Trump vows to 'HIT' any protester who spits on police. He pardoned those
who did far worse on Jan. 6
[June 10, 2025]
By NICHOLAS RICCARDI
In one of his first acts of his second term as president, Donald
Trumppardoned hundreds of people who attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan.
6, 2021, to try to keep him in office, including those who beat police
officers.
On Monday, Trump posted a warning on social media to those demonstrating
in Los Angeles against his immigration crackdown and confronting police
and members of the National Guard he had deployed: “IF THEY SPIT, WE
WILL HIT, and I promise you they will be hit harder than they have ever
been hit before. Such disrespect will not be tolerated!”
The discrepancy of Trump’s response to the two disturbances — pardoning
rioters who beat police on Jan. 6, which he called “a beautiful day,”
while condemning violence against law enforcement in Los Angeles —
illustrates how the president expects his enemies to be held to
different standards than his supporters.
“Trump's behavior makes clear that he only values the rule of law and
the people who enforce it when it's to his political advantage,” said
Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth College.
Trump pardoned more than 1,000 people who tried to halt the transfer of
power on that day in 2021, when about 140 officers were injured. The
former U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, Matthew Graves,
called it “likely the largest single day mass assault of law enforcement
” in American history.
Trump's pardon covered people convicted of attacking police with
flagpoles, a hockey stick and a crutch. Many of the assaults were
captured on surveillance or body camera footage that showed rioters
engaging in hand-to-hand combat with police as officers desperately
fought to beat back the angry crowd.
While some who were pardoned were convicted of nonviolent crimes, Trump
pardoned at least 276 defendants who were convicted of assault charges,
according to an Associated Press review of court records. Nearly 300
others had their pending charges dismissed as a result of Trump’s
sweeping act of clemency.
Roughly 180 of the defendants were charged with assaulting, resisting or
impeding law enforcement or obstructing officers during a civil
disorder.
“They were extremely violent, and they have been treated as if their
crimes were nothing, and now the president is trying to use the
perception of violence by some protesters as an excuse to crack some
heads,” said Mike Romano, who was a deputy chief of the section of the
U.S. Attorney's office that prosecuted those involved in the Capitol
siege.
A White House spokesman, Harrison Fields, defended the president's
response: “President Trump was elected to secure the border, equip
federal officials with the tools to execute this plan, and restore law
and order.”
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Protesters confront police on the 101 Freeway near the metropolitan
detention center of downtown Los Angeles, Sunday, June 8, 2025,
following last night's immigration raid protest. (AP Photo/Jae C.
Hong)
Trump has long planned to use civil unrest as an opportunity to
invoke broad presidential powers, and he seemed poised to do just
that on Monday as he activated a battalion of U.S. Marines to
support the presence of the National Guard. He mobilized the Guard
on Saturday over the opposition of California's governor, Gavin
Newsom, and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, both Democrats.
The Guard was last sent to Los Angeles by a president during the
Rodney King riots in 1992, when President George H.W. Bush invoked
the Insurrection Act. Those riots were significantly more violent
and widespread than the current protests in Los Angeles, which were
largely confined to a stretch of downtown, a relatively small patch
in a city of 469 square miles and nearly 4 million people.
The current demonstrations were sparked by a confrontation Saturday
in the city of Paramount, southeast of downtown Los Angeles, where
federal agents were staging at a Department of Homeland Security
office.
California officials, who are largely Democrats, argued that Trump
is trying to create more chaos to expand his power. Newsom, whom
Trump suggested should be arrested, called the president's acts
“authoritarian.” But even Rick Caruso, a prominent Los Angeles
Republican and former mayoral candidate, posted on the social media
site X that the president should not have called in the National
Guard.
Protests escalated after the Guard arrived, with demonstrators
blockading a downtown freeway. Some some set multiple self-driving
cars on fire and pelted Los Angeles police with debris and
fireworks.
Romano said he worried that Trump's double standard on how
demonstrators should treat law enforcement will weaken the position
of police in American society.
He recalled that, during the Capitol attack, many rioters thought
police should let them into the building because they had supported
law enforcement's crackdown on anti-police demonstrations after
George Floyd was murdered in 2020. That sort of “transactional”
approach Trump advocates is toxic, Romano said.
“We need to expect law enforcement are doing their jobs properly,”
he said. Believing they just cater to the president “is going to
undermine public trust in law enforcement.”
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Associated Press writers Michael Kunzleman and Alanna Durkin Richer
in Washington contributed to this report.
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