by Craig Unger
And, of course, there was Trump’s catastrophic management of the COVID-19 pandemic that appeared to be deliberately structured so as to make sure as many Americans died as possible. Even before the virus hit, the Trump administration had dismantled the global health team on the National Security Council and repeatedly dismissed dire warnings from the secretary of Health and Human Services, the Council of Economic Advisers, and the nation’s intelligence services. “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA,” he tweeted on February 24, after the virus had hit US shores. “Stock Market starting to look very good to me!”
This, seventeen days after he had already told journalist Bob Woodward that the coronavirus was far more deadly than the flu.
Trump, of course, explained the discrepancy between his public dismissal of the COVID threat and his taped interview with Woodward by asserting that he didn’t want the entire country to panic. But the truth was more political. Increasingly desperate about his reelection chances, Trump cast his political fortunes as the victim of the disease, proclaiming at a campaign rally in South Carolina, “The Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus. . . . This is their new hoax.”
As if hundreds of thousands of people dying were a hoax.
Meanwhile, as the deadly virus rapidly spread throughout the country, instead of forging a coherent national response to the crisis, Trump put the responsibility on the plate of the nation’s fifty governors. He flaunted his refusal to follow his own administration’s guidelines by rarely wearing a mask, and transformed a relatively effective and benign safety precaution into a potent weapon in the culture wars, in which mask-wearing citizens were disparaged as politically correct. Trump falsely claimed a vaccine would soon be available. He touted dangerous and bizarre alternative health measures: Taking hydroxychloroquine! Putting powerful ultraviolet lights inside your body! Ingesting disinfectants to kill the virus.
Trump even blamed the high incidence of cases in the United States on testing itself. “If we stop testing right now,” he said, “we’d have very few cases, if any.”
As if being deliberately oblivious to the virus would somehow make it disappear.
Now Trump had a plan that he hoped would reverse his political woes, and his trusted attorney general William Barr would play a key part in it.
* * *
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By the time of Trump’s June 1 news briefing, one hundred thousand Americans had died, the economy was in free fall, forty million had lost their jobs, and even more had been housebound for weeks, if not months. With the presidential election just five months away, Trump had already begun dropping in the polls.
And now, on top of all that, came massive demonstrations across the country—regarding another issue that Trump was equally ill-suited to handle. Asked why he thought so many people were demonstrating, Trump’s response to a Fox newscaster consisted largely of an incoherent word salad. “Protesters for different reasons,” he said. “You’re protesting also because, you know, they just didn’t know. I’ve watch—I watched very closely. Why are you here? They really weren’t able to say, but they were there for a reason, perhaps.”
For the most part, the demonstrations were peaceful, but they had erupted in at least 140 cities, and according to the New York Times, at least five people had died in the protests.22 So rather than deal with racism and police brutality, Trump focused on the very few acts of disorder, tweeting, “The United States will be designating ANTIFA as a terrorist organization.”
That, even though ANTIFA was not really an organization. “Antifa,” short for “antifascists,” refers to a left-wing ideology that resists neo-Nazis and white supremacists. It has been falsely portrayed as a single organization, rather than a movement, by right-wing activists and Trump officials, and there have been frequent attempts to discredit it via false-flag attacks from right-wing adversaries.
Earlier that day, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany had added fuel to the fire by telling reporters, “The President has made clear that what we are seeing on America’s streets is unacceptable. Violence, looting, anarchy, lawlessness are not to be tolerated, plain and simple. These criminal acts are not protest. They are not statements. These are crimes that harm innocent American citizens.”
Then McEnany raised the ominous specter that Trump would deploy the vast resources of the military to take up arms against American citizens. “There will be additional federal assets deployed across the nation,” she said.23 “There will be a central command center, in conjunction with the state and local governments. That will include [Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] General [Mark] Milley, Secretary [of Defense Mark] Esper, and AG Barr.”
McEnany declined to further specify exactly what was taking place. Nor did she mention another major event in Trump’s schedule that day—namely the phone conversation he’d had with Vladimir Putin. According to Putin’s office, the call was initiated by Donald Trump.24 The two men discussed the successful launch of the SpaceX rocket that week, and Trump repeated his invitation to Putin to attend the G7 conference in September, a move that was widely disapproved of by other members of the group.25
There is no evidence that Trump discussed with Putin his latest woes regarding ongoing nationwide protests, but Trump nonetheless prepared a ferocious Putinesque response. He was furious about the demonstrations and angry that the National Guard had not yet been deployed in Washington. During his brief announcement, Trump said that he was “your president of law-and-order” and “an ally of all peaceful protesters,” but he asserted that the demonstrations “are not acts of peaceful protests. These are acts of domestic terror. The destruction of innocent life, and the spilling of innocent blood, is an offense to humanity and a crime against God.”
In general, the law forbids using the military as a domestic police force, thanks to the Posse Comitatus Act, which gives state governments the authority to keep order within their borders. But Trump, without citing its name, was essentially invoking a rarely used law called the Insurrection Act of 1807. It was originally signed by Thomas Jefferson to halt a plot by Aaron Burr; it allows the president to deploy US military troops within the United States and had not been cited since 1992, when riots broke out in Los Angeles after the acquittal of four white police officers charged with using excess force in the beating of Rodney King, an unarmed African American. At the time, William Barr was serving as attorney general under George H. W. Bush.26
“If a city or state refuses to take the actions necessary to defend the life and property of their residents, then I will deploy the United States military,” Trump said.
“Thank you very much,” he concluded. “And now I’m going to pay my respects to a very, very special place.” His remarks lasted less than seven minutes—roughly two minutes less than the time it took the officer to kill George Floyd.
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The “very, very special place” to which Trump was referring was Saint John’s Episcopal Church, across Lafayette Square, a seven-acre park north of the White House. Because it had been damaged by vandalism and fire during the demonstrations, Trump wanted a photo op there, holding a Bible (upside down, as it turned out), in an apparent attempt to create an iconic image of himself as the president of law and order who was going to be the savior for people of faith. The only problem was that getting there in the midst of the ongoing demonstrations meant clearing out hundreds of peaceful protesters in Lafayette Square.
Lafayette Square was sometimes known as “the public square” because it had hosted countless First Amendment protests for more than a hundred years. It was the place where freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and the right to petition the government landed on the president’s front door—whether the cause was women’s suffrage, LGBTQ rights, reproductive rights, or civil rights.
But on this occasion, Attorney General William Barr said the protests “were so bad that the Se
cret Service recommended that the President go down to the bunker.”27 Consequently, Barr began to transform the area immediately surrounding the White House into “a veritable fortress,” as the Washington Post put it, with barricades erected by police and federal authorities blocking off various entrances so that they would be in complete control. This “public square” was for anything but the public.28
As Trump prepared to speak in the Rose Garden, Barr made his way to Lafayette Square, where he met briefly with assembled security forces and told them that a decision had been made to extend the security perimeter a block to the north. At about the same time, the Washington Post reported, a White House operations official told the Secret Service that the president would make a brief, impromptu visit to the church in just a few moments.
The damage to the church had taken place the previous evening when it had been briefly set afire, thereby outraging a number of White House aides. In response, presidential adviser Hope Hicks, a thirty-one-year-old former child model who had served as White House director of communications, had concocted a plan to have Trump walk over to the building for a photo op.
According to protocol, that meant the Secret Service had to bring in other law enforcement agencies to help clear the park—and that included the National Guard, mounted federal police, US Park Police, military police, Bureau of Prisons Special Operations Response Teams, and Secret Service officers. All this when church officials had not even been notified of the plan and were generally horrified by the aggressive riot-control tactics that were being used on a crowd that was peaceful.
In an interview with the Associated Press, Barr said he did not give the order to Park Police and the National Guard to begin sweeping protesters out, because he “was not involved in giving tactical commands like that.”29
But that contradicted an earlier statement by White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, who said, “AG Barr had determined that we needed to expand the perimeter by one block on each side.”
At 6:18 p.m., the Secret Service began moving onto H Street. Three minutes later, according to the Washington Post, law enforcement officers checked on the status of personnel who had training in deploying pepper balls and other irritants. Barr then left the park as a barely audible announcement ordered the crowd to disperse. At 6:32 p.m., military police on the southern edge of the protest area moved forward in a face-to-face confrontation with the protesters.30
By 6:35 p.m., police in riot gear with shields and clubs began forcing the protesters back, away from Lafayette Square, just as Trump had begun speaking from the Rose Garden.
According to a statement by Park Police, at that point, “Violent protesters on H Street NW began throwing projectiles including bricks, frozen water bottles and caustic liquids. The protesters also climbed onto a historic building at the north end of Lafayette Square that was destroyed by arson days prior. Intelligence had revealed calls for violence against the police, and officers found caches of glass bottles, baseball bats and metal poles hidden along the street.” But a review of video footage by the Washington Post showed only water bottles being thrown, and no bricks or caustic liquids.
Meanwhile, in the Rose Garden, Trump’s rhetoric rose to new heights as he threatened to deploy US armed forces to cities or states that do not take actions to halt the protests, saying the military will “quickly solve the problem for them.”31
Vice President Mike Pence said that he would have been “happy to walk shoulder to shoulder” with Trump and Barr in their sojourn to Saint John’s but that he was “encouraged to stay at the White House out of an abundance of caution,” because protocols dictate that US presidents and vice presidents should not be in the same place during volatile times.
At 7:01 p.m., Trump began walking across the north lawn of the White House to the southwest corner of Lafayette Square toward Saint John’s, accompanied by Barr, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, and General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Tear gas residue lingered in the air.
When he arrived at the church, Trump spent a few minutes posing for photos both alone and with Attorney General Barr, the radical right-wing Catholic who was appropriating the Episcopal church for Trump’s photo op without even consulting its clergy. Trump held a Bible, awkwardly, for the photo shoot, and when someone asked if it was his, President Trump responded with the only two words spoken during this episode.
“A Bible,” he said, putting deliberate emphasis on the first word. Other than that, Trump did not say a thing.
Trump’s presence in front of Saint John’s and the fact that he was holding a Bible, seemingly as a prop, outraged Mariann E. Budde, the Episcopal bishop of Washington. “He did not pray,” she said. “He did not mention George Floyd, he did not mention the agony of people who have been subjected to this kind of horrific expression of racism and white supremacy for hundreds of years. We need a president who can unify and heal. He has done the opposite of that, and we are left to pick up the pieces.”
As if it were not enough that Trump used the church as a political prop, Reverend Virginia Gerbasi, the rector at Saint John’s, found that Trump’s forces had transformed the park adjacent to the church from a place of peaceful contemplation to a tear-gas-filled field of violence and mayhem. “I literally COULD NOT believe it,” Gerbasi wrote, on her Facebook page, according to the Washington Post. “WE WERE DRIVEN OFF OF THE PATIO AT ST. JOHN’S—a place of peace and respite and medical care throughout the day—SO THAT MAN COULD HAVE A PHOTO OPPORTUNITY IN FRONT OF THE CHURCH!!! PEOPLE WERE HURT SO THAT HE COULD POSE IN FRONT OF THE CHURCH WITH A BIBLE! HE WOULD HAVE HAD TO STEP OVER THE MEDICAL SUPPLIES WE LEFT BEHIND BECAUSE WE WERE BEING TEAR GASSED!!!!”32
Meanwhile, a dramatic confrontation had begun. Protesters were hit by riot-control grenades and rubber bullets. Clouds of tear-gas covered scores of “Black Lives Matter” signs. There were smoke canisters, pepper spray, and flash-bang canisters. Police assaulted reporters. Five civilians were injured, as were a handful of cops. And fifty-four arrests were made.
The amount of damage aside, a line had been crossed: The American military was attacking American citizens, and it was being done at Trump’s and Barr’s behest.
Of course, Barr claimed that nothing could be further from the truth. In an interview with CBS News, the attorney general went so far as to assert that the police operation moving the perimeter of the protesters back from the White House had absolutely nothing to with the fact that President Trump wanted them out of the way so he could have a photo op.
“This was not an operation to respond to that particular crowd,” Barr said. “It was an operation to move the perimeter one block.”
Translation: It was pure coincidence that federal troops were using rubber bullets and tear gas to forcibly move protesters at the same time and place Trump was staging his photo op. And it was an especially odd coincidence given that the military police had allegedly asked the National Guard for flesh-melting heat guns called Active Denial Systems, which are said to make “targets feel their skin is on fire.”33
But a lot of people didn’t buy Barr’s explanation. “I think we need a thorough investigation about what occurred there,” Washington police chief Peter Newsham told the Washington Post. “Why was the crowd cleared? Who did it? Was it legal?”34
What was particularly disturbing was not just the aggressive tactics used; according to former DOJ attorneys, it was also that Barr had used “federal law enforcement officers throughout the country, and especially within the District of Columbia, to participate in quelling lawful First Amendment activity.”35
In a letter to Donald Trump, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi asserted that the use of such forces posed a grave threat to American democracy. “The practice of officers operating with full anonymity undermines accountability, ignites government distrust and suspicion, and is counter to the principle of procedural justice and legitimacy during this pre
carious moment in our nation’s history,” Pelosi wrote.
Initially, it had not been clear exactly which “federal law enforcement officers” had been brought in for the occasion. In fact, Barr had inundated Washington with agents from the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, the Bureau of Prisons, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. And according to Pelosi’s letter, this was just the beginning. Barr “was mobilizing agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI); the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP); the US Marshals; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA); and possibly other agencies, against peaceful protests.”
At Lafayette Square, many of them, especially teams from the Federal Bureau of Prisons, wore only generic, unmarked riot gear and were unidentified. Some observers compared them to Russia’s “little green men” who invaded eastern Ukraine wearing unmarked uniforms to obscure their identities.36
In this case, Barr had brought in only about three thousand such law enforcement officers, but when one understood the thicket of federal agencies under Barr’s command, those forces seemed ominous indeed. In 2016, the federal government had 132,000 law enforcement officers at its command, and the number had grown significantly since then. According to an article by Garrett M. Graff in Politico, in all, there were more than eighty different federal agencies with trained officers—not just well-known agencies like the FBI, Secret Service, and DEA, but also the federal US Capitol Police, the Park Police, the USPS police, Amtrak police, and the Bureau of Engraving and Printing Police, all of which could potentially be enlisted by Barr in “what amounts to a federal army of occupation.”
Increasingly, it was clear that there was no bottom. That there was no line that Trump and Barr wouldn’t cross. That they would not hesitate to use militarized forces against American citizens if it helped their cause. And that, with the entire country still in an uproar following George Floyd’s murder and hundreds dying daily in the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, as the presidential election approached, the question of how Trump and Barr might utilize such militarized forces suggested a dark and bloody future.
