Trump: ‘Beautiful to watch’ police raid Columbia pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel protests
Former US president and current Republican candidate calls protesters ‘raging lunatics and Hamas sympathizers,’ says Biden should be speaking out more against university rallies
WAUKESHA, Wisconsin — Presumed Republican US presidential candidate Donald Trump said on Wednesday it “was a beautiful thing to watch” New York police officers raiding a Columbia University building occupied by pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel students, and called on officials to crack down on campus protests across the United States.
“New York was under siege last night,” Trump told supporters at a campaign rally in Wisconsin, praising the police officers for arresting about 300 protesters at Columbia and City College of New York whom he referred to as “raging lunatics and Hamas sympathizers.”
While what the student protesters are seeking varies school to school, many are demanding an immediate ceasefire in the war on the Hamas terror group in Gaza and that their universities divest from companies with military ties to Israel.
Republican lawmakers have accused some university administrators of ignoring antisemitic rhetoric and harassment. Many student organizers say they are peaceful and have disavowed violence against pro-Israel counter-protesters, although many Jewish students have said they feel unsafe on campus and unnerved by antisemitic chants.
“I say remove the encampments immediately, vanquish the radicals and take back our campuses for all of the normal students who want a safe place from which to learn,” Trump said.
The October 7 attack on southern Israel by Hamas terrorists from the Gaza Strip and the ensuing Israeli offensive on the Palestinian enclave have unleashed the biggest outpouring of US student activism since anti-racism protests in 2020.
Meanwhile, the police response at Columbia triggered condemnations from some Columbia faculty.
Last week, the Columbia University Senate approved a resolution saying the school’s administration had undermined academic freedom and disregarded the rights of students and faculty by calling in the police and shutting down protests.
Trump sought to pin the blame for the turmoil on Democratic US President Joe Biden, whose aides have condemned physical intimidation and antisemitism while speaking out in support of peaceful protests.
“The radical extremists and far-left agitators are terrorizing college campuses, as you possibly noticed,” Trump said. “And Biden’s nowhere to be found. He hasn’t said anything.”
Biden has largely been staying mum about the student protests and police crackdowns as Republicans try to turn the campus unrest into a campaign cudgel against Democrats.
The president’s last public comment came more than a week ago, when he condemned “antisemitic protests” and also “those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians.”
The White House, which has been peppered with questions by reporters, has gone only slightly further than the president. On Wednesday, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Biden is “monitoring the situation closely,” and she said some demonstrations had stepped over a line that separated free speech from unlawful behavior.
“Forcibly taking over a building,” such as what happened at Columbia University in New York, “is not peaceful,” she said. “It’s just not.”
Biden has never been much for protesting. His career in elected office began as a county official when he was only 28 years old, and he’s always espoused the political importance of compromise over zealousness.
As college campuses convulsed with anger over the Vietnam War in 1968, Biden was in law school at Syracuse University.
“I’m not big on flak jackets and tie-dyed shirts,” he said years later. “You know, that’s not me.″
Biden will make a visit to a college campus on May 19 when he’s scheduled to deliver the commencement address at Morehouse University in Atlanta.
Despite the White House’s criticism of the protesters and Biden’s refusal to heed their demands to cut off US support for Israel, Republicans blame Democrats for the disorder and have used it as a backdrop for press conferences.
“We need the president of the United States to speak to the issue and say this is wrong,” House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, said on Tuesday. “What’s happening on college campuses right now is wrong.”
War erupted on October 7 when the Palestinian terror group Hamas led a devastating cross-border attack on Israel that killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians.
Israel responded with a military offensive to destroy Hamas, topple its Gaza regime and free the 253 hostages who were abducted from Israel by terrorists.
The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry says more than 34,000 people in the Strip have been killed in the fighting so far, a figure that cannot be independently verified and includes some 13,000 Hamas gunmen Israel says it has killed in battle. Israel also says it killed some 1,000 terrorists inside Israel on October 7.
At the Wisconsin campaign rally, Trump criticized a possible move by the Biden administration — outlined by the White House press secretary on Wednesday — for the US to receive some Palestinians from the war-torn region who are related to Americans to the US.
During his presidency, Trump pursued a hard line on immigration. At times, he has used dehumanizing terminology to describe refugees and immigrants in the country illegally, rhetoric that his critics say is aimed at generating fear and energizing his political base.
“Your towns and villages will now be accepting people from Gaza and various other places,” Trump said, eliciting boos from the crowd. “Under no circumstances shall we bring thousands of refugees.”
Last week, Trump described the campus protests as driven by “tremendous hate” while asserting that the violence at a 2017 white nationalist rally with some Trump supporters in Charlottesville, Virginia, when he was president was small by comparison.
Trump was staging rallies on Wednesday in the battleground states of Wisconsin and Michigan as polls show him locked in a close race with Biden ahead of the November 5 election.
Trump’s visit to the two swing states marked his first major campaign events since the April 15 start of his New York criminal trial, in which he is accused of falsifying business records concerning a hush money payment to a porn star.
