Better late than never, James
Mattis, the retired general who served as President Trump’s first secretary of
defense, broke his silence last week [June 3] to denounce what he called
Trump’s “deliberate effort” over three years to divide rather than try to unify
the American people.
The final straw that broke
Mattis’ loyalty as a military man to the president was Trump’s use of armed
soldiers to clear protesters out of Lafayette Square to allow the president a transparently
political photo opportunity in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church. Mattis’s
successor, Mark Esper, walked alongside Trump for the reality show-type
tableau, as did General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
dressed in combat fatigues.
Mattis opened his letter,
as later published in full in The Washington Post, by
recalling his oath to support the Constitution taken 50 years earlier when he
joined the military. “Never did I dream,” Mattis wrote, “that troops taking
that same oath would be ordered under any circumstances to violate the
constitutional rights of their fellow citizens – much less to provide a bizarre
photo op for the elected commander-in-chief, with military leadership standing
alongside.”
Trump, spared from military
service in the Vietnam era thanks to bone spurs, staged the tableau to refute the
unflattering suggestion of cowardice in reports that he had been sheltered from
“Black Lives Matters” protesters in the secure White House bunker. Once in
front of the historic St. John’s Church, Trump awkwardly held a Bible in his
outstretched right arm to demonstrate, one supposes, his Christian piety. But
the staging backfired in multiple respects.
The Rev. Mariann Budde,
archbishop of the Episcopal diocese of Washington, took offense that Trump had
given no advance of his plan to use the church for his visit. She noted that
Trump, of course, would have been welcome to use the church to pray or meet
with parishioners, but she berated him for using the unopened Bible as a
political prop.
Trump’s entourage that day
also included his lapdog attorney general, William Barr, who had personally
inspected the park hours earlier to lay plans for the later dispersal of the peaceful
protesters. Barr’s unquestioning obedience to Trump’s wishes earned him a spot
as a named defendant in a federal court suit that American Civil Liberties
Union (ACLU) lawyers filed the next day charging him and other administration
officials with violating the protesters’ free-speech rights by ordering the use
of gas and rubber bullets to clear them from the park and the adjoining street.
By week’s end, Bishop Budde
had amplified her criticism of Trump with an op-ed in The New York
Times [June 6] that described the visit as “outrageous” and cited
messages she received from around the country to similar effect. Trump, she explained,
“used sacred symbols to cloak himself in the mantle of spiritual authority,
while espousing positions antithetical to the Bible that he held in his hands.”
Mattis’s indignation over
Trump’s actions also drew support by week’s end: specifically, from a chorus of
89 former Defense Department officials in a stinging op-ed in The
Washington Post. The signers, including four former secretaries of
defense, blasted what they called Trump’s “shocking promise to send active-duty
members of the U.S. military to ‘dominate’ protesters in cities throughout the
country — with or without the consent of local mayors or state
governors.”
Esper also dissociated
himself from Trump’s plan to use active-duty troops to try to quiet the
protests sweeping cities throughout the country over George Floyd’s death at
the hands of Minneapolis police officers. “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 in addressing the
issue on Wednesday [June 3]. “We are not in one of those situations now.”
Trump nevertheless made
good on his promise in Washington, D.C., itself by sending troops to stand
guard at the Lincoln Memorial and, with Barr’s help, by posting Justice
Department personnel in riot-protective gear throughout the city’s streets. The
sight of armed troops in the nation’s capital city inevitably brought to mind
the images of tanks that the Chinese government deployed in Beijing’s Tiananmen
Square three decades ago to quell student demonstrations.
MSNBC researchers dug up an
interview that the mediagenic Donald Trump gave to Playboy
at the time praising the Communist regime for showing “strength” in dealing
with the demonstrators. For reference, the number killed in Tiananmen Square has
been put at 241 and the number of wounded at 7,000. Trump has yet to order
tanks to city streets or to issue shoot-to-kill orders, but he is failing badly
in his efforts to show strength.
Instead, Trump is flailing weakly
as polls show him 10 percentage points behind his presumptive Democratic
opponent, former vice president Joe Biden, five months before the November
election. Law-and-order themes may not be enough to save Trump from the harsh
reality of having mismanaged the response to the coronavirus pandemic, now with
more than 100,000 deaths nationwide and economic pain to a degree unseen since
the Depression.
Biden himself answered
Trump’s bluster and stagecraft later that evening with a speech in Philadelphia
with different themes. “I promise you this. I won’t traffic in fear and
division,” Biden said. “I won’t fan the flames of hate. I will seek to
heal the racial wounds that have long plagued this country — not
use them for political gain.”
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