President Donald Trump’s response to police murder threatens to further deepen unrest in the United States, Democrats and Republicans say

Mayors in at least 25 cities issued curfews Saturday night, as police responded with rubber bullets, tear gas, and arrests to occasionally disperse violent crowds. In the country’s capital, more than 1,000 protesters. They took to the streets, including some who threw bricks and dispersed only Sunday morning when the Secret Service began firing tear gas.

The president tweeted Saturday that if protesters violated the White House fence, “they would have been greeted with the most vicious dogs and the most sinister weapons I have ever seen.” And he called on Democratic officials to “get MUCH tougher” or the federal government “will step in and do what needs to be done, and that includes using the unlimited power of our military and lots of arrests.”

Elected officials on both sides of the aisle said Sunday that the president should focus on unifying the nation or refusing to address the country.

“It continues to intensify the rhetoric,” added Maryland Republican Governor Larry Hogan on CNN. “I think it’s the complete opposite of the message that should have come out of the White House.”

DC Mayor Muriel Bowser, a Democrat, also urged Trump to help “calm the nation” and stop sending “divisive tweets” in an interview Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

His comments followed a press conference on Saturday in which Bowser noted that Trump’s reference to “vicious dogs” was not “a subtle reminder” of segregationists who would attack African Americans with dogs.

On Fox News Sunday, South Carolina Senator Tim Scott said some of Trump’s tweets “were not constructive.” Scott, the only black Republican in the Senate, said he spoke to the President on Saturday and said it is beneficial for him to “focus” on Floyd’s death and “recognize the benefit of nonviolent protests.”

The protests this weekend came later Officer Derek Chauvin, the white Minneapolis police officer who nailed his knee to Floyd’s neck while begging for more than 8 minutes for air, was arrested and charged with murder. The Justice Department has promised to quickly proceed with a federal investigation into Floyd’s death. Protesters say they want to see the charges of the four police officers involved in Floyd’s death.

The Trump administration’s response

In an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union”, Robert O’Brien, the White House national security adviser, defended Trump, saying that the White House and the president support the peaceful protests. He went so far as to deny that there is systemic racism in the United States among law enforcement agencies. O’Brien He argued that “99.9% of our law enforcement officers are great Americans,” and called the rest “bad apples.” He admitted that there are “some bad policemen who are racist” and others who are poorly trained.

A a serious divide has emerged between Trump’s main allies and advisers on how the president must deal with several nights of unrest across the country. Some advisers urge Trump to formally address the nation and call for calm, while others have said he should either condemn the riots and looting more strongly or risk losing middle voters in November, according to several sources familiar with the deliberations. .

Trump addressed Floyd’s death Saturday during a speech at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida after the NASA / SpaceX rocket launch, saying that he was “in firm opposition to anyone who exploited this tragedy to plunder, steal, attack and threaten” and that “cure, not hate” is “the mission in question”.

“George Floyd’s death on the streets of Minneapolis was a serious tragedy. It should never have happened,” said the president. “It has filled Americans across the country with horror, anger, and pain.”

But the Trump administration’s response has not satisfied its critics, not even members of the Floyd family.

Speaking to MSNBC’s Al Sharpton, George’s brother Philonise Floyd, She said her conversation with Trump was “very fast.”

“It didn’t give me a chance to speak,” Floyd said. “It was difficult. I was trying to talk to him, but he just rejected me, like ‘I don’t want to hear what you’re talking about.’

“And I just told him that I want justice. I told him that I couldn’t believe that they committed a modern lynching in broad daylight,” he said.

The president said he had spoken to Floyd’s family on Friday, the same day he tweeted that “HITS” are “disgracing” his memory. “Any difficulties and we will take over but when the looting begins, the shooting begins,” he tweeted.

Democratic New Jersey Senator Cory Booker He said that after those comments and others, including his “inability to condemn the Nazis” after the Charlottesville riots in 2017, the President no longer “has the ability to break my heart.”

“Every time I respond to Donald Trump, I do so from a place where I realize he doesn’t deserve an answer, he doesn’t deserve my attention or my emotion. Our people do,” Booker said on CNN. “Donald Trump no longer has the ability to break my heart, to surprise me.”