Trump Threatens to Deploy National Guard Into Portland if Protests, Unrest Continues: We’ll ‘Clean Out the Beehive of Terrorists’
President Donald Trump threatened to deploy the Army National Guard into Portland if the nightly protests seen for the past 60-plus days continues after DHS and DOJ agents pull back off of the city’s streets.
Trump’s warning came at a Thursday White House press conference, one day after Oregon Governor Kate Brown announced that she had struck a deal for state police to protect federal property so that heavily militarized federal agents deployed into her city could leave. She also blasted the president, while Trump claimed she misrepresented the deal and accused Fox News of “bad reporting.”
During a question about the agreement at the briefing, a reporter asked what recourse Trump would take if the unrest did not stop.
Trump decried the ongoing demonstrations as a “disaster,” and dismissed the protests as anything but peaceful displays against racial injustice.
“You see it and a lot of people weren’t reporting it right, they tried to pretend it was protest as opposed to anarchists and agitators and you understand what I’m saying, a mess,” Trump claimed. “The governor and mayor who’s been been dealing on it. We think they don’t know what they are doing. Because this should not have been going on for 60 days. It is not our job and, in case of emergency which I consider now to be an emergency. It’s not our job to go in and clean out the cities, it’s supposed to be done by local law enforcement. Yesterday, the governor worked a deal where they will do it to come up we’ll stand by, they’ll do it and that’s really good, but she didn’t report it that way. What she reported was totally different. She said ‘I think Trump wants to take over the country’ It’s crazy.”
The president then clarified that the federal agents have been removed from the cordons around the federal buildings but they will remain in the city as a precaution.
“If they don’t do it,” Trump said of the Oregon state police protection details, “we will send in the National Guard and we’ll take care of it.
“We’re telling right now these protesters and many should be arrested because these are professional agitators, these our professional anarchists, these our people who hate our country,” Trump continued, threatening an even greater show of force than the previous militarized crackdowns, which have sparked bipartisan outrage. “We are telling them right now that we are coming in very soon, the National Guard, a lot of people, a lot of very tough people, these are not people that just have to guard the courthouse and save it. These are people who are allowed to go forward and do what they have to do. And I think that makes the governors and mayors jumps very easier and they’re working today and tomorrow to clean out the beehive of terrorists. And if they do it then I’ll be very happy.”
Watch the video above, via Fox News.
Have a tip we should know? tips@mediaite.com
