Man Who Spent the Weekend In A Bunker Demands “Weak” Governors “Dominate” Protesters

Donald Trump, who spent much of the weekend sequestered in the White House—and at one point was reportedly whisked away to an underground bunker—as protests over the brutal police killing of a George Floyd raged across the country, admonished state leaders in an unhinged conference call Monday, urging governors to “toughen up.” “You have to dominate,” the president said, in remarks obtained by CBS News and other outlets. “If you don’t dominate, you’re wasting your time. They’re going to run you over. You’re going to look like a bunch of jerks. You have to dominate.”

Saying protesters had made state leaders look like “fools,” the president called on governors to “arrest people...track people...put them in jail for 10 years.” “You’ll never see this stuff again,” Trump added, claiming other nations view the United States as a “pushover” for allowing the demonstrations. “We can’t be a pushover,” he said, calling governors “weak.” “We have all the resources. It’s not like we don’t have the resources. So, I don’t know what you’re doing.”

The rant echoed public remarks Trump has made on Twitter amid the protests. Last week, as demonstrations in Minneapolis escalated, Trump wrote that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts”—an apparent violent threat. After protesters rallied outside the White House Friday, Trump tweeted the next morning that anyone who reached the fence of the complex would be “greeted with the most vicious dogs, and most ominous weapons, I have ever seen,” calling to mind some of the ugliest scenes of the civil rights movement, in which police sicced dogs on black protesters. He went even further in his remarks to governors Monday, implying that his administration would more aggressively clamp down on the demonstrations: “We will activate Bill Barr and activate him very strongly,” he said.

Trump has demonstrated a stunning lack of leadership during the turmoil, which has played out against the backdrop of a deadly pandemic and mounting economic hardship. Unable to meet the moment, he singled out individual states in his rant Monday for what he described as an insufficient response—including New York and Minnesota, two epicenters of the protests. “They were a laughingstock all over the world,” Trump said. “I’ve never seen anything like it, and the whole world was laughing.” According to the Washington Post, he and Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker got into a testy exchange on the call, with Pritzker calling out the president’s rhetoric and the president replying that “he doesn’t like Pritzker’s rhetoric either” and accusing the Democrat of mishandling his state’s coronavirus response.

Like his comments over the past week, Trump’s rant on Monday is likely to make the standoff even worse, and makes clear that the president cares more about the optics of protests than the optics of ongoing police violence. “We’re going to have it under much more control,”he promised. “We’re going to clamp down very, very strong.”