Whether he knew this or not, he is partly responsible for the fact that it is happening. Either he was absurdly negligent and didn’t notice that this was one of the major promises of the Trump campaign, or he did know and wants some plausible deniability to say “Oh, sure, I voted for Trump and convinced millions of others to do so as well, but I’m still a basically decent human being who doesn’t like seeing jackbooted thugs violently hauling people away into vans! I wanted this to happen in a nice and not terrifying way!”
Neither says anything good about him.
I think its more that he says so much shit, you can’t take any of his words at face value, which isn’t the same as everything is a lie.
If he says something that sounds positive to people other than himself, its probably a lie. If he says something that sounds horrible, its probably him telling the truth by accident.
Following this heuristic, this sort of violence was exactly the sort of thing he should have been believed on. edit: formatting