WHITE HOUSE
Trump threatens to end protests with military
Declaring himself the “president of law and order,”
Trump said he would act if local officials couldn’t contain violent
demonstrations.
By CAITLIN
OPRYSKO
06/01/2020
12:33 PM EDT
Updated:
06/01/2020 09:25 PM EDT
President
Donald Trump on Monday declared himself the “president of law and order” and
said he would mobilize every available federal force both “civilian and
military” as he vowed to put an immediate end to violent protests that have
swept the nation for days.
In a brief
statement delivered from the Rose Garden of the White House as law enforcement
forces deployed tear gas and cleared out protesters just on the opposite side
of Pennsylvania Avenue, Trump ordered governors and mayors to establish “an
overwhelming law enforcement presence” until the protests have been quelled,
and he threatened to send in the U.S. military to “quickly solve the problem
for them.”
As Trump
spoke, police also fired rubber bullets at protesters gathered peacefully on
the edge of Lafayette Square directly in front of the White House. After his
speech and with the square cleared, the president walked across the street for
a photo op in front of the the historic St. John’s Episcopal Church, where he
held up a Bible.
Peaceful
demonstrations began in Minneapolis last week following the death of George
Floyd, an unarmed black man who died after being pinned down by a police
officer’s knee to the neck for nearly nine minutes. But the protests descended
into violence at times and quickly spread from coast to coast, with
participants setting fire to and looting businesses, and clashing with law
enforcement officers dressed in riot gear.
For the
past three days, the uproar has lasted well into the night despite local leaders’
imposing curfews, and has teetered on the president’s front yard and the
surrounding areas. Dozens of state leaders have called in the National Guard to
restore order, a move Trump cheered and urged other governors to replicate.
“Today, I
have strongly recommended to every governor to deploy the National Guard in
sufficient numbers that we dominate the streets,” he said from the White House,
warning that he would step in if a city or state “refuses to take the actions
that are necessary to defend the life and property of their residents.”
Trump on
Monday denounced the violence as “domestic acts of terror,” accusing far-left
anti-fascist groups of being responsible for the chaos as he threatened to use
military force to bring them to a halt.
“The biggest
victims of the rioting are peace-loving citizens in our poorest communities,
and as their president, I will fight to keep them safe,” Trump said, reading
from a teleprompter. “I will fight to protect you. I am your president of law
and order and an ally of all peaceful protesters.”
The
president’s sharp rhetoric on Monday, though couched in a more elevated tone
befitting a nationally televised address, was hardly a departure from the
incendiary tweets he fired off all weekend long. It also echoed the blunt
instructions he gave the nation’s governors on a call earlier in the day during
which he berated them as “weak” and urged them to “get much tougher” on people
in their states protesting police violence.
In both
instances, the president made little mention of the root cause of the unrest,
however, aside from acknowledging that Americans are “rightly sickened and
revolted” by Floyd’s death. Trump vowed that justice would be served and that
Floyd “will not have died in vain,” but never spoke of the systemic changes protesters
say are required to prevent more killings of unarmed black Americans by police.
“But we
cannot allow the righteous cries and peaceful protesters to be drowned out by
an angry mob,” he continued in the Rose Garden. “The biggest victims of the
rioting are peace-loving citizens in our poorest communities, and as their
president, I will fight to keep them safe. I will fight to protect you. I am
your president of law and order and an ally of all peaceful protesters.”
After
threatening to unleash the military on unruly protesters, citing his authority
under the Insurrection Act of 1807 to circumvent federal law barring the use of
federal troops for domestic law enforcement, the president turned and walked
away, but not before dropping a cryptic line.
“Thank you
very much. And now I am going to pay my respects to a very, very special
place,” he said without further explanation as he headed back into the West
Wing.
Immediately
after Trump ended his speech, it became clear why police had begun to clear out
Lafayette Square a short while earlier. Minutes after leaving the Rose Garden,
he emerged from the White House surrounded by a security detail and made his
way through a deserted Lafayette Square, statues covered in graffiti from the
night before and protesters kept away by police in riot gear and mounted on
horses.
Trump made
his way across the street to St. John’s, which had briefly caught fire in the
previous night’s unrest. According to a press pool report, remnants of the tear
gas lobbed at protesters spurred coughing and choking by some in the group,
while Trump summoned Attorney General William Barr, his chief of staff, Mark
Meadows, and his press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, as he stood in front of
cameras holding up a Bible. After several moments, Trump strode away, back onto
the White House grounds.
The Rose
Garden address and ensuing photo-op came as Trump faced criticism for shrinking
from public view over the weekend, remaining inside the White House except for
a trip to Florida for a SpaceX launch on Saturday during which he briefly
addressed the violence.
While the
president responded to questions from reporters about the killing last week,
calling Floyd’s death a tragedy and asking the Justice Department to
investigate the episode, he had ignored calls for a formal address to the
nation — an idea that divided his advisers — while firing off incendiary tweets
online.
The brash
language continued on Monday morning’s call with the nation’s governors.
“If you
don’t dominate, you’re wasting your time,” Trump told them, according to audio
of the teleconference. “They’re going to run over you, you’re going to look
like a bunch of jerks.”
In the
roughly hourlong call, Trump urged for a greater crackdown on the unrest and
repeatedly praised the job the National Guard had done in Minneapolis over the
weekend to bring under control what had become at times violent protests,
saying that guardsmen “knocked them down … like bowling pins.”
He
continually cast the use of force as the only way to deter protesters once and
for all, telling the governors that “the harder you are, the tougher you are,
the less likely they’re going to be hit.”
“It’s a
movement that if you don’t put it down, it’ll get worse and worse,” Trump
added, according to audio obtained by The Washington Post.
Trump went
further than his calls for greater force, lambasting some governors who he said
weren’t heeding his pleas.
“The only
time it’s successful is when you’re weak,” he said of the protests. “And most
of you are weak.” He later told governors who neglected to call in the National
Guard that they were “making yourself look like fools,” naming none but
name-dropping cities like Philadelphia, Los Angeles, New York and Washington.
In D.C., he
said ominously, “we’re going to do something that people haven’t seen before.
And you’re gonna have total domination.”
In the Rose
Garden address, the president shed more light on his threat.
“As we
speak, I am dispatching thousands and thousands of heavily armed soldiers,
military personnel and law enforcement officers to stop the rioting, looting,
vandalism, assaults and the wanton destruction of property” in the District, he
said. “We are putting everybody on warning, our 7 p.m. curfew will be strictly
enforced. Those who threaten innocent life and property will be arrested,
detained and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”
He also
compared the current moment with the Occupy Wall Street movement, calling the
use of force to sweep out those protesters in the wake of the 2008 financial
crisis “a thing of beauty.”
“It was an
hour of bedlam, but when it was all over it was a beautiful thing and that’s
the way it has to end,” Trump told the governors.
He also
implored them to carry on with prosecutions of arrested protesters “or they’ll
be back.”
“You have
to arrest people, and you have to try people, and they have to go jail for long
periods of time,” he said, asserting that “you have to do retribution” in order
to properly deter future clashes.
The
president’s calls with governors have become a somewhat routine occurrence
throughout the coronavirus crisis, though Monday’s centered almost entirely on
the unrest across the country and featured Barr, Defense Secretary Mark Esper
and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley.
Barr told
participants that the Justice Department would be using joint terrorist task
forces to track instigators at the protests.
He urged
them to control crowds rather than react to them, and echoed Trump’s call to
“dominate” the scene and “go after troublemakers.”
Only one
governor openly objected to the president’s comments on the call.
“I wanted
to take this moment, and can’t let it pass,” said Gov. J.B. Pritzker of
Illinois, a Democrat, going on to outline his “extraordinary” concern about the
president’s “inflammatory” rhetoric, which he said was making the upheaval
worse.
“We’ve got
to have national leadership in calling for calm,” Pritzker told the president,
who responded in kind and accused the governor of mishandling the coronavirus
outbreak in his state.
It was at
this point Trump also lashed out at criticism that he hadn’t spoken enough
about Floyd’s death. Trump complained that he wasn’t receiving enough credit
for mentioning it at the SpaceX launch, telling the call participants that “we
just sent out a billion-dollar rocket” but that he still mentioned Floyd at the
top of his remarks.
“The whole
world was disgraced by it, not just our country,” he told the governors of the
manner of Floyd’s death. “Nobody can tell me I haven’t spoken about it. I’ve
spoken about it at great length. … But I also have to speak about law and
order.”
The president
ended the call by instructing governors again to utilize the National Guard to
clamp down on the protests, telling them that “you’re much better off” with too
many defense assets than too few, and “too few is unacceptable.”
“So go out
and get ‘em, good luck tonight,” he finished.
The Justice
Department did not respond to questions about the involvement of Barr, who was
captured by news cameras standing in the park with police just before they
began to clear protesters out of the area, in that decision. But a department
spokesperson, Kerri Kupec, said Barr was leading Monday night’s efforts in the
District, after Trump called the handling of Sunday night's protests a
“disgrace.“
But the
move by law enforcement officers to deploy tear gas and fire rubber bullets to
enable the president’s photo op immediately sparked outrage.
Mariann
Edgar Budde, the diocesan bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, which
oversees St. John’s, tore into the president in a CNN interview on Monday night.
“Let me be
clear. The president just used a Bible, the most sacred text of the
Judeo-Christian tradition, and one of the churches of my diocese without my
permission as a backdrop for a message antithetical to the teachings of Jesus
and everything our churches stand for,” she told host Anderson Cooper. “And to
do so, as you just said, he sanctioned the use of tear gas by police officers
in riot gear to clear the church yard. I am outraged.”
Moreover,
she said, the president did not use the church to pray, nor did he address the
unrest simmering across the country.
“I just
can't believe what my eyes have seen tonight,” Budde continued. She then
blasted what she called an “abuse of sacred symbols for the people of faith in
this country to justify language, rhetoric, an approach to this crisis that is
antithetical to everything we stand for.”
D.C. Mayor
Muriel Bowser also slammed the move, pointing out in a tweet that officers’
clearing of the park came less than half an hour before the city’s curfew went
into effect.
“Federal
police used munitions on peaceful protestors in front of the White House, an
act that will make the job of @DCPoliceDept officers more difficult,” she wrote
on Twitter. “Shameful!”
Shia Kapos contributed to this report.
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