walked into Ann Arbor and drew and quartered the Wolverines. Texas, merely a one-touchdown favorite coming in, won by a 31–12 score that didn’t even fully capture the lopsidedness of the performance. This was a match between the nominal defending national champions and a current national championship contender. The score was 24–3 at halftime, and at that point, Texas had controlled the ball for two-thirds of the afternoon. Texas quarterback Quinn Ewers took whatever he wanted as the air gradually seeped out of the Big House, filled with 111,000 humans.

It’s not unprecedented for someone to destroy a defending champ this early in the year. (In 2020, LSU took an arguably uglier home loss in its first game post-title.) Michigan is dealing with many of the same problems that plague dozens of teams every year, including the best ones. Namely, it’s hard to resupply quickly after losing tons of good players and most of a program’s key coaches. But Michigan was also a victim of timing, as Harbaugh’s move to the Los Angeles Chargers clashed inconveniently with college football’s new calendar. Add in a dash of post-championship complacency, and you have a recipe for a rapid (if temporary) downfall that no program has ever quite brewed up before.

Michigan’s most noticeable problem is that its quarterbacks suck. The team had JJ McCarthy, a first-round NFL draftee, slinging and running the ball the past three years. It did not develop a capable backup, however, and an offseason alternating between buzz and worry has now materialized into a season of horrible QB play. The presumed starter over the summer, as far as the public knew, was last year’s top backup, Alex Orji. But most people have never seen Orji throw more than a handful of passes. The job went instead to Davis Warren, a former walk-on who likely would’ve had more scholarship opportunities if he did not have to spend time and energy beating cancer late in high school. Now, it is clear after two games that neither Warren nor Orji has any juice. Michigan’s quarterbacks offer very little—not just compared to the dynamic McCarthy or a star like Ewers at Texas, but compared to any Division I program. There are teams in the lower-level Football Championship Subdivision that can trot out better passers.

There are other problems. Over the previous three years, no team had a more consistent, physical offensive line than Michigan. The Wolverines’ big lads up front were ferocious maulers who enabled an excellent running game. It isn’t a coincidence that Sherrone Moore—the man elevated to head coach during Harbaugh’s 2023 suspensions and after his departure—started out coaching this group. But the line turned over all five starters from the championship team, and it has yet to congeal into a dominant unit. Michigan also lost starting running back and program legend Blake Corum, and while it returned a couple of tailbacks with experience, neither is Corum. The whole operation is a lot less special in 2024. Meanwhile, the team has a mediocre group of wideouts going after passes from a lesser quarterback. It’ll be enough to beat most of the flotsam in the middle of the Big Ten, but not the best teams in the country.

Defensively, the Wolverines should still be quite good. Most of their stars from a dominant 2023 unit are back. But they lost three top-100 NFL picks on that side of the ball, and they lost their coordinator, who rolled out to Southern California with Harbaugh. Texas picked on some of the unit’s fill-ins on Saturday and beat up the Michigan defense worse than anyone had in a few years. There is no area of the game in which Michigan seems better now than it was last year, except perhaps kicker, where they got a stud transfer from Arkansas State. It’s possible that no team in college football history has lost more playing and coaching talent from one year to the next. Things may yet get worse before they get better.

All of these issues flowed downhill from Harbaugh. He had wanted for years to get back to the NFL, where he came within a whisker of winning a Super Bowl with the San Francisco 49ers. The Chargers finally bit in January, finalizing the deal right after Michigan beat Washington to win the college title. Harbaugh is a great pickup for the Chargers for the same reasons he was a great coach for Michigan.

A college team losing its coach to the pros is a sign of a healthy program, but in modern college football, it’s also a massive inconvenience that sets the team back relative to its peers. The NFL’s hiring-and-firing carousel doesn’t get going until January, after most college teams are done playing and after the transfer portal “window,” where teams can go shopping for other schools’ players, is closed. Michigan is not heavily reliant on transfers, preferring to develop and retain its own players. But the 2023 championship team was a good example of how an elite team uses the portal to supplement its roster: Star edge rusher Josaiah Stewart arrived from Coastal Carolina, offensive tackle LaDarius Henderson from Arizona State.

Michigan, then, was always due to have huge roster holes. The program added a couple of players shortly before Harbaugh left. But Michigan, busy with both the College Football Playoff and coach uncertainty, could not be a major transfer portal player after the season. Another transfer window opened in April, but there aren’t many great players available that late in the year. Teams have already gone through spring practice, compensation deals with schools’ outside collectives are already inked, and the coaching turnover that prompts a lot of transfers is in the rear view. Could Michigan’s outside boosters have waved a million bucks in front of a better QB last December, before Harbaugh left? Almost certainly. Could the program have landed someone better in April, though? The answer is still probably yes, but there just weren’t many great QBs available by that point. The pool of talent had gotten shallower, and Michigan may have thought (wrongly) that its existing quarterbacks were a better bet.

It was Harbaugh’s extensive dalliance with the NFL—not karmic payback for stealing signs—that put Michigan in an extra bad spot this season. Wolverines fans would take that trade 1,000 times out of 1,000. Flags, after all, fly forever. But Michigan was due for a decline even if Harbaugh had stayed. And then the lateness of his move made it more difficult for Moore to patch up his team in his first year in charge.

The program’s long-term outlook remains rosy. Michigan will never be dislodged as one of the sport’s blue-bloods, and Moore has every chance to be a solid head coach. He’s already shown hints of that, filling in for a suspended Harbaugh for nearly half of last season. He was Harbaugh’s obvious replacement, and it must have been nice for Michigan to not have to mount a sprawling search.

But things may not be fun for quite a while. The eventual punishment the NCAA metes out for the sign-stealing affair won’t be as bad as the indignity of getting annihilated by Ohio State this November for the first time since 2019. The best course of action will be to keep staring very intently at 2023’s championship trophies. In the best case, they are bright enough to cause temporary blindness.

The Michigan Wolverines dropped their first game of the season on Saturday, losing to Texas, 31-12. It was a tough game to watch if you’re a Michigan fan, and the advanced stats from Pro Football Focus (PFF) agree with the eye test.

Let’s get into this week’s player grades and snap counts.

Offense

OL Evan Link – 57 snaps / 27.2 overall player grade

OL Dominick Giudice – 57 / 59.3

OL Myles Hinton – 57 / 55.6

OL Giovanni El-Hadi – 57 / 66.0

OL Josh Priebe – 57 / 65.6

QB Davis Warren – 54 / 76.5

TE Colston Loveland – 44 / 55.7

WR Tyler Morris – 40 / 58.1

WR Kendrick Bell – 39 / 53.1

RB Donovan Edwards – 32 / 71.9

WR Semaj Morgan – 31 / 68.1

WR CJ Charleston – 19 / 62.3

TE Marlin Klein – 17 / 57.8

WR Peyton O’Leary – 15 / 72.9

RB Ben Hall – 14 / 62.8

TE/FB Max Bredeson – 13 / 73.0

RB Kalel Mulings – 13 / 64.5

WR Fred Moore – 7 / 52.3

QB Alex Orji – 3 / 56.6

WR Amorion Walker – 1 / 59.0

Takeaways: After rotating in Greg Crippen with Dominick Giudice last week against Fresno State, Crippen didn’t see the field at all against Texas. It appears that position battle is over, as Giudice played every snap along the offensive line on Saturday.

Additionally, it’s interesting to see Kendrick Bell’s snap counts increase from Week 1 (30) to Week 2 (39). He was a guy that kind of flew under the radar this offseason, with guys like Fred Moore, Amorion Walker and CJ Charleston garnering more attention at the position. The coaching staff seems to trust him the most as the team’s WR3 at this point.

Surprises: It’s a shock that Kalel Mullings and Max Bredeson only got 13 snaps each on Saturday. For a ground and pound team like Michigan is, it’s stunning that these two hardly played at all. But I guess that’s what happens when you give up 24 points in the first half and only put a field goal on the board to counter that. Being down by three touchdowns to start the second half likely had a role with that, but to have two of your better offensive players on the bench more often than not is … not great.

Defense

CB Jyaire Hill – 65 / 57.2

LB Ernest Hausmann – 65 / 43.9

LB Jaishawn Barham – 64 / 43.7

S Makari Paige – 61 / 56.2

DT Kenneth Grant – 60 / 61.7

CB Will Johnson – 58 / 70.3

DT Mason Graham – 58 / 67.9

S Quinten Johnson – 57 / 58.3

CB Zeke Berry – 50 / 63.0

Edge Derrick Moore – 46 / 64.3

Edge Josaiah Stewart – 45 / 75.9

DT Rayshaun Benny – 28 / 74.4

Edge TJ Guy – 26 / 64.6

Edge Cameron Brandt – 25 / 52.3

S Wesley Walker – 21 / 55.8

CB Aamir Hall – 17 / 59.9

LB Jimmy Rolder – 13 / 55.3

DT Trey Pierce – 7 / 60.8

DT Ike Iwunnah – 6 / 82.3

DT Enow Etta – 4 / 62.4

CB Kody Jones – 3 / 60.0

CB Myles Pollard – 2 / 60.0

Takeaways: Kenneth Grant playing 60 snaps and Mason Graham playing 58 snaps could be detrimental for them as the season goes on. They are two of the best defensive tackles in the country, but if you’re playing that many snaps per game, even the best of the best are going to get gassed.

A season ago, Graham played 442 total snaps while Grant played 403 snaps. Through two games, Graham is already up to 104 snaps while Grant is at 101. For them to already be a quarter of the way to what they played all of last year is insane.

Additionally, the linebackers were graded pretty harshly by PFF, with Ernest Hausmann and Jaishawn Barham both grading out below 50. They gave Barham a very good tackling grade of 80.4, but nothing else was graded higher than 52.6. PFF also dinged Hausmann for three missed tackles, and for giving up five catches on five targets in coverage. It was a really rough day for the linebackers.

Surprises: Where in the world was Ja’Den McBurrows? The player to relieve Zeke Berry in the slot was redshirt sophomore Kody Jones, who only had 59 snaps in his entire career until yesterday. Perhaps McBurrows had a last second injury pop up, but that was an interesting thing to see on the player report.