Trump says police raid on university protesters 'beautiful to watch'

WASHINGTON: Republican U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump said on Wednesday it "was a beautiful thing to watch" New York police officers raiding a Columbia University building occupied by pro-Palestinian students, calling the protesters "raging lunatics and Hamas sympathizers." "New York was under siege last night," Trump told supporters at a campaign rally in Wisconsin. He praised the police officers for arresting about 300 protesters.

Trump was addressing the spread of pro-Palestinian protests across the U.S. in recent days. Republicans have accused some university administrators of turning a blind eye to antisemitic rhetoric and harassment. The Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel by Hamas militants from the Gaza Strip and the ensuing Israeli offensive on the Palestinian enclave have unleashed the biggest outpouring of U.S. student activism since anti-racism protests in 2020.

"Your towns and villages will now be accepting people from Gaza and various other places," Trump said, referring to media reports of plans by the administration of President Joe Biden, a Democrat, to accept some Gaza refugees. The crowd booed in response. CBS News said it had obtained internal government documents showing that U.S. officials have been discussing different options to resettle Palestinians who have been displaced by the fighting in Gaza after they pass a battery of screening tests.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said on Wednesday the administration was looking into a plan to relocate some Palestinian refugees who are related to Americans. Last week, Trump described the pro-Palestinian protests as driven by "tremendous hate" while asserting that the violence at a 2017 white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, when he was president was small by comparison.

Biden's aides have said the president supports peaceful protests but stands against violent rhetoric, hate speech and physical intimidation, placing special emphasis on condemning antisemitism on college campuses. Trump was staging rallies on Wednesday in the battleground states of Wisconsin and Michigan as polls show him locked in a close race with Biden ahead of the Nov. 5 election. Trump's visit to the two swing states marked his first major campaign events since the April 15 start of his New York criminal trial, in which he is accused of falsifying business records concerning a hush money payment to a porn star.