By Meryl Kornfield, The Washington Post (c) 2024
Donald Trump has a new yarn to tell about 2020’s racial justice protests.
For years, the former president has falsely claimed that he stopped protesters who were trying to pull down statues in D.C. by enacting or signing a new law that threatened anyone who vandalized a statue with an “automatic” 10 years in prison. (A federal law against statue vandalism had been on the books for years, but it did not carry “automatic” sentences, and protesters have said Trump’s comments at the time had no bearing on their decision-making.)
This year, however, Trump has added a new embellishment to this tale, claiming he personally watched “thousands of asses” through the White House windows as protesters left Washington after he publicly threatened to punish them.
“I said, ‘from this moment forward, anybody that so much as touches one of our beautiful Washington monuments goes to jail for 10 years with no parole, no nothing,’” Trump said at a Las Vegas rally on Thursday, to cheers from his supporters. “It was a beautiful sight, because I looked out of the White House window, and I saw thousands of people from the back. I watched all of those asses walking away from Washington, and they were gone, and we never heard from them again.”
Trump has now referred to watching the retreating protesters’ bottoms six times, first in August and twice last week during rallies in battleground states as he makes his final pitch to crucial voters, according to a Washington Post review of campaign speeches.
When he told a version of the story at a Sept. 19 antisemitism event blocks from where he said the drama took place, he added a new description of protesters leaving their equipment behind as they fled.
“They dropped the ropes, and they started walking out of town,” he said. “I was watching thousands of asses 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 any mass exodus of demonstrators fleeing Trump’s threats to punish them, and Trump did not create 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 has 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 sadly turned into a dilapidated place where families are fleeing, criminals are running rampant, and tourists are scared 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.”
Here’s what actually happened in June 2020, the month Trump first became fixated on punishing statue vandals.
Protests over George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis police custody had reached a fever pitch, prompting a reckoning over racism in U.S. history and the markers that memorialized controversial moments and people.
Protesters toppled the statue of Confederate Gen. Albert Pike near Judiciary Square on the night of June 19, infuriating Trump, who asked the city to do something. D.C. police said that 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, attaching ropes to it in an attempt to tear it down. They were soon rebuffed by law enforcement.
Trump posted again the following day that he had “authorized the Federal Government to arrest anyone who vandalizes or destroys any monument, statue or other such Federal property in the U.S. with up to 10 years in prison,” and cited the Veterans’ Memorial Preservation and Recognition Act of 2003, which was signed by George W. Bush.
Three days later, Trump issued an executive order calling attention to Bush’s law. He signed the order in the Oval Office, according to photos the White House posted.
“It is the policy of the United States to prosecute to the fullest extent permitted under Federal law, and as appropriate, any person or any entity that destroys, damages, vandalizes, or desecrates a monument, memorial, or statue within the United States or otherwise vandalizes government property,” the order read.
In Trump’s latest jumbled version of the week’s events, his action stopped protesters from taking down the Jackson statue. But by the time he signed the executive order, the demonstrations around the statue had already ceased.
Jay Brown, an activist who runs a nonprofit counseling program called Community Shoulders and worked as a street medic during the protests in the square in front of the White House, said demonstrators were deterred by law enforcement’s aggressive use of force, not social-media posts or statements by the president. Many were injured by rubber bullets, batons and tear gas. No one spoke about Trump’s tweets or his not-yet-issued executive order, he said. Also, 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 need to think twice,’” Brown said. “He had no bearing.”