President Donald Trump has threatened to take unspecified measures against the protesters.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -:
US President Donald Trump threatened Friday with unspecified action against protesters at his weekend re-election rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in a warning that his campaign was not directed against peaceful protesters.
“All the protesters, anarchists, agitators, looters or lowlifes who go to Oklahoma please understand, you will not be treated as you were in New York, Seattle or Minneapolis. It will be a very different scene!” Trump wrote on Twitter.
Trump campaign spokesman Marc Lotter said that Trump was referring to agitators, not peaceful protesters.
“The president supports peaceful protests and those who exercise their first amendment rights,” Lotter told MSNBC in an interview after the tweet. “If we see what we have seen in other cities with riots, looting, building fires and physical violence, then it will be something that will be encountered by the police.”
White House spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany told reporters at a media briefing that previous destructive demonstrations were unacceptable while peaceful protesters would be allowed: “What he meant was protesters violent, anarchists, looters – the kind of anarchy we’ve seen before. “
The rally is Trump’s first major re-election event following the new coronavirus pandemic that has shut down much of the country and comes amid weeks of civil unrest over the treatment of African Americans and growing protests against racism and the police.
With more than 100,000 people expected in the assembly area on Saturday, the mayor of Tulsa declared a curfew for several city blocks around the site.
The ordinance entered into force Thursday evening and continues until Saturday morning, then again from the end of the rally until 6 am Sunday.
Trump faced a tweet during a protest after the recent death in Minneapolis custody of George Floyd, an African American man, who said “when looting begins, filming begins”. The phrase evoked a white segregationist who was mayor of Miami in the 1960s, although Trump later said he was unaware of his origins.
Reverend Al Sharpton, a veteran civil rights activist scheduled to address a Juneteenth event in Tulsa later Friday, called Trump’s tweet “disrespectful,” especially after the recent death of Floyd and another African man. American, Rayshard Brooks, in Atlanta.
“To have a threat like this, you cause an incident and you provoke unnecessary interaction,” Sharpton told MSNBC.
