Trump: Protester an ‘Antifa provocateur’?
It is true, his friends admitted, Martin Gugino was an activist, a seasoned peacenik who in a lifetime of protest had taken part in demonstrations against military drones, climate change, nuclear weapons and police brutality.
But Gugino was also a football fan, they said, a mild-mannered bachelor and a Buffalo, New York, native who returned to his hometown some years ago to care for his ailing mother.
The one thing he was not, however, those who knew him said, was what President Donald Trump claimed he was on Twitter on Tuesday morning: a wily “antifa provocateur.”
Trump’s viral tweet — none of it backed by fact — raced across the internet all day even as Gugino, 75, still lay in the hospital, recovering from the head wound he sustained Thursday night when two Buffalo police officers shoved him to the ground at a demonstration marking the police killing of George Floyd.
The president and his allies have often tried to place anti-fascists and other “outside agitators” at the center of the protests as a way to delegitimize them and to deflect from the fact that the vast majority of the demonstrations have been peaceful.
But even by his own standards, Trump appeared to test the boundaries of credulity by trying to brand a retired septuagenarian computer programmer as a follower of antifa, whose adherents are, for one thing, generally much younger.
“Antifa? Oh, heavens no,” said Judy Metzger, 85, who lives near Gugino in Amherst, a suburb of the city. “Martin is a very gentle, a very pleasant person.”
Trump’s tweet seems to have been based on a report by One America News Network, a right-wing cable television channel, which claimed Gugino had been trying to knock out the police officers’ radios with his cellphone — an idea that several of Gugino’s friends dismissed as ludicrous.
Hours after the tweet was posted, Gov. Andrew Cuomo lashed out at Trump, saying he should “apologize” and “show some humanity.”
Terrence Bisson, a mathematics professor who has known Gugino for a decade, said his friend would remain in the hospital for at least the next five weeks. Gugino was still in a delicate condition, disturbed by bright lights and unable to move his head without tremendous pain, he said.