So in the past Black Power Salute ? |
WASHINGTON (AP) —
President Donald Trump on Friday called protesters in Minneapolis
“thugs” and said that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” —
drawing another warning from Twitter for his rhetoric. 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.”
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 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.
“This
is the first race-tinged case that I’ve ever heard him address” as
president, said the Rev. Al Sharpton, a civil rights activist and Trump
critic who has known the president for decades. “So therefore he cannot
be upset when people feel that it’s empty words because it is so out of
character.”
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.
“This
is something that is a local matter and that’s something that we feel
should be left up to the local authorities,” then-White House press
secretary Sarah Sanders said at the time.
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.
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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.
But Trump’s tone has changed in recent weeks as he has repeatedly expressed dismay at footage of the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, the 25-year-old black man fatally shot in February in Georgia while jogging.
“You
know, my heart goes out to the parents and the family and the friends,”
he told reporters this month. “It’s a heartbreaking thing.”
The
president has notably left open the possibility of some other
explanation, saying: “it could be something that we didn’t see on tape.”
Trump
and his allies have been even clearer on the death of Floyd, who can be
heard and seen on tape pleading that he couldn’t breathe before he
slowly stops talking and moving.
Trump
“was very upset when he saw that video,” White House press secretary
Kayleigh McEnany said Thursday. “He wants justice to be served.”
Trump’s conservative allies also rallied to the cause.
Fox
News Channel host Sean Hannity said he is “a big supporter of law
enforcement” but expressed outrage Wednesday, telling his audience: “The
lack of training here is breathtaking.”
“We
got to get to the very bottom of how this poor individual was treated,
and the death of him on the video itself is shocking from what I saw,”
Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said.
Even
conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh, who once called Black Lives
Matter a “terrorist group,” said Floyd’s death was totally “unjustified”
and he was “so mad.”
The
outpouring comes as the Trump campaign has sought to chip into the
advantage Democrats have with black voters. The campaign hopes either to
win enough black support to keep pivotal states such as Pennsylvania,
Michigan and Wisconsin in play or minimize enthusiasm for Democratic
rival Joe Biden. There could be a small window after Biden last week
told a prominent black radio host that African Americans who back Trump
“ain’t black,” a gaffe he later said he regretted.
Trump
and his allies have seized on that and other Biden statements, even
though Biden, who served as vice president under the nation’s first
black president, remains deeply popular among black voters, who helped
him secure the Democratic nomination. CNN Fake News Poll?
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