NINETEEN
In late May, angry protests erupted in more than 140 cities across the country. Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin had been caught on video pressing his knee on the neck of George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, for seven minutes and 46 seconds, killing him.
Some of the protests escalated into violent clashes with police and looting as darkness fell each evening. The scenes replayed endlessly on cable news.
In an interview at the time, Trump told Woodward, “These are arsonists, they’re thugs, they’re anarchists and they’re bad people. Very dangerous people.
“These are very well-organized. Antifa’s leading it,” Trump said, pointing his finger at the anti-fascist movement that had confronted white supremacists and others.
Stephen Miller, the 34-year-old director of White House speechwriting and one of Trump’s most conservative senior advisers, was a hardliner on the unrest. Several colleagues believed he was responsible for stoking and spinning up the president about the violence.
Articulate and harsh, and known for his fitted suits and skinny ties, Miller had helped draft Trump’s “American carnage” inaugural address and had been the architect of the controversial travel ban for Muslim-majority countries. He seemed to forever be lingering in the Oval Office, waiting for an opportunity to push his agenda.
If there were ever a modern-day Rasputin, Joint Chiefs chairman Milley had concluded it was Miller.
Milley had his staff prepare a daily, classified SECRET report, “Domestic Unrest National Overview.” The report tracked the latest violence in American cities with a population over 100,000 people.
Less than a week after Floyd’s murder, Milley was walking through the report with Trump in the Oval Office.
“Mr. President,” Miller said, piping up from one of the Oval Office couches, “they are burning America down. Antifa, Black Lives Matter, they’re burning it down. You have an insurrection on your hands. Barbarians are at the gate.”
Milley spun around from his seat in front of the Resolute Desk. “Shut the fuck up, Steve.
“Mr. President,” Milley said turning back to Trump, “they are not burning it down.” His extended hands were flat in front of him, and he raised them up to his shoulders and slowly lowered them in a calming motion. He cited information from the daily SECRET report.
“Mr. President, there are about 276 cities in America with over 100,000 people. There were two cities in the last 24 hours that had major protests,” he said. “Elsewhere, it was 20 protesters to 300.” While images of burning and violence had been on television, many of the protests were peaceful—about 93 percent of them, according to a later nonpartisan report.
“They used spray paint, Mr. President,” Milley said. “That’s not insurrection. That guy up there.” He pointed to the portrait of Abraham Lincoln on the wall in the Oval Office. “That guy up there, Lincoln, had an insurrection.” Milley cited the militia bombardment of the U.S. Army’s Fort Sumter in 1861 that started the Civil War.
“That was an insurrection,” Milley said.
“We’re a country of 330 million people. You’ve got these penny packet protests,” Milley said, saying the situation was not even close to being as threatening as the 1968 riots in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere after the assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
Barr, who also attended the meeting, understood Milley’s frustration with Miller. He had also once told Miller to shut the fuck up. And Milley had been calling Barr regularly in recent weeks, asking him to weigh in during Oval Office meetings as a heat shield and protection for the military.
“Look, Steve,” Barr said, “you don’t have operational experience to be talking about this stuff, okay? These things are very delicate. For every time you have a success, you have Waco,” referring to the 1993 FBI siege and assault of the Branch Davidian religious sect that led to the death of 76 sect members, including 25 children and pregnant women.
“You have to be careful,” Barr said. “You have to know what you’re doing. Stop mouthing that kind of stuff. Getting that kind of confrontation going, we can do it. But using the military isn’t required right now. I’m not willing to roll the dice on that.” He said bringing in the military was only a “break-glass option,” a last resort.
Milley turned to retired Army General Keith Kellogg, Pence’s national security adviser and a Trump loyalist, who was also sitting on a couch.
“Keith,” Milley said, “this is nothing like 1968. You were Lieutenant Kellogg in 1968 sitting on top of one of these buildings collocated with the commanding general of the 82nd Airborne.” President Lyndon B. Johnson had deployed combat troops into Washington.
“This isn’t even on the same level of the 1968 stuff when tens of thousands of protesters and rioters are going through Detroit and Chicago and L.A.”
“That’s right, Mr. President,” Kellogg said.
The protests should be monitored, Milley said. “We should pay attention to it. It’s important.” But it was an issue for local police and local law enforcement, mayors and governors.
“It is not an issue for the United States military to deploy forces on the streets of America, Mr. President.”
Milley then carefully broached the issue of systemic racism and policing with Trump.
“That’s pent up in communities that have been experiencing what they perceive to be police brutality,” he said.
Trump didn’t say anything.
By June 1, 2020, Trump was furious.
The protests had continued to grow in size and intensity across the country. Trump had agitated all weekend about the loud protests at the White House gates. A pedestrian area off 16th Street, leading up to the White House, which would soon be renamed “Black Lives Matter Plaza,” had become a focal point for different groups, with an increasing police presence.
The previous evening, May 31, a fire had been lit in the basement nursery of the historic St. John’s Episcopal Church, barely 1,000 feet from the White House and often called the Church of Presidents. At one point, the Secret Service had taken Trump to the underground bunker.
Boarded up and charred, the church and the sprawling scene outside brought the racial unrest convulsing the country to Trump’s front door.
Trump called his top officials to the Oval Office for a meeting on June 1 around 10:30 a.m.
Trump told them he wanted a law-and-order crackdown—10,000 active-duty, regular troops in the city. He asked about the Insurrection Act, an 1807 law which gave the president the authority to use active-duty troops domestically by simply declaring an insurrection.
“We look weak,” Trump said angrily. “We don’t look strong.” He was sitting with his arms folded at the Resolute Desk.
Secretary of Defense Mark Esper was fielding most of Trump’s questions. Esper knew that Trump’s “we” meant “he.”
Esper, 56, square-jawed and with thin spectacles, could have been an extra on the television program Mad Men about 1960s advertising executives. He also kept a low profile. But he was one of the most experienced defense appointees in modern times, having graduated from West Point in 1986 and then serving 21 years in the Army. He had deployed with the 101st Airborne “Screaming Eagles” as an infantry officer for the 1991 Gulf War, winning a Bronze Star. He later served in the National Guard and earned a master’s degree from the Kennedy School at Harvard, and a doctorate in public administration.
Esper had worked in Congress as an aide, and as a Raytheon lobbyist before Trump made him Army secretary, then acting deputy secretary and then, finally, secretary.
“Mr. President, there is no need to call up the Insurrection Act,” Esper said. “The National Guard is on the ground and more suited.” The National Guard, comprised of volunteer reservists, often helped with national disasters.
Barr interjected and said they could bring in additional law enforcement, which was the traditional way to handle domestic protests. Barr had the FBI and the U.S. attorneys working together to pull everything together on what was happening in the various cities, and he was talking near daily with Milley.
“Mr. President,” Barr said, “if it comes to keeping law and order on the streets, I would not hesitate to use regular troops, believe me, if we had to. But we don’t have to. They’re not necessary,” he said. “You got a lot of stuff going on in different cities, but they’re manageable, if the cities step up. They have the adequate resources to do it, especially if they use their National Guard or their state police.
“It looks like a lot because of the way the media is covering it. But some of these cities are like 300 people on a street corner and a burning car in the background. You don’t need the 82nd Airborne Division.”
But Trump was adamant: He wanted the storied 82nd Airborne, stationed at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, the military’s elite crisis responder, to arrive in Washington before sunset when a protest was planned in Lafayette Square, the seven-acre park between the White House and St. John’s Church.
Esper explained to Trump the 82nd was trained to take the fight to the enemy with the biggest, most modern weapons. They were not trained in crowd control and civil unrest. They were exactly the wrong troops for the job.
The president was getting increasingly contentious, and Esper worried that if he didn’t put something on the table, Trump might formally order him to bring the 82nd to D.C. He needed the president to calm down.
“Mr. President,” Esper said, “let’s do this. We will alert the troops and start moving them north from Fort Bragg. But we’re not going to bring them into the city. We can get the Guard here in time. If we can’t, if it gets out of control, we have these other forces.”
Milley agreed with Esper’s approach. Neither he nor Esper wanted a potentially bloody, unpredictable street confrontation between Black Lives Matter protesters and highly lethal, combat-trained U.S. military forces.
Trump sat there. His arms were still folded. He started to yell, his face heating up. Esper could sense Trump’s wheels moving. Esper stayed still.
An aide hurried in: “Mr. President, the governors are on the phone for your conference call.”
Trump got up and strode down to the Situation Room. On the call, he told the governors they should forcefully crack down on their demonstrators. There was none of his usual cajoling. His tone was belligerent.
“You have to dominate,” Trump told them, almost issuing a command. “If you don’t dominate, you’re wasting your time. They’re going to run over you. You’re going to look like a bunch of jerks. You have to dominate, and you have to arrest people, and you have to try people and they have to go to jail for long periods of time.”
“Law enforcement response is not going to work unless we dominate the streets as the president said,” Attorney General Barr told the governors, adopting the same language. “We have to control the streets.”
Esper then echoed them. “I agree, we need to dominate the battlespace,” he said on the call.
Milley left the White House and headed downtown to visit the FBI command post monitoring the demonstrations. Expecting a late night, he changed into his uniform of camouflage fatigues to be more comfortable.