Iran Press/ America: Trump tweeted after protesters outraged by the death of a black man in police custody torched a police station.
Earlier Thursday, Trump said: “I feel very, very badly” about George Floyd’s death while handcuffed and in the custody of Minneapolis police. “That’s a very shocking sight,” The Associated Press reported.
It was the kind of personal statement expected from a president in response to the disturbing video of a black man gasping for help as a white policeman pinned him to the street by the neck. But it was a very different tone for Trump, who has often been silent in the face of white-on-black violence and has a long history of defending the police.
Trump’s language got more aggressive as violence boiled over in Minneapolis on Thursday night. “These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won’t let that happen,” he tweeted. “Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Thank you!”
Twitter added a warning to Trump’s tweet about the Minneapolis protests, saying it violated the platform’s rules about “glorifying violence.” It did not remove the tweet, saying it had determined it might be in the public interest to have it remain accessible, something it does only for tweets by elected and government officials. A user looking at Trump’s timeline would have to click to see the original tweet. Earlier this week, Twitter applied fact checks to two of Trump’s tweets about mail-in ballots.
Once more likely to hew to the “blue lives matter” mantra, Trump and his allies have been questioning an officer’s conduct and calling for justice for Floyd. But some activists doubt that Trump has suddenly evolved on the issue of police brutality and instead see election-year political calculations.
Trump has been silent on a number of high-profile police-involved killings, including that of Stephon Clark, a black man shot by Sacramento, California, police in 2018.
Trump has never addressed the 2014 death of Eric Garner, who was placed in a chokehold by police trying to arrest him for selling loose cigarettes. Video of the encounter was viewed millions of times online, and Garner’s dying words, “I can’t breathe,” became a rallying cry for the Black Lives Matter movement. Trump has, however, invoked those words on several occasions to mock political rivals, even bringing his hands to his neck for dramatic effect.
Trump has a long history of injecting himself into racially sensitive cases. In 1989, he took out full-page newspaper ads calling for the death penalty for the Central Park Five, five young men of color who were wrongly convicted of a brutal assault on a jogger. Trump has never apologized, telling reporters last year: “You have people on both sides of that.”
Trump also spent years railing against NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick for kneeling during the national anthem to protest racial injustice and police brutality. And he has even appeared to advocate for the rougher treatment of people in police custody, speaking dismissively of the police practice of shielding the heads of handcuffed suspects as they are being placed in patrol cars.
In footage recorded by a bystander, Floyd can be seen pleading that he can’t breathe as a police officer kneels on his neck. As the minutes passed, Floyd slowly stops talking and moving.
US police killed nearly 200 people in the first four months of 2020, according to reports.
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