I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump's Catastrophic Final Year

by Carol Leonnig

  “What the fuck?” Milley asked the group.

  It was crystal clear Trump had no understanding of how the various departments of his administration worked, or of how civilian and military roles diverged at the Pentagon, or even of the sacred importance of the First Amendment. A president could not merely do away with it to impress some foreign leaders. But Barr, wanting to find a way to be helpful, had just said yes to overseeing something vague and ominous.

  About 2:00 that afternoon, Barr headed to the Strategic Information and Operations Center, the FBI’s global command center, known as SIOC, to check on the status of protests in Washington and around the country. Pointing at a map on an electronic board, Barr explained how he expected the northern White House perimeter would be moved by one block.

  At roughly the same time, Ivanka Trump was cooking up a plan for her father to make a dramatic show of strength that evening. The president would deliver an address from the Rose Garden extolling the importance of “law and order,” and then exit the White House, walk across Lafayette Square, and pay a visit to St. John’s. Ivanka’s conceit was for Trump to show the country that violent protests weren’t the answer.

  “You’re not hunkered down. You’re not hiding,” she told her father. “Why don’t you walk to the church, go inside, say a prayer, and show people they should not be afraid. We can’t tear our country apart and burn it to the ground.”

  Hope Hicks also suggested the president do something once he got to St. John’s, such as read Scripture or visit with faith leaders, to make the event more meaningful. She worried that the image of him merely standing in front of the church would come across as awkward. But Trump nixed that idea. He decided he would simply carry a Bible symbolically and hold it aloft.

  Sometime close to 4:00 p.m., Barr had moved to the FBI’s Washington Field Office—where representatives of many of the various law enforcement agencies in Lafayette Square were stationed—to coordinate security around the city and White House. Watching the live video feeds of the square, Barr noticed the perimeter hadn’t been moved yet. Someone told him the crowd in the square was very small, maybe 150 people, so it seemed to him it would be a good time to push out the perimeter. But some of the fencing reinforcements had not yet been delivered to the scene. The perimeter extension would have to wait.

  At about 5:00, Esper called Milley, who by now had joined Barr at the WFO, to talk over rules of engagement, the plan for the night, and their coordination with local law enforcement. Milley told Esper he was going to change out of his stiff dress uniform, with its chest full of medals, into his more comfortable camouflage battle fatigues because he would be out on the streets with National Guard units late into the night. Milley and Barr got bored in the command center and decided to venture out to Lafayette Square to check on the scene themselves. A few minutes after 6:00, Milley and Barr walked into the square from behind the security perimeter. They saw the crowd by now was substantially larger than 150 people, many of them holding up their arms and chanting “Hands up! Don’t shoot!” Some of the protesters recognized the attorney general and yelled at him. Barr spoke with a Park Police commander in charge of the scene. Ornato, who coordinated presidential movements but was not in charge of perimeter security, came out to join them.

  “Why haven’t you moved the perimeter yet?” Barr asked the Park Police commander.

  The commander said they had been waiting on more backup forces, including some National Guard units that were just arriving, but they planned to make the move soon.

  “When is the president coming out?” Barr then asked.

  Barr had been told earlier in the day the president was coming out to the square, and he presumed it was to survey the scene.

  Ornato pulled Barr aside and, with an indoor voice, said: “He’s coming out, but we’re not telling anyone about that.”

  Milley was a few steps away. His cell phone rang, and he stepped away to answer it. It was his wife, Hollyanne.

  “I’m seeing you on TV,” she said. “Are you okay?”

  “Everything’s fine,” Milley assured her.

  Milley then talked to some of the National Guard members, including Major Adam DeMarco. Milley sensed a tension in the air and sought to defuse it. “We defend the Constitution, and the First Amendment gives you the right to protest and freedom of speech,” Milley told the guard members on one corner of the park. “Keep your cool. No matter what happens here, stay cool.”

  With Barr and Milley still conferring on the square and surveying the police lineup at the perimeter, D.C. police commanders got a radio alert that the president would soon be making an unscheduled movement in the area. Minutes later, the D.C. police were warned on the same system that Park Police would soon begin using munitions to move the protesters and for officers to take cover. The police hadn’t seen the crowd engage in any specific violence that day. So far the worst thing that had happened was that a few protesters had thrown their water bottles over the perimeter fencing.

  About twenty clergy members from around the city had spent the day on the patio of St. John’s, handing out granola bars and bottles of water to protesters to keep them cool in the heat and humidity. As the Reverend Gini Gerbasi remembered, it had been a day of inspiration and hope that perhaps the country might someday overcome the racism that infected it.

  At this moment, Barr told Milley he had just learned the president wanted them at the White House for an update. Esper, then being driven downtown to survey the troops, got the same message and headed to the White House. At about 6:25, Barr and Milley left the park area and headed toward the Northwest Gate. As they walked away, Barr heard a warning to disperse over a loudspeaker. Arriving in the West Wing, they found an unusual flurry of activity and many people scurrying about. They learned the president was about to speak in the Rose Garden. Behind them, however, something far more dramatic and shocking was unfolding.

  At about 6:30, a half hour before the city’s 7:00 p.m. curfew, federal police in riot gear fired gas canisters, flash-bang shells, and exploding munitions that released rubber pellets to force largely peaceful demonstrators out of the area. They struck protesters with batons and slammed into them with their shields. They sought to rush them by riding at them on horseback.

  “The air was just crackling with something as the police were piling up,” Gerbasi recalled. “And suddenly, there were screams and explosions. . . . I looked up and saw a smoky trail coming from the park out to the street, and then just billowing smoke from that. We’re seeing people starting to run toward us, and running toward us with their faces just red and their eyes burning. . . . The police on horseback, they’re driving people down. Tear gas. It’s like a war scene.”

  While peaceful protesters were being charged, shot at with rubber pellets, and routed out by flash grenades, Trump strode into the Rose Garden to declare before cameras, “I am your president of law and order and an ally of all peaceful protesters.”

  Esper arrived as instructed at the White House and found nearly twenty people milling around in the anteroom just outside the Oval. He turned to an assistant.

  “I’m here for the meeting, where’s the meeting?” Esper said.

  “There is no meeting,” the aide said. “The president is out talking to the press. He’s giving remarks.”

  Esper said he needed to go and check out the security situation, then.

  “No, no,” the aide said. “Just hang tight. He may want to go to the church afterward.”

  Esper figured he’d at least get some work done while he waited, so he went to find Robert O’Brien.

  Milley, who arrived a little later than Esper, also did not attend the speech.

  “Do you know what’s going on?” Esper asked him.

  “No, I really don’t know,” Milley replied.

  A little later an aide explained to Esper that the president wanted to head over to the churc
h because he wanted to see the damage from the previous night. Milley was sitting in the Cabinet Room and heard applause, indicating the president had finished speaking in the Rose Garden. Esper called out to him. It was time to walk with the president.

  Then Trump came by.

  “Okay, you guys ready to go?” he asked. “I’m going to go walk to the church.”

  Dozens of aides quickly gathered to accompany Trump for his grand surprise exit from the White House. Conspicuously absent was Pence—in part because Marc Short had sensed the church photo op could backfire politically and decided to keep the vice president away from the scene. Trump saw that Ivanka had brought her purse and asked her to carry in her bag the Bible he intended to use as a prop. Milley, Esper, and Barr were in the first row directly behind Trump as he stepped out of the West Wing. All of them felt their spidey sense go off as soon as the walk began.

  As if staging a Hollywood production, some White House aides told Barr, Esper, and Milley to trail several paces behind Trump, allowing him to lead the entourage alone. Within a few steps, the group could smell pepper spray. Esper’s face—usually expressive and easy to read—had a look of, Whoa. This is weird. Milley, still in his battle camouflage, got almost all the way to the church. He was a few yards away when he saw Trump stop in front of the entrance. An aide guided the president on where he should stand, and his daughter handed him the Bible she had been carrying in her $1,540 MaxMara purse. This is fucked up, Milley thought. Concerned about the appearance of a uniformed military leader joining in a political photo op, Milley looked at his aide and said, “Let’s get out of here.” Like a running back on a football field, he looked for an opening and took it. He headed off to the right, saw some cops at an intersection, and struck up a conversation with them. Then he took a circuitous route back to the White House.

  As a civilian political appointee, Esper had less to worry about in participating, but he likewise stayed at a distance from the church, trying to avoid any chance of being pulled into the photo.

  Barr accompanied Trump all the way to the church door but tried to stand offstage left so he wouldn’t be in the picture. Trump insisted and summoned Barr to stand by his side. Trump held the Bible aloft, but did not read from it or deliver a prayer as Hicks had proposed, and said only a few words. When a reporter asked whether it was a family Bible, Trump responded only that it was “a Bible.” He did not go inside the church to inspect the fire damage.

  It was impossible for Trump or any of his deputies to argue the clearing they executed at Lafayette Square was for a security purpose. This was purely a political show.

  Trump campaign aides almost immediately circulated the resulting propaganda-style photographs online. The clergy members were disgusted and distraught. A seminarian, Julia Domenick, sent Gerbasi a text message that read: “Did we just get fucking tear gas for a fucking photo op?”

  Gerbasi burst into tears. “It answered all the questions,” she later explained. “The apocalypse. People tend to think it means the end of the world or the zombies are coming. But the word ‘apocalypse’ means an unveiling, a revealing. . . . And that is what happened there. People of faith everywhere were able to see.”

  When the president and his entourage returned to the White House, the entryway was lined with two rows of Secret Service officers holding their shields in front of them, standing at attention like the president’s own Praetorian Guard.

  * * *

  —

  Among the participants, bitter disagreements remain about what actually happened that day at Lafayette Square and why. Barr later told aides he thought there was consensus to move the perimeter back as soon as possible that morning, had embraced that decision, and pushed to make it happen. He claimed to them that he heard Trump was going to come out to inspect the square but did not know he had planned to walk across it to take a picture at the church. He also told aides that he didn’t actually give the tactical order to clear the park, but that after White House officials identified him as the person who gave the order, he chose to take the heat and responsibility rather than correct the record.

  D.C. Metropolitan Police Chief Peter Newsham said the timing of the urgent push to remove protesters was directly connected to the president’s walk across the park a half hour later. DeMarco also disputed Barr’s claim that there was an agreed-upon plan to move the perimeter. Both Newsham and DeMarco said the fencing materials needed to create the expanded perimeter did not arrive until 9:00 p.m.—hours after Barr asked the Park Police why they hadn’t yet pushed it out.

  Acting Park Police Chief Greg Monahan said his team moved to clear the square because protesters had grown increasingly violent. He said a decision had been made late in the day to create an expanded perimeter on the White House’s north side but declined to say by whom. But the part of his account alleging violence has been roundly rejected.

  Ornato has not answered questions about how the planning of Trump’s walk across the park shaped the frightening charge on the protesters. He and the Secret Service had a responsibility to clear the park of any risk before the president crossed it.

  For the trio walking with Trump that evening, Lafayette Square was a wake-up call. Barr realized Trump couldn’t help but spike the football and look smaller for it. Esper recognized that Trump was willing to trample the spirit of public service that had been instilled in him since his earliest days at West Point. “We were played,” he would tell confidants late that night. And Milley decided he wasn’t going to get caught in Trump’s web like that again. He was going to have to draw very bright boundaries with this president.

  “He burned me,” Milley told aides. “Fuck these guys. I’m not playing political games.”

  Eight

  Staring Down the Dragon

  After accompanying President Trump on his triumphant walk across Lafayette Square on June 1, Mark Esper and Mark Milley surveyed the streets of Washington late into the night, talking with National Guard soldiers, learning where they were from and what they had seen. When they returned to the FBI’s Washington Field Office after 10:00, they finally put together all the pieces of what had happened. Despite their best efforts, Esper and Milley had dragged the U.S. military into an ugly scene and there would be a fierce backlash. They realized they had to explain themselves to the public, even if doing so would rupture their relationships with the president. They had to make clear they did not condone the use of force against people exercising their constitutional right to protest. That night, Esper instructed his spokesperson to ready a statement he wanted to send out to thank the entire force, stressing their important role defending those rights and staying above politics.

  On June 2, NBC News and other media reported that Esper thought he was walking with Trump to visit a vandalized bathroom in Lafayette Square, but not whether Esper knew that the walk was a staged photo opportunity or whether law enforcement had been ordered to clear the park. Regardless, Esper’s bathroom explanation became a punch line of sorts on cable news, with some analysts poking fun at the idea of the defense secretary inspecting toilets. Meanwhile, the president had only amped up his rhetoric about bringing in the military to put down the “thugs.”

  The night of June 2, Esper decided he had to correct the record in his own words. He told confidants that he was motivated by a sense the country was out of control like a runaway car, and somebody needed to grab the wheel. Trump had inflamed the Floyd protesters, and set the country on edge with the events of June 1. Esper feared what fresh violence might be set off in this volatile moment and would later tell associates he felt he needed to “break the fever.” He stayed up until 2:00 a.m. trying to strike the right notes. The morning of June 3, he gathered Milley; General John Hyten, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Deputy Defense Secretary David Norquist; and a few other trusted advisers around a table, with some joining by phone, to help him get his message just right. Esper knew Trump would no
t like what he had to say. Milley said, “This is the right thing to do and you’re going to hit it out of the park.”

  Later that morning, Esper stood before reporters in the Pentagon’s press briefing room and began to speak. He first offered his condolences to George Floyd’s friends and family and said the police officers on the scene “should be held accountable for his murder.” Then Esper stressed that the military values diversity and that the right of people to protest systemic racism is part of the Constitution that “every member of this department has sworn an oath to uphold and defend.”

  Esper had not shared his remarks with White House officials ahead of time, but Trump was watching the defense secretary’s statement on television with rapt attention. The next few sentences would set him off. Esper said he had always felt the National Guard, of which he had been a member, was better suited to supporting police in times of civil unrest—and, importantly, that he did not support invoking the Insurrection Act.

  “The option to use active-duty forces in a law enforcement role should only be used as a matter of last resort, and only in the most urgent and dire of situations,” Esper said. “We are not in one of those situations now.”

  Esper also touched on what happened at Lafayette Square and said some of the reporting on his role had been flawed. “I did know that following the president’s remarks on Monday evening that many of us were going to join President Trump and review the damage in Lafayette Park and at St. John’s Episcopal Church,” Esper told the reporters. “What I was not aware of was exactly where we were going when I arrived at the church and what the plans were once we got there.”