Donald Trump recently told a group of donors that if he wins the 2024 presidential election, he will “throw out” students who attend pro-Palestinian protests , according to the Washington Post . “One thing I do is, any student that protests, I throw them out of the country. You know, there are a lot of foreign students.
As soon as they hear that, they’re going to behave,” Trump said, according to donors at the event, whom the Post did not name. It is unclear if he meant he would throw out all students, regardless of their nationality, or only non-U.S.
citizens studying here. Over the past several months, anti-war protests have cropped up at dozens of schools and universities across the country, beginning with Columbia University in New York, where tent enclosures and campus occupations disrupted final weeks of class, canceling its graduation ceremony . Though the demonstrations have been largely peaceful, the NYPD violently cracked down on them, arresting hundreds of people in April and May.
(Many of those charges were later dropped, according to the news organization The City .) During the donor event, which per the Post occurred on May 14 in New York City, Trump called the protests a “radical revolution” and commended the NYPD’s reaction to the organizers, which he said “[have] to be stopped now.” If re-elected, he promised, “we’re going to set that movement back 25 or 30 years.
” This is not the first time the former president has threatened studen.
