"What do you think they [protesters] want?" Harris Faulkner of Fox News asked the president. "What do you think they need, right now, from you?"
Here was Trump's answer, verbatim:
"Protesters for different reasons. You're protesting also because, you know, they just didn't know. I've watch - I watched very closely. Why are you here? They really weren't able to say, but they were there for a reason, perhaps.
"But a lot of them really were there because they're following the crowd. A lot of them were there because what we witnessed was a terrible thing. What we saw was a terrible thing. And we've seen it over the years. We haven't, you know, this was one horrible example, but you've seen other terrible examples. You know that better than anybody who would know it. And I know it. I've seen it, too. I've seen it before I was president. I've seen it. I think it's a shame. I think it's a disgrace. And it's got to stop."
Edit: This quote was from 2020
This was from 2020 in response to the George Floyd protests in case anyone was wondering. Not to say that this isn't relevant but with the context of the Hands Off protests it feels like it might get attributed to the wrong event. I guess it's even more worrying that this is the kind of nonsense he was spouting 5 years ago and people still voted him in again.
I confess that in the context where I saw this I did not realize that!
Stop posting everything you see without doing some work to vet those things yourself. This spread of mis/disinformation goes both ways and the left isn't magically immune to it.
Yep, I'm as prone to confirmation bias as anyone.