President Donald Trump says he hasn’t spoken with Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan about the ongoing situation with protesters setting up a six-block “autonomous zone” in the city, adding that he finds the matter “pathetic.”
“This woman, I don’t know,” said Trump told Fox News’ Harris Faulkner in an interview airing Friday, according to a clip shown on the network Friday morning. “Has she ever done this before? It’s pathetic. We are not going to let this happen in Seattle. We have to go in, we are going to go in. Let the governor do it. He’s got great National Guard troops. He couldn’t do it. One way or the other, it’s going to get done.”
He added that “if there were more toughness, you wouldn’t have the kind of devastation that you had in Minneapolis and in Seattle. Let’s see what’s going on but I will tell you if they don’t straighten that situation now, we are going to straighten it out.”
Also during the interview, Trump denied that he got the phrase “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” from former Miami police chief Walter Headley, whose comment sparked riots in the late 1960s, but instead got it, he thinks, from “very tough” late Philadelphia Mayor Frank Rizzo.
His use of the phrase in the early days of protest marches and looting in Minneapolis over the police-related death of George Floyd came under fire, but Trump said in the interview that it means “very different things.”
“Well, it also comes from a very tough mayor, who might have been police commissioner at the time, but I think the mayor of Philadelphia named Frank Rizzo,” he told Faulkner, but she disagreed, informing him that the Miami chief had used the comment that sparked riots.
“It means two things, very different things,” Trump argued with her. “One is, if there’s looting, there’s probably going to be shooting, and that’s not as a threat, that’s really just a fact because that’s what happens. And the other is, if there’s looting, there’s going to be shooting. They’re very different meanings,” he said.
