George Floyd Protests: What Donald Trump Has Said About Demostrations In Washington, DC

Protests against police brutality continue in major cities all across the U.S. As the initial unrest gives way to more uniformly peaceful demonstrations, one of the biggest came in Washington, D.C., on Saturday with protestors gathering at the Capitol building, the National Mall, and elsewhere.

City officials estimated that it was in fact the largest “Black Lives Matter” demonstration since George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police.

Attempting to downplay the demonstrations which he has routinely clashed with, President Trump took to Twitter to try and suggest that the crowds in the nation’s capital were less than impressive.

“Much smaller crowd in D.C. than anticipated,” Trump said in his tweet.

In response to the President’s attempts to disperse these protests, Mayor Muriel Bowser told ABC News on Sunday that Trump’s efforts have had the opposite of their intended effect.

“What he actually did – as you saw for the remaining days – was turn out more people and more people who were there for peaceful protests,” Bowser said during an appearance on “This Week.” “What Americans saw was federal police forces tear-gassing peaceful Americans, and how they responded made clear to the president that Americans would exercise their first amendment rights and they will do it peacefully.”

Trump has also come under fire for invoking Floyd during the signing of a bill on Friday, saying that the man was “looking down” on the proceedings. The comments were made during remarks that seemed largely off-the-cuff and improvised.

Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms was intensely critical of these comments during an appearance on CNN’s “Inside Politics.”

“I think if the President was going to say anything, it may have been more appropriate to talk about his [Floyd] family,” Bottoms said. “It just shows that this President is incapable of showing any type of empathy. He always gets it wrong, time and time again, and I think we have got to stop expecting any more from him.”