President Donald Trump on Tuesday claimed the participants of the immigration protests in Los Angeles are actually “paid insurrectionists.”
Protests began last weekend in response to immigration agents conducting raids around the city. Since then, altercations with police have turned violent. There have been numerous instances of officers using non-lethal bullets on demonstrators — and even the press — and demonstrators hurling rocks at fleeing immigration agents. In response to the violence, Trump deployed thousands of members of the National Guard and hundreds of U.S. Marines to the city.
While taking questions in the Oval Office on Tuesday, Trump was asked if he’d spoken to California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) recently. He cited his widely-reported phone call with the governor before baselessly claiming the protesters were paid:
Called him up to tell him, “Got to do a better job.” He’s doing a bad job, causing a lot of death and a lot of potential death. If we didn’t send out the National Guard — and last time, we gave him a little additional help — you would have, Los Angeles would be burning right now. Los Angeles would be not a lot different than what you saw take place in California in Los Angeles just a little while ago. And, you know, you gotta remember we have the Olympics coming; and we don’t want people looking at Los Angeles like it was, like it would
have been. It would have been bad.Last night, they had total control. If we didn’t have the military in there, the National Guard — and then we also sent in some Marines — we had some bad people. We have people — they look in your face and they spit right in your face. They’re animals. And these are paid insurrectionists. These are paid troublemakers. They’re agitators. They’re paid.Do you think somebody walks up to a curb and starts hammering pieces out, has all the equipment necessary, and starts handing it out to people to use as a weapon? These are paid insurrectionists, or agitators, or troublemakers — you can call it whatever you want — and we ended it and we have in custody some very bad people, some very bad people. Did you see the guy throwing the rocks at the police cars as they went by, and crushing their windows and endangering our police? We’re not going to let that happen.
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