Violence could be justified if someone is trying to thwart a flying fruit barrage, according to former President Donald Trump.
Projectile fruits — such as tomatoes, pineapples, and bananas — could be used as “very dangerous” weapons that the former president said in sworn testimony his team was looking out for during rallies. The comments appeared in a transcript from an October deposition for a civil lawsuit brought by protesters who alleged they were assaulted outside Trump’s New York offices in 2015 by Trump’s security guards during the presidential campaign.
An attorney for the protesters pointed to Trump’s remarks during a rally in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in February 2016, when he said, “If you see someone getting ready to throw a tomato, just knock the crap out of them, would you?”
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“They were going to throw fruit,” the former president said in defense of his comments, according to court transcripts. “And you get hit with fruit, it’s — no, it’s very violent stuff. We were on alert for that.”
Trump said “we were told” about the threats and noted that he “thought Secret Service” was keeping an eye on potential fruit projectiles. If one of his supporters had used aggression to stop a threat, Trump explained he would have covered their legal fees if it was “a serious threat.” However, no such incidents happened, he said.
Trump acknowledged his fruit comments were made partly “in jest” but noted there was a “little truth” to them, as he stressed projectile fruits can be lethal.
“You can get killed with those things,” he said.
It’s not clear whether anyone at the Iowa rally had tomatoes in their possession, and Trump conceded he didn’t hear any reports of fruit-throwing. His comments weren’t made to encourage or justify violence, he said. Rather, they were just to put people “on alert that they were going to do fruit.”
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“Getting aggressive includes the use of physical force?” the cross-examining lawyer asked.
“To stop somebody from throwing pineapples, tomatoes, bananas, stuff like that, yeah,” Trump said. “It’s dangerous stuff.”
