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Daye Gottsche let the stranger into the car without knowing he was a right-wing provocateur who had been leading a march to support President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.

She didn’t realize that the demonstrators she saw on her drive had gathered at Minneapolis City Hall on Saturday to counterprotest — and were chasing him away, throwing punches at him. Gottsche did not recognize that this man was Jake Lang, who had been accused of beating police officers with a baseball bat during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and was jailed for four years before Trump pardoned him.

She saw only a man in need of rescue.

“Please help me,” Lang said, standing outside her friend’s car door, Gottsche told the Washington Post. “They hurt me bad.”

Gottsche saw a cut on his lip and scrapes on his face. From the driver’s side, her friend unlocked the doors. Lang jumped in the back seat.

As they waited for the stoplight to turn green, protesters swarmed them, shouting “That’s him!” according to video of the incident and interviews with Gottsche and Lang. People pried open the doors and kicked Lang. Some hit the car itself. Finally, Lang, Gottsche, and her friend sped away.

Within minutes, footage of the moment surfaced online. It fueled speculation about how Lang had escaped the reach of counterprotesters and who had helped him pull it off. The reality was simpler — and in some ways, more complicated — than what most guessed.

Inside the car was Gottsche, a 22-year-old transgender woman and singer-songwriter who said the choice to help Lang felt easy. She thought he might have been hurt by ICE officers, carrying with him the same fear that she and her neighbors have felt for weeks.

But minutes before Lang was begging for help outside the car, he had been blasting “Ice Ice Baby” to support federal immigration agents and yelling about how immigrants were “replacing” white Americans. After facing attacks from the crowd, he was seen bleeding from the back of his head.

Gottsche said if she had to relive the encounter, she would make the same decision to help Lang.

“I don’t necessarily know if he deserved our kindness, but I would not change anything that happened,” she said.

Afraid for her own safety, Gottsche had sat out the anti-ICE protests roiling Minneapolis. But, she said, she opposes the presence of the thousands of federal officers who have spent their days stopping people to ask for paperwork, pepper-spraying protesters and door-knocking in search of undocumented immigrants. Now, Gottsche sees her decision to rescue Lang as a sort of ironic intervention.

“I feel like it was meant to happen, because who knows — had we not stopped, he might have died,” she said. “He was really hurt, and I would hate to have something like that on my conscience.”

To Lang, receiving help from people who disagreed with him presented “a powerful kind of imagery,” a reminder of a higher power at play. He said he wanted to believe that had they known his beliefs, they still would have helped — but he doubts it, given public social media posts he saw from Gottsche afterward. He referenced one video in which she said, “We’re letting the wolves have you next time.”

“That’s very sad and disappointing,” he told the Post. “And I pray God checks their heart on that.”

Asked about the video, Gottsche said she had made it just minutes after Lang left the car and before she had even begun to process what had transpired. She said she may have taken her remarks too far.

But, Gottsche said, she wondered whether, if the roles had been reversed, Lang would have helped her. In the 48 hours since the interaction, Gottsche said she and her friend have been the target of derogatory, threatening messages and posts with false information from right-wing social media accounts.

Since an ICE officer shot and killed 37-year-old Renée Good on Jan. 7, protests have spilled into the streets of Minneapolis daily. In a different world, Gottsche might have joined them.

After a police officer murdered George Floyd in 2020, Gottsche, then a high school student, joined thousands in Minnesota to protest police brutality. Gottsche, who is half Black, marched with a sign reading, “Stop killing us.”

But she doesn’t feel safe anymore, she said. She had seen videos of the shooting of Good, a white woman who had been in her car, blocks away from home. She had watched Vice President JD Vance say the ICE officer who killed Good had “absolute immunity.”

“I felt like that was my warning to just not” protest, Gottsche said. “That’s not normal.”

So she chose to keep her support of the Minneapolis demonstrations subtle. She honked when driving by protesters. Then she went about her day.

On Saturday, Gottsche and her friend decided to grab drinks. The bar they wanted to try was blocks away from Minneapolis’ city hall and federal courthouse, where Lang planned to hold an anti-immigration protest. He had been preparing to protest for months as part of a series of anti-Muslim rallies he has held across America. He said his desire to demonstrate in Minneapolis only grew after he heard Trump blame Somali immigrants for a yearslong welfare fraud probe in the state and saw that residents there were clashing with ICE officers.

As he was chased by the crowd of counterprotesters Saturday, Lang ran into a hotel and left through a side door. He said he took off the military-style vest he had been wearing with patches reading “Infidel” and “47,” a reference to Trump.

Then Lang approached the red sedan where Gottsche and her friend, Aleigha, were sitting at a traffic light. Gottsche said that she rolled down her window as she saw Lang running toward them, and that he asked for help. She and her friend looked at each other, trying to figure out whether to let him inside the car.

Suddenly, the car was surrounded. From the passenger’s side, with the window still down, Gottsche panicked, trying to explain to the people outside that she did not know the man and was just trying to help.

“Drive!” Lang shouted, according to video and an interview with him. “Drive! Drive!”

Soon after, they tore away from the crowd.

Gottsche turned to face Lang and asked him what had happened. It was then that she realized “that we had someone that’s not on our side in our car.” Lang said he recognized that Gottsche was trans and her friend was also a woman of color, and he thought to himself that “they probably are not sympathetic to my stance as a pro-ICE supporter.”

Lang thanked Gottsche and her friend but did not directly answer their questions about what had led him to their car, Gottsche said. He identified himself only as “Jake” and as a Christian who loves God. He offered to pay for the damage to the car and shared a phone number, Gottsche said. She texted the number and confirmed that the message had gone through.

The ride was short. They reached the bar, and Lang got out of the car.

Gottsche still didn’t know who exactly he was.

Then friends and social media followers who had started to see videos of Lang’s escape sent her messages: Did she know she had just saved an anti-immigrant influencer? They sent videos of the rally he had just held and links to his social media pages, where he had repeatedly made incendiary posts about immigrants and Muslims. Some people seeing the photos and videos of the moment assumed Gottsche was a fan of Lang.

She took to TikTok to clarify how she had ended up in the now-viral exchange. In one video, she lip-synced to “No Good Deed” from Wicked, with the caption: “When you try to help an injured man in the street but it turns out he was Jake Lang.”

In the hours that followed, Gottsche still felt it was a “right place, right time” moment — a twist of fate that landed two people otherwise unlikely to talk to one another in the same car. She told Lang in a text message that she hopes the interaction sparks a reconsideration of his stances.

“I also wanna add while i do not whatsoever support you or ur ideals, im happy to see that you are gonna be okay, and i hope this has some sort of impact on you,” Gottsche wrote to the number Lang had shared with her.

“Because the fear and urgency you felt trying to escape that crowd is what people here feel everyday. America was never ours to begin with, so how does it make sense that we cant share, especially with people seeking safety and shelter?”

By Monday afternoon, a reply had not come.

A massive replica of a birthday note and crude drawing signed with the typed name “Donald J. Trump” and a “Donald” signature that was part of a 2003 book of birthday wishes for the deceased convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was placed on the National Mall early Monday morning, the latest installation of artwork critical of the president by a group that identifies itself as “The Secret Handshake.”

The group, whose members are anonymous, has previously placed installations at the same location, including a statue of Trump and Epstein holding hands and skipping, a mock tribute to Trump from the world’s authoritarian leaders, and a replica of the desk of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) with a pile of fake excrement on it that ridiculed the Jan. 6, 2021, rioters who sought to overturn the 2020 election.

The new installation, located on the Mall on Third Street NW between Jefferson and Madison drives, stands 10 feet high by 12 feet wide. A National Park Service permit will allow the work to remain at that location through Friday.

Trump has denied writing the note and has told reporters that the signature is not his. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the new installation.

In front of the replica card is a stack of marble blocks made to resemble a filing cabinet, with each drawer labeled “The Files” and overflowing with hundreds of strips of paper. Atop the files is a box of Sharpies and an invitation for visitors to sign the card with a message to the administration. It notes, “Please refrain from any promotional, violent or hateful speech or it will be removed.”

The towering placard replicates the message found in a “birthday book” given to Epstein for his 50th birthday by friends and acquaintances. It was one of a tranche of documents released in September by the House Oversight Committee that it had received from Epstein’s estate.

The sketch is of a woman’s nude form and includes a dialogue between “Donald” and Epstein, ending with a handwritten signature and the typed words “Donald J. Trump” above it.

The exchange between “Donald” and “Jeffrey” appears inside the contours of a woman’s body. “We have certain things in common, Jeffrey,” “Donald” says. “Enigmas never age, have you noticed that?”

“Happy birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret,” “Donald” ends the note.

Last year, Trump sued the Wall Street Journal and others at the news organization, alleging defamation after the newspaper published its story revealing the letter. The case is pending in federal court in Miami.

On its permit application, the artists wrote that the purpose of the work was “to use creative and artistic free speech about one of the most relevant political issues of this moment, and to highlight the conversation about President Donald Trump’s friendship and relationship with Jeffrey Epstein using his own reported language and correspondence. As well, to highlight the heavily redacted files that have been released and those that haven’t.”

The Mall was quiet Monday morning as the nation took a day off to honor Martin Luther King Jr. By midmorning, there were just a few messages written on the giant card, all with negative sentiments toward the president.

“Looking forward to your jail sentence, DJT!”

“The people will rise. We already are.”

D.C. resident Susan Fritz, 61, stopped to take a look during her morning run. “What I really like about it is that they didn’t have to make anything up. They just had to blow it up and put it out here.”

But she was pretty sure the installation’s message would not be received well by the administration.

“I’ll be surprised if it stays up,” she said.

“I think everyone should see it,” said Anders Williams, 45, who stopped in front of card on his way to the Air and Space Museum with his wife and young child. “It shows that someone lived in a very different world from the rest of us at some point. It’s just weird.”

Ying Yong, 33, also from the District, said he spotted the card from a distance and came over to check it out.

“It’s great, it’s hilarious,” he said. “Nothing more to be said.”

A woman bundled up against the morning cold said she was a federal worker and declined to provide her name. But she wanted to comment on the new installation, so she picked up a Sharpie and approached the card.

On it she quoted King. “Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that.”