Trump recalls watching racial justice protesters flee DC. There is no evidence that this happened

Meryl Kornfield
| WashingtonPost

Donald Trump has a new story about the 2020 racial justice protests.

For years, the former president falsely claimed that he stopped protesters trying to take down statues in D.C. by enacting or signing a new law that threatened anyone who vandalized a statue with an “automatic” 10-year prison sentence. (A federal law against statue vandalism had been in the works for years, but it did not include “automatic” penalties, and protesters have said Trump’s comments at the time had no impact on their decision-making.)

This year, however, Trump added a new embellishment to this story, claiming that he personally watched “thousands of donkeys” through the windows of the White House as protesters left Washington after he publicly threatened to punish them.

“I said, ‘From this moment on, anyone who so much as touches one of our beautiful monuments in Washington is going to prison for 10 years, without parole, without nothing,’” Trump said at a rally in Las Vegas on Thursday, to cheers from his followers. “It was a beautiful sight because I looked out the window of the White House and saw thousands of people from the back. I saw all those donkeys running away from Washington, and they were gone, and we never heard from them again.”

Trump has now hinted that he looked at the bottom of retreating protesters six times, first in August and twice last week at rallies in battleground states as he delivers his final speech to crucial voters, according to a review of campaign speeches in the Washington Mail.

When he told a version of the story at an anti-Semitism event on September 19 where he said the tragedy unfolded, he added a new description of protesters leaving their equipment behind as they fled.

“They dropped the ropes and walked out of town,” he said. “I was looking at thousands of donkeys from the back.”

“It was a beautiful sight,” he said. “It was a beautiful sight. It was a beautiful sight.”

But there is no evidence of a mass exodus of protesters fleeing Trump’s threats to punish them, and Trump has not created the law he has repeatedly touted.

The Trump campaign did not answer questions from The Washington Post about what event Trump was referring to and why he continued to repeat the false claim that he “enacted” Bush’s anti-vandalism law. But spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt reiterated Trump’s campaign promise of safety.

“Our nation’s capital has unfortunately turned into a dilapidated place where families are fleeing, criminals are on the rampage and tourists are being chased away,” she said. “President Trump has promised to make Washington DC safe and beautiful for all Americans who want to be proud of our country.”

This is what actually happened in June 2020, the month Trump first became fixated on punishing statue vandals.

Protests over the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody had reached a fever pitch, sparking a reckoning over racism in American history and the markers that commemorate controversial moments and people.

Protesters toppled the statue of Confederate Gen. Albert Pike at Judiciary Square on the night of June 19, angering Trump, who asked the city to do something. DC police said the statue was under federal jurisdiction. Then on June 22, protesters turned their attention to the bronze statue of President Andrew Jackson in Lafayette Square, near the White House, and tied ropes to it in an attempt to tear it down. They were quickly turned away by the police.

Trump posted again the next day that he had “authorized the federal government to arrest anyone who vandalizes or destroys any monument, statue, or other federal property in the U.S. with up to 10 years in prison,” and cited the Veterans’ Memorial Preservation and Recognition Act of 2003, signed by George W. Bush.

Three days later, Trump issued an executive order drawing attention to Bush’s law. He signed the order in the Oval Office, according to photos posted by the White House.

“It is the policy of the United States, to the fullest extent permitted by federal law, and as appropriate, to prosecute any person or entity who destroys, defaces, vandalizes, or desecrates any monument, memorial, or statue within the United States . otherwise destroys government property,” the order read.

In Trump’s latest scrambled version of the week’s events, his action stopped protesters from tearing down Jackson’s statue. But by the time he signed the executive order, demonstrations around the statue had already stopped.

Jay Brown, an activist who runs a nonprofit counseling program called Community Shoulders and worked as a street doctor during the White House Square protests, said demonstrators were deterred by law enforcement’s aggressive use of force, not by messages on social media. or statements by the President. Many were injured by rubber bullets, batons and tear gas. No one talked about Trump’s tweets or his yet-to-be-issued executive order, he said. Furthermore, most of the protesters lived in the area and did not flee the city as Trump claimed.

“It wasn’t like, ‘oh my God, Trump just did this, and we should think twice about it,’” Brown said. “He had no influence.”