******************** POSTING RULES & NOTES ********************
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*****************************************************************
NY Times, May 30, 2020
Trump Threatens White House Protesters With ‘Vicious Dogs’ and ‘Ominous
Weapons’
By Maggie Haberman
A day after claiming he didn’t mean to suggest that law enforcement
officials should shoot people who were part of the unrest in Minnesota,
President Trump said on Saturday that the Secret Service had been
prepared to sic the “most vicious dogs” on protesters outside the White
House gates on Friday night.
“Great job last night at the White House by the U.S. @SecretService,”
Mr. Trump tweeted in a string of four posts on Saturday. “They were not
only totally professional, but very cool. I was inside, watched every
move, and couldn’t have felt more safe.”
He continued that the Secret Service allowed the protesters to “scream &
rant as much as they wanted” and only acted when “someone got too frisky
or out of line.”
“The front line was replaced with fresh agents, like magic,” he added.
“Big crowd, professionally organized, but nobody came close to breaching
the fence. If they had they would have been greeted with the most
vicious dogs, and most ominous weapons, I have ever seen. That’s when
people would have been really badly hurt, at least.”
Mr. Trump claimed that Secret Service agents told him they were
clamoring for engagement with the protesters. “We put the young ones on
the front line, sir, they love it, and good practice,” he claimed he had
been told.
He also appeared to invite his own supporters to amass outside the White
House on Saturday to counter the protesters, despite a ban against
gatherings of more than 10 people in effect in Washington amid the
coronavirus pandemic.
“Tonight, I understand, is MAGA NIGHT AT THE WHITE HOUSE???” he tweeted,
using the acronym for his first campaign slogan, “Make America Great
Again.” And he tried to paint the protesters as recruited agitators
instead of people organically making a statement.
Mr. Trump’s renewed threat of violence against the protesters came as
protests erupted in cities across the country.
And it came a day after he tweeted — and then tried to walk back — that
“when the looting starts, the shooting starts” in response to protests
in Minneapolis against the killing of George Floyd, a black man, at the
hands of a white police officer.
That phrase was used in 1967 by a Miami police chief in reference to
crackdowns on young black men. The chief, Walter Headley, accused the
men of operating under cover of the civil rights movement and said his
police force didn’t mind being accused of police brutality.
Mr. Trump waited nearly 14 hours to try to walk that statement back,
claiming he had meant that when people loot, they then sometimes fire
guns as well. And in remarks at a late afternoon event at the White
House, Mr. Trump conceded that some of the protesters had legitimate
grievances.
Mr. Trump traveled to Florida on Saturday for the second time this week
to watch SpaceX try to launch a rocket to the International Space
Station. The initial launch was scrubbed shortly before it was set to
take place on Wednesday.
Talking to reporters as he left the White House, Mr. Trump was asked
about his tweet that seemed to invite his own supporters to rally
outside the White House. As he often does, Mr. Trump distanced himself
from his own statements, saying he was merely asking a question and that
he didn’t know if people were coming. He claimed not to be trying to
stoke racial strife.
“By the way, they love African-American people, they love black people,”
Mr. Trump volunteered, unprompted, describing his own supporters, who
are overwhelmingly white.
“MAGA loves the black people,” he added.
He reiterated his condemnation of Minnesota’s governor and the mayor of
Minneapolis, both Democrats, painting the matter in starkly political
terms as his opposition to “liberal” activists.
“They’ve got to get tougher. They’ve got to get tougher,” Mr. Trump said
of the responses to the unrest, which resulted on Thursday night in the
burning of the police station where the officers involved in Mr. Floyd’s
death worked. “They’ve got to be strong. Honor the memory of George
Floyd, honor his memory. They have to get tougher, and by being tougher
they will be honoring his memory, but they cannot let that happen.”
He again raised the prospect of sending in the military to quell the unrest.
“We could have troops on the ground very quickly if they ever want our
military,” Mr. Trump said.
At Mr. Trump’s behest, the Defense Department ordered the Army to
prepare active-duty military police units to deploy from several army
bases to Minneapolis. The move does not mean that the units will be
activated, but it is a first step toward doing so, officials said.
Mr. Trump has repeatedly criticized protesting groups that are
predominantly made up of black people. In the 2016 campaign, he
condemned the Black Lives Matter protesters as a “threat.”
Since he became president, he has also denounced protesters critical of
his administration as being members of “antifa,” a contraction of the
word “antifascist.” The name has become a catch-all for a loose
affiliation of radical activists who oppose the far right.
On Saturday, Mr. Trump insisted that the protesters were far-left
extremists, a claim that Attorney General William P. Barr echoed on
Saturday.
“Groups of outside radicals and agitators are exploiting the situation
to pursue their own separate and violent agenda,” Mr. Barr said.
“In many places it appears the violence is planned, organized and driven
by anarchic and left extremist groups, far-left extremist groups, using
antifa-like tactics, many of whom travel from outside the state to
promote the violence.”
While it is the responsibility of state and local officials to get the
rioting under control, Mr. Barr said the F.B.I. and other federal law
enforcement would support those efforts. He warned it was a violation of
federal law to cross state lines “to incite or participate in violent
rioting.” The Department of Justice and F.B.I., he said, would enforce
those laws.
On Twitter on Saturday, Mr. Trump also denounced several mainstream news
outlets, a day after a CNN reporter was arrested on camera for no
apparent reason by police officers in riot gear in Minneapolis, and a
female reporter for a local television station was shot with what
appeared to be pepper balls by an officer in Louisville, Ky.
“Much more ‘disinformation’ coming out of CNN, MSDNC, @nytimes and
@washingtonpost, by far, than coming out of any foreign country, even
combined. Fake News is the Enemy of the People!” Mr. Trump wrote.
_________________________________________________________
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at:
https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
