Reportedly angered by the perception that he was hiding in a bunker while parts of Washington, D.C., burned around him over the weekend, Donald Trump reemerged publicly on Monday to speak in the Rose Garden as peaceful protesters were violently expelled near the White House. The crowd was cleared to open a path to St. John’s Church, a historic building damaged by a fire amid Sunday’s clashes between police and protesters. In helping to set up the president’s church photo op, Bill Barr, Trump’s attorney general attack dog, ordered law enforcement to disperse the demonstrators, leading to the use of chemical agents, flash bangs, and shields to beat them back.
Trump got his comeback glamour shots—posing in front of St. John’s while waving around “a Bible” for the cameras—and is now denying that he ever retreated to said bunker at all. During a Wednesday interview on Fox News Radio, the president acknowledged that, yes, he did briefly go subterranean, but only to inspect the secure quarters. “Well, it was a false report,” he told Fox’s Brian Kilmeade. “I went down during the day, and I was there for a tiny little short period of time, and it was much more for an inspection. There was no problem during the day.” The president went on to say that he’d “gone down two or three times, all for inspection,” because “someday you may need it,” the implication being that nationwide unrest, triggered by a white Minneapolis police officer killing George Floyd, an unarmed black man, was not one of those times. “We never had a problem. Nobody ever came close to giving us a problem,” he said, noting in the same breath that “one evening...was a little rough,” so that’s why he “brought in the troops.”
Those hundreds of active-duty military personnel sent to protect the capital are already starting to head back to their home bases after two full days and nights of largely peaceful protesting in D.C. But Trump is still hung up on the “lamestream media” coverage of his church offensive. While telling Kilmeade that he had no idea about the park protesters and was not behind the order to “move them out,” he insisted that law enforcement actually “didn’t use tear gas.” On Twitter the president has lashed out at media reports referencing tear gas, a chemical weapon that causes severe eye and respiratory pain, after the U.S. Park Police claimed that they, in fact, only discharged “pepper balls.” He has also dispatched his communications staff to die on this hill. “We now know through the U.S. Park Police that neither they, nor any of their law enforcement partners, used tear gas to quell rising violence,” said Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh. “Every news organization which reported the tear gas lie should immediately correct or retract its erroneous reporting.” White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, too, said at Wednesday’s briefing that “no tear gas was used” before the church pose, which she compared to Winston Churchill surveying bombing damage during World War II.
The president’s quibble over which chemical agent was used to attack peaceful protesters on his behalf, like his insistence that he was only “inspecting” the bunker that multiple reports say he was spirited into by Secret Service, is another petty attempt to redirect the narrative, to regain a shred of the dignity he has lost, by splitting hairs. And as usual, it’s wrong. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, pepper spray pellets fit the definition for tear gas. “Riot control agents (sometimes referred to as ‘tear gas’) are chemical compounds that temporarily make people unable to function by causing irritation to the eyes, mouth, throat, lungs, and skin,” states the organization, noting that there are “several different compounds” that fit this description, including chloroacetophenone, the active component in pepper sprays.
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