President Donald Trump pledged to crack down aggressively on any protesters at a parade celebrating the 250th anniversary of the Army this weekend.
“If there’s any protester that wants to come out, they will be met with very big force,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Tuesday. “For those people that want to protest, they’re going to be met with very big force. And I haven’t even heard about a protest.”
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Nationwide protests are planned for Saturday, June 14, the same day as the parade. The so-called "No Kings" protests are an attempt to reject Trump's brand of authoritarianism, and they fall on the president's birthday.
"He is planning to roll tanks through the streets of D.C. in celebration of his birthday, and that's the kind of thing you normally wouldn't see in a constitutional republic, certainly not America," Event co-organizer Ezra Levin said of the protests in an interview with Newsweek.
Levin shared that no large-scale protest is scheduled in the nation’s capital, for fear that it would give Trump an excuse to suppress peaceful demonstrations.
"We didn't want him to have the excuse that peaceful protesters are protesting the military," he said.
The Secret Service and city officials told ABC News on Tuesday that they were tracking nine smaller protests, but were not expecting the demonstrations to turn violent. On Tuesday, Trump called would-be protestors “people that hate our country.”
