The St. Louis couple that gained notoriety after pointing loaded firearms at Black Lives Matter protesters passing by their home last month joined a Trump campaign event late Friday to recount the terror they experienced on that fateful day when demonstrators encroached on their sidewalks. They noted that they’d since gotten “support from the White House on down.”
Speaking to Kim Guilfoyle, campaign adviser and partner to Donald Trump, Jr. in a campaign livestream, Mark McCloskey echoed President Trump in painting a picture of a complete breakdown of law and order.
“I thought that within seconds we’d be overrun, they’d be in the house, they’d be setting fires, they’d be killing us,” he said of the protesters marching past on their way to Mayor Lyda Krewson’s home last month.
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The couple has insisted that a horde of protesters broke into the gated community where they live and bum rushed their home en masse, though surveillance footage does not back up that claim.
“It’s a real warzone,” Mark McCloskey said of his neighborhood.
The incident is now the subject of investigation by local authorities, who have sought unspecified warrants while weighing possible charges against the couple.
“We have nothing to apologize for. We did nothing wrong,” Mark McCloskey told Guilfoyle. When asked if she would do it again, Patricia McCloskey answered, “Of course.”
Bizarrely, Guilfoyle repeatedly insisted, without evidence, that protesters were “trying to burn down your house” and that the McCloskey’s were defending themselves against “potentially death,” echoing President Trump’s own baseless claim made in support of the gun-toting couple. McCloskey spoke of a burning 7-11 store earlier in the interview.
“Apparently people are allowed to just burn down other people’s homes, shoot people, kill people,” Guilfoyle said.
After claiming they were “on their own” when protesters marched through, McCloskey played down the scrutiny he and his wife have faced from local authorities following the incident.
Acknowledging that police had recently executed a search warrant at their home, Mark Mcloskey insisted “they didn’t want to have to do it,” and said officers were “very apologetic” as they came to confiscate the weapons the two brandished at demonstrators.
“Quite frankly, on the second event, when they came back to get us, we then had support from the White House on down. We had cooperation from the federal government, the state government, the local police. The police chief himself came out and met with my private security,” he said.
Trump has publicly defended the couple and gone so far as to declare that he will be “getting involved” in the case. St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner reportedly said earlier this week that Trump and Republican Missouri Gov. Mike Parson “came after her” for investigating the case.
The couple also appeared to fully embrace the new role of gun-loving heroes foisted upon them by Guilfoyle, who called Patricia McCloskey “inspirational” for holding a loaded gun with her finger on the trigger that day, at times pointing it towards her husband.
Asked what her message would be to other women, Patricia McCloskey said: “I think it’s time that we not just stand behind the man that is going to have the gun.”
“Everybody’s saying, ‘Well I’ve never owned a gun before, but we’ve gotta do it now,’” Mark McCloskey said, adding that the seizure of the couple’s weapons left them “defenseless.”
“So we’re depending upon retained private security.”
