President Trump, in a pair of tweets Monday night, criticized “upset anarchists and agitators” in riots in some cities, and claimed that if presumptive Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden wins the November election, the country will would plunge into chaos.
The ominous and fiery tweets continue a pattern of sharp rhetoric from the president, as he warned that anyone caught damaging federal buildings will face a “MINIMUM TEN YEARS IN PRISON. Don’t do it!”
Trump and his administration have also targeted non-cooperative Democratic governors and mayors who are fighting to control violence in their cities, but who in many cases have resisted federal aid, and in Portland have explicitly banned city police work with federal law enforcement.
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“The bogus media is trying to portray the Portland and Seattle ‘protesters’ as wonderful, sweet, and innocent people just taking a little walk. They are actually sick and upset anarchists and agitators than our great men and women law enforcement easily control, but who … would destroy our American cities, and worse, if Sleepy Joe Biden, the puppet on the left, ever won, “Trump said in the posts.
Trump’s claim that police can “easily control” rioters appears to be in dispute for his own Department of Homeland Security: His reading of Monday’s Portland riots only indicates that officers had been attacked Sunday night. by fireworks, at least one Molotov cocktail, and an “intense laser attack” by rioters.
On one night this weekend, six officers in Portland were injured, and several may not recover their vision after the laser attacks in recent days.
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Trump continued: “Markets would collapse and cities would burn. Our country would suffer as never before. We will soon beat the Virus and go to the Golden Age, better than ever!”
These Trump attacks on Biden are also not new.
He claimed that the stock market would collapse, ruining people’s savings, if Biden were chosen.
Trump also previously said that “[n]Or one will be SAFE in Joe Biden’s America! “In a tweet that the alleged Democratic candidate wants to abolish the police, Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE), the suburbs and the Second Amendment – Biden has not said he would abolish any of those things.
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But Monday’s tweets underscore the apocalyptic terms in which both the president and Biden are framing the elections, as the United States, amid a cascading crisis, is severely divided on political lines, with Americans politically polarized in everything from whether schools should be opened up to whether confederate monuments should be torn down
Among Democrats, a 61-17 majority thinks Confederate monuments should be removed, according to a recent Fox News poll. Among Republicans, it is 73-17 in opposition. In schools, 57 percent of Republicans think that schools should reopen entirely in person, without precautions or with social distancing and masks. Only 21 percent of Democrats think the same.
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Biden, for his part, has previously said “[i]It is no exaggeration to say that Donald Trump is a threat to our planet, “he said” Donald Trump is a poison to our soul, “and he explicitly said that Trump’s response to the coronavirus” has cost us our lives. “
“We are in a battle for the soul of our nation, and Donald Trump is poison to our soul. We have to get him out of the White House,” Biden said in a tweet.
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Meanwhile, the unrest continued in Portland on Monday night and the Trump administration plans to send 100 deputy sheriffs there later this week, according to an internal Marshals email reviewed by The Washington Post. That would roughly double the current presence of the federal police in Portland.
But Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler, along with Democratic mayors from other cities affected by the surge in violence in recent weeks, signed a letter to congressional leaders on Monday demanding that they pass a bill that bans the Trump administration send officers to cities without local consent.
“[W]We are outraged that the administration has responded to this First Amendment protected meeting by authorizing the deployment of riot forces in Washington, DC, Portland, Seattle and other communities across the country without the consent of local authorities, “the letter says.” As now demonstrated in Portland, these federal forces have used the pretext of protecting federal property to also patrol the streets, outside their legal jurisdiction, arrest residents without cause, and trample on constitutional rights. “
Fox News’s Vandana Rambaran, Barnini Chakraborty, and Associated Press contributed to this report.
