President Donald Trump touted the falling unemployment numbers during a Rose Garden speech on Friday after days of protests and announced that “it’s a great day for [George Floyd], it’s a great day for everybody.”
Trump’s Rose Garden speech came after days of protests in the country after Floyd’s death in the custody of Minneapolis police officers — one of those officers has now been charged with murder.
The president said, “We have fantastic military, we have fantastic National Guard. National Guard was barely used and these people have done an unbelievable job, they helped the Secret Service in Washington. Secret Service by the way are unbelievable, the job they did at the White House was unbelievable.”
Trump added, “All I could see is what I was seeing on television.”
The president also urged governors to call in the National Guard, saying, “Don’t be proud. Get the job done. You’ll end up looking much better in the end. Call in the National Guard. Call me, we’ll have so many people, more people than — you have to dominate the streets, you can’t let what’s happening happen. It’s called dominate the streets, you can’t let that happen in New York where they’re breaking into stores and all of the things.”
.@POTUS: "I'm suggesting to some of these governors… don't be too proud. Get the job done…Call in the National Guard. Call me. You have to dominate the streets."
— CSPAN (@cspan) June 5, 2020
"…Hopefully George is looking down right now & saying 'this is a great thing happening for our country.'" pic.twitter.com/gxIr1n2AnQ
Moments later, Trump turned his eyes to the behavior of the police, saying, “Equal justice under the law must mean that every American receives equal treatment in every encounter with law enforcement regardless of race, color, gender or creed.”
But the president then appeared to go off-script saying, “We all saw what happened last week, we can’t let that happen. Hopefully, George is looking down right now and saying ‘this is a great thing that’s happening for our country’, it’s a great day for him, it’s a great day for everybody, it’s a great day for everybody. It is a great, great day in terms of equality.”