Walking the walk didn’t work for Trump

WASHINGTON — President Trump tried to characterize a mostly peaceful, nationwide protest movement as a riot, after a black man was suffocated to death by a white police officer in Minneapolis last week.

George Floyd’s last words were “I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe,” after one of four officers had pinned him to the ground, his knee pressed against Floyd’s neck for more than eight minutes.

All four of the policemen involved were fired from their jobs. Three were charged with aiding and abetting a murder, and the patrolman who killed Floyd has been charged with second-degree murder.

Floyd’s death unleashed a storm of anger and protests in the nation’s capital and across the country. And what began as an arrest turned into a nationwide firestorm.

Trump, whose job approval polls are mediocre at best, is in a fight for his political life, combatting the coronavirus pandemic that has pushed unemployment up to nearly 20 percent, and plunged economic growth to a new low.

On Monday, Trump declared himself the “president of law and order,” saying he would mobilize “all available federal resources, civilian and military,” as police descended on protesters who had surrounded the White House.

But he went further than that, saying he would bring in military forces, urging the nation’s governors to “dominate their streets” and call out their National Guard.

If they refused to do so, Trump said he would send “thousands and thousands of heavily armed soldiers and law enforcement officers ... to stop the rioting, looting, vandalism, assaults and the wanton destruction of property.”

Many in and out of the administration questioned whether he had the authority to do so, if the governors did not request his help. They haven’t.

Administration insiders said unless he enacted the Insurrection Act, Trump wouldn’t have the authority to deploy military troops. He took no action to do that because it wasn’t necessary.

But Trump was making every effort to blow this up into something bigger than it was. He tweeted last week the protesters were “thugs,” declaring “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.”

District of Columbia Mayor Muriel E. Bowser said the White House “had pushed to take control of the D.C. police force to quell the protests,” but Bowser said she rejected that offer.

Then, in a bizarre move on Tuesday, Trump left the White House to walk across the street through Lafayette Square, which had been entirely cleared of protesters, to St. John’s Episcopal Church. An aide handed him a Holy Bible, which he held up while standing in front of the church for what was described as a “photo op.”

The White House later put out a video of Trump’s walk past “a phalanx of officers in tactical gear and through the (Lafayette) park to the church,” The Washington Post reported.

The Rev. Virginia Gerbasi, who’s the rector of St. John’s Episcopal Church, Georgetown, told the Post she was driven from the Lafayette Square church by police and returned to her car when she began getting text messages about Trump’s photo op.

“I literally COULD NOT believe it,” Gerbasi texted. “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!!!”

In an interview with the Post on Tuesday afternoon, Gerbasi said she believed her first-person account of the attack on clergy and protestors struck a chord with many thousands of readers because it “tapped into something that was so universally offensive. That church people got driven off of church grounds by riot police for a photo op for the president in front of the church holding a Bible is offensive to the core.”

Trump isn’t known as a regular churchgoer and rarely attends Sunday services, even though St. John’s Church is that short walk from his front door.

But former Vice President Joe Biden had the last word on the president’s renewed interest in the Bible this week.

“I just wish he’d open it up once in a while,” Biden said.

Donald Lambro has been covering Washington politics for more than 50 years as a reporter, editor and commentator.