President Trump said on Friday that the “radical left” was responsible for much of the political violence in the country, and walked to the edge of excusing violence on the right, saying that most on the extreme right of the political spectrum were driven there because “they don’t want to see crime.”
In an interview on “Fox and Friends” that ran for nearly an hour, Mr. Trump built on the case he had made on Thursday evening to reporters that “we have radical left lunatics out there and we just have to beat the hell out of them.”
Mr. Trump is often deliberately vague in his wording, but he appeared to be suggesting that the left needed to be beaten politically, noting later that he wanted his supporters to respond to the killing of Charlie Kirk, the conservative activist and organizer, with “nonviolence.”
But Mr. Trump dismissed on Friday a suggestion from one of his interviewers that there were extremists on both the left and the right, saying his biggest concern was those on the left. “The radicals on the right oftentimes are radical because they don’t want to see crime,” he said. “The radicals on the left are the problem, and they’re vicious and they’re horrible and they’re politically savvy.”
America has seen a wave of violence across the political spectrum, targeting Democrats and Republicans.
Mr. Trump’s comments came after he revealed that a suspect was in custody for the killing of Mr. Kirk, but he gave no details. Nor did he discuss the suspect’s possible political affiliations, though since the killing Mr. Trump had seemed to suggest it might have been the work of someone on the left. At one point in the conversation on Fox, he said that George Soros, the 95-year-old philanthropist, and his family should be investigated for “agitation.”
Mr. Soros has been a major funder of liberal groups.
Mr. Trump then turned the subject to a critique of former President Joseph R. Biden Jr., saying he had no idea what was happening while “radical left” advisers took control of the country. Repeating a line he uses often, Mr. Trump insisted that Mr. Biden “was up sleeping most of the time.”
David E. Sanger covers the Trump administration and a range of national security issues. He has been a Times journalist for more than four decades and has written four books on foreign policy and national security challenges.
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