I was wrong to walk with Trump to church: Milley

WASHINGTON — Army Gen. Mark Milley, the top military officer in the United States, said Thursday he was wrong to accompany President Donald Trump on a walk through Lafayette Square that ended in a photo op at a church.

He said his presence in uniform amid protests over racial injustice “created a perception of the military involved in domestic politics.”

“I should not have been there,” the Joint Chiefs chairman said in remarks to a National Defence University commencement ceremony.

Milley’s statement risked the wrath of a president sensitive to anything hinting of criticism of events he has staged. Pentagon leaders’ relations with the White House were extraordinarily tense after a disagreement last week over Trump’s threat to use federal troops to quell civil unrest triggered by George Floyd’s death in police custody.

Trump’s June 1 walk through the park to pose with a Bible at a church came after authorities used pepper spray and flash bangs to clear the park and streets of largely peaceful protesters demonstrating in the aftermath of Floyd’s death. Milley’s comments were his first public statements about the walk with Trump, which the White House has hailed as a presidential “leadership moment” akin to Winston Churchill inspecting damage from German bombs in London during the Second World War.

Milley said his presence and the photographs compromised his commitment to a military divorced from politics. “My presence in that moment and in that environment created a perception of the military involved in domestic politics,” Milley said.