U.S. President Donald Trump on Friday threatened unspecified action against any protesters at his weekend re-election rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in a warning that his campaign said was not directed at peaceful demonstrators.
“Any protesters, anarchists, agitators, looters or lowlifes who are going to Oklahoma please understand, you will not be treated like you have been in New York, Seattle, or Minneapolis. It will be a much different scene!” Trump wrote on Twitter.
Marc Lotter, a spokesman for Trump’s campaign, said Trump was referring to agitators and not peaceful protesters.
“The president supports peaceful protests and people who are exercising their First Amendment rights,” Lotter told MSNBC in an interview following the tweet. “If we see what we’ve seen in other cities with rioting, looting, setting buildings on fire and physical violence, then that’s going to be something that’s going to be met by police.”
White House spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany told reporters at a briefing that earlier destructive protests were unacceptable while peaceful demonstrators would be allowed: “What he was meaning are violent protesters, anarchists, looters – the kind of lawlessness we saw before.”
The rally is Trump’s first major re-election event in the wake of the novel coronavirus pandemic that shuttered much of the country and comes amid weeks of civil unrest over the treatment of African Americans and growing protests over racism and policing.
With more than 100,000 people expected in the area of the rally on Saturday, the Tulsa mayor has declared a curfew for several downtown city blocks around the venue.
The order came into effect on Thursday night and runs through Saturday morning, then again from the conclusion of the rally until 6 a.m. on Sunday.
Trump faced backlash over a tweet during protests after the recent death in Minneapolis police custody of George Floyd, an African American man, that said “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” The phrase evoked a white segregationist who was Miami mayor in the 1960s, though Trump later said he was unaware of its origins.
The Rev. Al Sharpton, a veteran civil rights activist set to address a Juneteenth event in Tulsa later on Friday, called Trump’s tweet “disrespectful,” especially following the recent deaths of Floyd and another African American man, Rayshard Brooks, in Atlanta.
“To have a threat like that you’re provoking an incident, and you’re provoking an interaction that is unnecessary,” Sharpton told MSNBC.
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