Donald Trump on Monday blamed President Barack Obama for heightened tensions between police and black communities in the U.S., repeatedly claiming “there’s something going on.”
In an interview on “Fox and Friends” addressing the fatal shootings of three police officers in Baton Rouge on Sunday, Trump even suggested that Obama was using his body language to implicitly signal support for Black Lives Matter protesters over police.
“I watched the president and sometimes the words are okay,” Trump said, a day after Obama condemned the “cowardly and reprehensible” attacks on law enforcement. “But you just look at the body language and there’s something going on. Look, there’s something going on.”
“What does that mean, there’s something going on?” host Brian Kilmeade asked.
“There’s just a bad feeling, a lot of bad feeling about him. I see it too. There’s a lot of bad feeling about him,” Trump replied.
Trump repeated the phrase “there’s something going on” five times during the interview, referring at different moments to the Baton Rouge shooter’s unconfirmed links to the Nation of Islam, Obama’s sympathy towards Black Lives Matter and the racial profiling endured by black Americans.
As Kilmeade pointed out, both Trump’s runner-up pick for vice president, Newt Gingrich, and Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC), who is black, have spoken out about the unfair treatment minorities face at the hands of law enforcement.
“Is there something on the other side that needs to be addressed too?” Kilmeade asked.
“It’s probably something that we really don’t know and maybe we can’t feel it unless we’re black. It is a—it’s definitely something going on there also. That has to do with training and it has to do with something. But there is something going on that maybe, Brian, we can’t recognize or we can’t see it unless you’re black and it’s an experience. There’s no question about that.”
Kilmeade asked how Trump could address issues unique to black Americans as a white man.
“Well, you have to see and you have to put yourself in their position and you have to see what’s going on,” Trump said before launching into a defense of the police.
“Really, they’re under attack and now they’re under attack in the true sense of the word,” he said. “We have to bring law and order back to this country, whether we like it or not. We have to bring law and order back to this country. No games.”
