President Trump has not taken kindly to the protesters who have showed up near the White House following the death of George Floyd — and who, last Friday, forced the president into an underground bunker that he later claimed he was merely “inspecting.” On Thursday, Trump turned up the rhetoric against his antagonists across the street by endorsing the view that the protesters are illegitimate “terrorists.” Trump tweeted a letter written by his onetime impeachment lawyer John Dowd that somehow makes the president’s own dark, menacing description of the demonstrations happening around the country look tame.
Dowd addresses the letter to former secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, who harshly criticized Trump this week. After telling Mattis of his disappointment at the comments, Dowd launches into a diatribe accusing Mattis of being soft on President Obama (“nobody divided this country more”), crime (“the drug cartels that own huge sections of our major cities”), and Iran’s major general Qasem Soleimani (“why did it take President Trump to have the instincts and balls to take him out”).
The most noteworthy section comes near the top, when Dowd asserts that “the peaceful protesters near Lafayette Park were not peaceful and are not real. They are terrorists using idle hate filled students to burn and destroy.” Of the now-notorious incident on Tuesday wherein police and National Guard units teargassed protesters so that Trump could pose with a Bible, Dowd writes that the protesters “were abusing and disrespecting the police when the police were preparing the area for the 1900 curfew.”
Perhaps the letter’s only saving grace was that, unlike one previous Dowd missive, it wasn’t written in Comic Sans. Read the whole thing below:
