KENOSHA, Wis. (CN) — President Donald Trump and a host of state and federal officials visited Kenosha, Wisconsin, on Tuesday, surveying damaged property and celebrating the law enforcement response to ongoing protests sparked after a Black man was shot in the back by police a little over a week ago.
After the president arrived in Kenosha early Tuesday afternoon, he split his roughly three-hour visit between touring damaged and destroyed businesses and gathering with local law enforcement to applaud the combined state and federal response to quell the violent unrest in the small Wisconsin town.
Protests erupted on the night of Aug. 23, hours after Jacob Blake, a 29-year-old Black man, was shot in the back seven times by white Kenosha police officer Rusten Sheskey after also being tased twice. Blake is alive at a Milwaukee hospital but is currently paralyzed from the waist down, and Sheskey has been placed on administrative leave along with at least two other officers involved in the incident, who were responding to reports of a domestic incident at the time of the shooting.
Adding to the turmoil in Kenosha, two people were killed and one was injured in another shooting at a protest on the night of Aug. 25. Kyle Rittenhouse, a 17-year-old from Antioch, Illinois, was charged with the murders in Kenosha County the next day.
According to a Tuesday update from the Wisconsin Department of Justice, over 600 hours have been clocked in the investigation into Blake’s shooting, including 88 witness interviews, 28 downloaded videos for review and four search warrants issued. That investigation is being led by the state DOJ’s Division of Criminal Investigations, with assistance from the FBI, Wisconsin State Patrol and Kenosha County Sheriff’s Office.
The disparities in public and police response to each shooting has further embroiled Kenosha in a precarious and hyperpolitical tinderbox under intense national scrutiny, and the Wisconsin town of just under 100,000 has been placed at the epicenter of those debates from the vantage of a critical battleground state in a turbulent election year.
The president’s visit on Tuesday drew criticism from local Democratic officials, including Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers, Lieutenant Governor Mandela Barnes, Attorney General Josh Kaul and Kenosha Mayor John Antaramian, all of whom publicly asked Trump not to come to Kenosha.
Protesters both in support of and against the president turned out on Tuesday. Reports from the ground portrayed the opposing groups as being peaceful, if arguing and shouting at each other on occasion.
In a short statement before what the administration called a community safety roundtable, Trump acknowledged that while Evers denied his offer of assistance in the form of federal troops early on, he eventually relented and accepted the help last week, calling the Democratic governor “better than many.”
The roundtable commenced at around 2 p.m. local time at Mary D. Bradford High School. Trump was joined by U.S. Attorney General William Barr, acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf, Kenosha County Sheriff David Beth and Kenosha Police Chief Daniel Miskinis, as well as GOP U.S. Senator Ron Johnson and Republican Congressman Bryan Steil.
Business owners, some who lost property to fires during protests, and local pastors also took part in the event.
The president held the situation in Kenosha up as “an example of what can happen when you do it right,” and painted the intervention of federal law enforcement as the key to restoring order in Kenosha, which is similar to recent assertions of his that Politifact debunked.
Trump said federal law enforcement were ready and willing to come to not only Kenosha but other cities with violent protests, but that it was only a matter of those states asking for help in dealing with what he termed “domestic terror.”
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