Every time President Trump latches on to a new conspiracy theory, it seems more ludicrous than the last one.
Now he’s suggesting on Twitter that a white, 75-year-old Black Lives Matter protester shoved to the sidewalk by police last week in Buffalo NY, then left unconscious, bleeding from his head, could have been a “set up” for the officers.
Trump said the man, Martin Gugino, “could be an ANTIFA provocateur,” adding: “I watched, he fell harder than was pushed. Was aiming scanner. Could be a set up?” Antifa is a radical anti-Fascist group.
Video of the demonstration Thursday “showed a row of officers walking toward the man and two pushing him,” CNN reported. “His head bled onto the sidewalk as officers walked past him, some looking down at him.”
The two Buffalo officers directly involved in the incident confrontation, which has been viewed by millions, were suspended and charged with second-degree assault. That prompted nearly 60 other officers to resign from the department’s crowd control unit.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo called the incident “wholly unjustified and utterly disgraceful.”
Republican Trump critic George Conway, husband of White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, tweeted about what he called Trump’s “diseased” mind — and posted close-ups of Gugino on the sidewalk.
Trump apparently picked up the notion that Gugino was a “provocateur” from the One America News Network (OANN), described by the Washington Post as “a tiny conservative cable outlet that based its reporting on speculation that appeared on a blog called the Conservative Treehouse.”
The report “suggests that Gugino appeared to be using a police scanner on his phone, which it said is a common tactic of antifa … [which] Trump has blamed for violence at protests of the death of George Floyd.” There’s no evidence that Gugino was affiliated with antifa, the Post says.
Gugino, the tall, gangly victim, is a well-known human rights advocate and long-time protester in the Buffalo area. He remains hospitalized in serious but stable condition.
A tweet relaying a statement from Gugino’s lawyer says that “…Martin has always been a PEACEFUL protester … we are at a loss to understand why the President of the United States would make such dark, dangerous, and untrue accusations against him.”
