An independent report last week on last summer’s violent crackdown on protesters at Washington’s Lafayette Park gives a misleading and inaccurate portrayal of events culminating in President Donald Trump’s silly photo-op outside an adjacent church. The National Park Service might have a valid claim of innocence for having planned to clear the area well before Trump’s escapade, as an Interior Department inspector general’s report found. But there were plenty of other actors on the scene — ordered up by the Trump administration — with the specific, predetermined mission of using force to clear protesters out so Trump could stand in front of St. John’s Church holding a Bible.
The government action was excessive. The Black Lives Matter protesters were not engaged in violence at the time, although some protesters had previously engaged law enforcers, injuring 49 U.S. Park Police officers. At the time of the confrontation on June 1, 2020, nonviolent protesters were exercising their First Amendment right to express outrage over the police murder, days before, of George Floyd in Minneapolis. They were actually moving away from the park when law enforcers other than U.S. Park Service police deployed chemical irritants against them.
Unfortunately, Trump interpreted the inspector general’s report as “Completely and Totally exonerating” him. The report was anything but an exoneration. Trump, hardly a religious man, had absolutely no need, other than his own political promotion, to stand in front of St. John’s Church that day. The Bible he used was a prop.
