WASHINGTON — US President Donald Trump on Monday (June 1) lashed out at governors for their response to the violence roiling the country, calling protesters “terrorists,” demanding “retribution” and warning the governors they would look like “jerks” if they did not send them to “jail for long periods of time”.

“You have to dominate,” Mr Trump told the governors. If they failed to take a strong hand, he said, the protesters were “going to run over you; you’re going to look like a bunch of jerks”. In blunt remarks rarely heard from an American president, he prodded the chief executives not to be “too careful”.

“Someone throwing a rock is like shooting a gun,” Mr Trump told them. “You have to do retribution.”

The tirade, delivered on a private conference call and captured on audio obtained by The New York Times, showed the depth of Mr Trump’s anger over protests and riots that have bubbled up in more than 100 US cities after the death of a black man under the knee of a white police officer in Minneapolis. For days, Mr Trump has hunkered in the White House, expressing himself largely on Twitter.

But his call with the governors showed how Mr Trump is not about to take a moment of deep national crisis to appeal for reconciliation. Instead he is solely pressing the governors to use force, even though aides spent much of the weekend trying to convince him that the unrest was about deeper issues than his leadership or immediate circumstances.

“You’re making yourself look like fools,” he told the governors, chiding them for not all calling out the National Guard.

Taking over a call that was supposed to feature Vice-President Mike Pence, who has been praised in his efforts to forge relationships with governors during the coronavirus pandemic, Mr Trump said that Minnesota had become “a laughing stock all over the world”. The president had just spoken with President Vladimir Putin of Russia before addressing the governors.

In a briefing with reporters after the call, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz said that at the president’s laughing stock comment, Mr Trump called on him to speak. Mr Walz said he thanked the president and defence secretary for their support but disagreed with his assessment.

“I said, ‘no one is laughing here,’” Mr Walz said. “We’re in pain; we’re crying. We saw a man lose his life.”

He added: “I also shared with the president that a posture of a force on the ground is both unsustainable militarily, it’s also unsustainable socially, because it’s the antithesis of how we live.”

The pushback from governors only seemed to energise the president. Alluding to television footage of violence and looting, Mr Trump called the people committing those acts “scum” and demanded of the governors: “Why aren’t you prosecuting them?”

Governor J.B. Pritzker of Illinois confronted the president over what he called Mr Trump’s “inflammatory” language. “We have to call for calm,” said Mr Pritzker, whose state was hit with a wave of looting over the weekend. “The rhetoric that’s coming out of the White House is making it worse,” he added.

Mr Trump, who has rarely been so directly criticised during his coronavirus-related conference calls with the governors, swiped back. “I don’t like your rhetoric much either,” he said. He told Mr Pritzker he could do “a much better job”.

Mr Pritzker was not the only governor to express unease. In an illustration of this precarious moment, Governor Janet Mills of Maine, a Democrat, told the president that his planned trip to Maine this week may provoke more unrest. “I’m very concerned your presence may cause security problems for our state,” Ms Mills said.

The president responded, “We’ll look into that,” before firing back that he expected “a tremendous crowd of people showing up.”

“They like their president,” Mr Trump said.

Governor Jim Justice of West Virginia, a Republican, then interjected to say Mr Trump would be welcome in his state. The president replied with a message for Ms Mills: “She tried to talk me out of it, now I think she probably talked me into it,” he said of his planned trip to Maine. “She just doesn’t understand me very well.”

The president also zeroed in on unrest in New York City, reminding the governors that he maintained a residence there and suggesting that police should be able to do their jobs.

“I don’t know what’s happening in Manhattan, but it’s terrible,” Mr Trump said. “New York is going to have to toughen up. We’ll send you National Guard if you want.” Again stoking conflict, he said New York police officers had “to be allowed maybe to do their jobs”.

Mr Trump often sounded as much like an angry bystander as the nation’s president, repeatedly recalling his reaction to televised footage of the unrest.

“They just walked right down the street, knocking them out with tear gas, tear gas,” he said of the National Guard’s handling of the riots in Minneapolis. “These guys, they were running.”

And without evidence, Mr Trump asserted that after the crackdown in the Twin Cities the protesters had left to create mayhem in other localities.” They’re all looking for weak spots,” he said of the protesters. “Now what they’re going to do is search out perhaps smaller cities.”

The governors, the president said, must apprehend them.” And you can’t do the deal where they get one week in jail,” he said. “These are terrorists. These are terrorists. And they’re looking to do bad things to our country.”

Perhaps recognising the risks he was taking with his language, Mr Trump acknowledged the presence of his attorney general William Barr. “I’m not asking my attorney general, and perhaps you’ll stop me from saying that, but you’re allowed to fight back,” he said.

Mr Trump has long used language common to authoritarians than to democratically elected leaders to speak about protesters. In 1990, Mr Trump told Playboy magazine that Beijing showed “the power of strength” when it used deadly military force to quell the student-led demonstrations at Tiananmen Square the year before.

“When the students poured into Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government almost blew it,” Mr Trump said. “Then they were vicious; they were horrible, but they put it down with strength. That shows you the power of strength. Our country is right now perceived as weak.”

In 2016, Mr Trump said the comments were not an endorsement before calling the students “rioters” and reiterating that a “strong, powerful government” stopped the protests. And even as president, he has openly nudged law enforcement officers to treat those apprehended with harsh tactics.

“When you see these thugs being thrown into the back of a paddy wagon, you just see them thrown in, rough — I said, ‘Please don’t be too nice,’” Mr Trump said to applause from Long Island, New York, police officers in a 2017 speech. THE NEW YORK TIMES