Trump Seeks ‘Law and Order’ in Tweetstorm on Portland Death
Trump unleashed a tweetstorm after a man was killed during clashes between Trump supporters and Black Lives Matter demonstrators.
(Bloomberg) -- President Donald Trump unleashed a tweetstorm early Sunday about Portland, Oregon, hours after a man was killed there during clashes between a large group of Trump supporters and Black Lives Matter demonstrators.
The string of messages enlivened criticism from Democrats, including presidential candidate Joe Biden, that Trump is looking to inflame unrest in U.S. cities because he believes it will help his re-election campaign.
The president retweeted a post that had used a profanity to describe Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler -- commenting only to “Tone down the language, but TRUE!” -- and others in which the original tweeters accused the mayor, a Democrat, of “war crimes” and of having blood on his hands.
Portland has been the site of protests, often violent, for months, following the killing of a Black man, George Floyd, by police in Minnesota in late May.
While labeling Black Lives Matter protesters in Washington as “agitators and thugs,” Trump praised as “GREAT PATRIOTS” the hundreds of his supporters who rolled into the city in a convoy of cars and trucks on Saturday. He concluded a string of dozens of tweets with the slogan “LAW AND ORDER!!!”
Video posted on Twitter from Portland showed some of the caravan participants driving pickup trucks into protesters and shooting what appeared to be tear gas and paint balls.
The man shot to death on Saturday night was a supporter of a right-wing group that’s frequently clashed with other demonstrators there. He was identified by the group Patriot Prayer as Aaron “Jay” Danielson, who also went by Jay Bishop. Trump tweeted “Rest in Peace Jay!”
In a lengthy statement, Biden said “it isn’t a peaceful protest when you go out spoiling for a fight.”
“I condemn violence of every kind by anyone, whether on the left or the right. And I challenge Donald Trump to do the same,” Biden said in a statement Sunday.
Biden said “the job of a president is to lower the temperature” and Trump’s “failure to call on his supporters to stop seeking conflict shows just how weak he is.”
Wheeler, the Portland mayor, hit back at Trump during a press conference. “It’s you who have created the hate and the division,” Wheeler said of the president. “You’ve tried to divide us more than any other figure in modern history. And now you want me to stop the violence that you helped create.”
Earlier, Chad Wolf, Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Homeland Security, blamed local officials in Portland and other cities for an “environment of lawlessness and chaos” that’s led to fatal shootings as America’s ideological divide clashes in an interview Sunday on CBS.
Another string of posts from Trump late Saturday night included one in which he shared a message from the conservative broadcaster One America News (OAN) that called ongoing protests against racism in the U.S. an attempted coup aimed to “take down the president.”
And Trump addressed a Twitter message Sunday at Muriel Bowser, mayor of Washington, saying the Democrat should “Clean up D.C. or the Federal Government will do it for you. Enough!!!”
A White House spokesman said late Saturday that Trump will travel to Kenosha on Tuesday, days after the Wisconsin city was rocked by protests after police were filmed shooting a Black man, Jacob Blake, in the back multiple times at close range.
Since then, two people involved in a protest over Blake’s shooting were killed and a third was seriously wounded. A 17-year-old Trump supporter from Illinois, Kyle Rittenhouse, has been charged as an adult with two counts of homicide.
Trump hasn’t directly addressed the Rittenhouse incident. Talking to reporters in Texas on Saturday, Trump, he said the matter was “under investigation right now and they’ll be reporting back to me over the next 24 hours.”
The president may meet with Blake’s family while in Kenosha, campaign aide Lara Trump said on “Fox News Sunday.”
Representative Karen Bass, a California Democrat who chairs the Congressional Black Caucus, said on CNN that Trump was traveling to Kenosha with “one purpose and one purpose only, and that is to agitate things and to make things worse.”
“He will stoke it through his social media where he can, because he believes the violence helps him,” said Representative Adam Schiff, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. “That is the sad and tragic truth about this.”
©2020 Bloomberg L.P.