During last week’s demonstrations against police brutality, officers in Buffalo, New York, allegedly attacked a 75-year-old protester as he walked toward them. Video shows officers in full riot gear shoving Amherst resident Martin Gugino to the ground, his head hitting the concrete and starting to bleed. The incident was so appalling that the two officers directly involved were charged with felony assault, which the officers pleaded not guilty to, while New York governor Andrew Cuomo harshly condemned the incident. But on Tuesday, Donald Trump, theorized that Gugino could actually be a domestic terrorist.
“Buffalo protester shoved by Police could be an ANTIFA provocateur,” the president tweeted, an unfounded but especially notable label, given his recent informal designation of “ANTIFA as a Terrorist Organization.” (Antifa, as I have reported previously, is not a formal organization.) Trump added that the “75 year old Martin Gugino was pushed away after appearing to scan police communications in order to black out the equipment…I watched, he fell harder than was pushed. Was aiming scanner. Could be a set up?” As for the source behind his theory, the president tagged fringe Fox News competitor One America News Network.
The president’s prominent media allies are usually willing to boost his theories, no matter how cruel or deranged. But when hosts like Sean Hannity or Tucker Carlson leave him cold, Trump descends a notch or two in the conservative-media hierarchy until he finds someone who will. OANN frequently fills this niche. What the San Diego–based channel lacks in production value, ratings, and talent, it makes up for in ardently loyal pro-Trump coverage. Several weeks before Shep Smith, the network’s ex-top Trump critic, left Fox News last year, the president criticized Smith’s “lowest rated show on @FoxNews,” before adding, “Actually, whenever possible, I turn to @OANN!”
But it turns out that OANN’s Kristian Rouz lifted this most recent conspiracy theory from an even fringier outlet: the Conservative TreeHouse, a far-right site that features the kinds of conspiratorial ramblings typically reserved for Facebook-status replies and dated internet forums, described Gugino as a “professional antifa provocateur” and claimed he approached officers to tamper with their radios. Rouz, an OANN correspondent who has worked for the Russian state media outlet Sputnik and previously accused Hillary Clinton of astroturfing antifa operations, read parts of the original post on the air, saying that the incident was a “false-flag provocation” by antifa that involved a scheme to “black out police communications.”
The segment initially aired on Sunday but has reaired multiple times, per Media Matters, which is how the president came into contact with it and subsequently shared it with his nearly 82 million Twitter followers. While Trump usually resorts to boosting OANN coverage primarily when he’s feuding with Fox, that does not appear to be the case. On Twitter, he’s had nothing but praise for the top cable-news channel since he lashed out over a presidential poll on May 22. Fox News’ coverage on the nationwide protests, which began nearly two weeks ago in response to Minneapolis police killing George Floyd, has been a favorite of the president’s. “Chaos, lawlessness, and destruction take over New York,” he tweeted early this month, quoting a Fox segment.
In his own Twitter commentary last week, Trump linked the “Defund the Police” protests with “Crime, especially against you and your family. This is where Sleepy Joe is being dragged by the socialists.” Tucker Carlson used a Monday night monologue to push a similar message. “This may be a lot of things, this moment we’re living through, but it is definitely not about Black lives,” he said. “Remember that when they come for you, and at this rate, they will. Anyone who has ever been subjected to the rage of the mob knows the feeling. It’s like being swarmed by hornets.”
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