New York Daily News columnist Shaun King claims anarchists will secretly vote for Trump:

As expected, Democrats are now falling for the same trap his 16 Republican opponents fell for. They are grossly underestimating just how much Trump resonates throughout the country—in part because his appeal just doesn't make sense to them. Trump makes sense to millions, though.

He might also make sense to anarchists—who see a Trump presidency as a shortcut to mass chaos, protest, dissidence, and anger in our nation.

Increasingly, I am hearing voices from many different anarchist and revolutionary communities thinking out loud about exactly what might happen if Trump somehow won the election in November.

King is hitting on an important truth here. A Trump win would make the country more volatile.

But there are stupid people of every political stripe and it's lazy to make them (King doesn't cite any specific examples) representative of an entire ideology. Susan Sarandon, a liberal Sanders supporter, made the same pro-chaos-pro-Trump argument that King attributes to anarchists. Idiots may thrive in Trump world, but they don't speak for everyone.

Noam Chomsky, the most prominent anarchist in the country, supports Bernie Sanders. But he would "absolutely" vote for Hillary Clinton if he lived in a swing state where Trump was the alternative. He attributes Trump's rise to Americans identifying as "isolated, helpless, victim[s] of powerful forces that they do not understand and cannot influence" under neoliberalism.

I'm sure most anarchists—the decent ones—share this view: Without much fanfare, they'll do what they can within the constraints of the political system to stop Trump. They certainly won't vote for him. In the streets, they'll be on the front lines, putting their bodies on the line, pushing back against him and the far right. In Pittsburgh last month, anarchists organized a march against Trump with a banner reading, "Fight fascist scum, fuck Trump." They issued a communique echoing Chomsky. In the tradition of antifascist militants, they tried to crash the Trump rally:

Our contingent came prepared with a dozen black and Anti-Fascist Action flags on strong poles and a large black banner. As we arrived at the convention center, we marched and pushed straight through a crowd of Trump supporters, knocked aside barricades, and pushed to the main entrance of the building. Many other demonstrators had already made it that far and were blocking the roads; others followed us through the hole in the crowd we created.

That's a far more accurate snapshot of anarchists today than the notion of them sneaking into the voting booth to cast ballots for Trump. At the local level, when rumors circulated last December of a neo-Nazi rally, anarchists turned out by the hundreds on short notice to lead an antifascist march through Capitol Hill. One wonders where they were on Saturday, when Trump campaigned in Lynden and immigrant activists attempted to blockade his convoy.

UPDATE 5/12: I was mistaken about anarchists being absent from the Trump blockade—at least a few were on the scene. One sent me this note:

There were several anarchists of color that were supporting at all levels, from medics to the blockade itself. I am one of them. I would never vote for Hillary Clinton, or Donald Trump or even Bernie Sanders. If you can retract that we were not there as it does more to divide the support that we have worked hard to build over the years. Seattle is a very tender city, and erasing anarchists of color is not what I think you were intending in your article.