Pelosi on Trump’s Response to Protests: ‘I Kinda Ignore What President Trump Says’

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) says to take President Donald Trump’s “bait time and time again is just a gift to him.”

When asked about her mention of “unfortunate statements,” ABC’s George Stephanopoulos asked Pelosi during Sunday’s interview if she was referring to Trump’s tweets, including when he tweeted, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.”

The House speaker quickly responded, “No. I’m not paying too much attention to what the president says. I’m talking about the injustice, the knee in the neck. … I kind of ignore what President Trump says.”

Asked what Trump “should be doing right now” in responding to the protests, Pelosi said, “The president of the United States should bring dignity to the office that he serves. He should be a unifying force in our country.”

“We have seen that with Democratic and Republican presidents all along. They have seen their responsibility to be the president of the United States, to unify our country. And not to fuel the flame, not to fuel the flame. And I think to take his bait time and time again is just a gift to him because he always wants to divert attention from what the cause of the response was rather than to describe it in his own terms.”

See Pelosi’s comments below:

The tweet Stephanopoulos was referring to was one that Twitter flagged with a note reading, “This Tweet violated the Twitter Rules about glorifying violence. However, Twitter has determined that it may be in the public’s interest for the Tweet to remain accessible.”

Trump had several other tweets posted over the weekend.

Protests have broken out across the U.S. — both peaceful and violent — over the death of 👤George Floyd, an unarmed black man, whose neck was knelt on by a Minneapolis police officer. Things continued to heat up over the weekend and curfews were put in place in several cities across the U.S.