#BunkerBoy’s Photo-Op War

Is this an authoritarian crackdown by Donald Trump or just another politicized spectacle?
President Donald Trump standing in front of the boarded up St. Johns Church
Washington has never been a more tragic combination of the menacing and the absurd.Photograph by Patrick Semansky / AP / Shutterstock

On Tuesday morning, a day after Donald Trump crossed Lafayette Square for an awkward photo op in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church, I met an outraged Lutheran pastor there—he was in a cassock, parking his bike. Only a few hours earlier, on Monday evening, heavily armed federal troops had beaten with batons and fired smoke grenades and chemical irritants at a stunned crowd of peaceful protesters, to make way for the President. Now it was a lovely June morning, and the square was quiet, punctuated only by the sound of TV reporters’ live standups and the distant hum of buzz saws, as carpenters installed plywood boards on the front of nearby office buildings.

The pastor, Michael Wilker, is one of the leaders of the Washington Interfaith Network, and he had been summoned from St. John’s sister parish, a Lutheran church on Capitol Hill. His bishop had already denounced Trump’s Monday-night actions as “a desecration of the church.” Wilker told me that he considered them not only an “abomination” but an effort by the President to distract from the point of the protests that have followed the murder of George Floyd: police brutality and racial injustice. As a Lutheran, Wilker said, he felt especially upset by Trump’s clumsy wielding of the Bible as he stood in front of St. John’s, a scene that was soon turned into a campaign-ad-style montage by the White House. “During Nazi Germany, Adolf Hitler used the symbols of the Lutheran church—our own church—as a way to divide Christians from one another, and especially to deny the humanity of Jews in Germany. It’s the same thing Trump is doing here: he is using the symbols of the church,” Wilker said, “as a way to divide the church from one another and to divert our attention from the actual suffering and killing that’s going on.” It was, he concluded, “a demonic act.”

With that, Wilker rushed off to join a group of African-American clergy who had gathered in front of St. John’s to denounce Trump’s actions, and I looked back across H Street, to a graffiti-covered wall bearing “Fuck Donald Trump” in giant letters, that the President had walked past en route to the church. There was a new black chain-link fence, barring access to Lafayette Park, that had been installed overnight. Burly men from the F.B.I., Secret Service, and Park Police stood guard in the middle of the street. The President was inside the White House, a few hundred yards away. “D.C. had no problems last night,” he tweeted minutes earlier, continuing, “(thank you President Trump!)”

A few hours later, I returned to the plaza in front of St. John’s, where there was a growing crowd of hundreds who had come to protest before the District’s 7 P.M. curfew. The major difference from the morning, aside from the large number of people, was the presence of armored military Humvees in the streets of downtown Washington, guarded by young soldiers who had been trained for combat in places like Afghanistan and were now patrolling D.C., on the orders of the President. “Did you ever think you would be asked to do this in your own country?” I asked one guy in combat fatigues, a bandanna tied around his face in a nod to the still-raging coronavirus pandemic. All around us there were young people, black and white, wearing face masks as they streamed toward the White House. There were people walking dogs and parents pushing baby strollers. He shook his head.

It was another unthinkable moment of the Trump era, in a time full of them. But what is it, exactly, that we have been experiencing these past few days here in Washington? Should we disregard the peaceful mass protests against the oppression of black people and focus, as Trump would have us do, exclusively on the lawlessness and looting that the self-styled “LAW & ORDER” President claims to be cleaning up? Is this an authoritarian crackdown by Trump or merely another politicized spectacle from a leader who craves them? Just as he did this spring, during the pandemic, when he declared war against an “Invisible Enemy” but denied “any responsibility at all” for its outcome, the President has talked tough but seems most interested in being seen to “dominate,” as he has put it repeatedly, rather than actually doing so. He has mustered a major show of force in the District, but although he has invoked the possibility of ordering the U.S. military to deploy to certain states—whether they ask for the military or not—he has not actually done so. At least not yet.

As always with Trump, there’s an intense element of farce mixed with the fury. On Monday, there was a cringe-inducing moment when Trump, having marched across the emptied park, stood awkwardly in front of the church while his daughter Ivanka, in heels and a spangly face mask, extracted the Bible from her oversize white purse, a fifteen-hundred-dollar number from Max Mara. The whole affair seemed to have been precipitated at least in part by the President’s fury at being mocked as “#BunkerBoy,” following reports that he had been taken to the White House’s underground bunker on Friday, when protests got heated. On Wednesday, the President admitted in an interview that he had gone into the White House bunker, but claimed that it was “more for an inspection” that had lasted only a “tiny, little, short period of time” which, completely coincidentally, happened to take place during the protests. Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, meanwhile, admitted during a press conference that he had not, in fact, thought that he was going to inspect alongside the President a looted toilet when he ended up at Trump’s controversial church photo op, as he had claimed in an interview. This was all before 11 A.M. Wednesday. By early afternoon, Trump’s press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, announced to reporters with a straight face that Trump’s walk to St. John’s was just like when Winston Churchill toured London during the Blitz.

Washington has never been a more tragic combination of the menacing and the absurd. There are helicopters and drones overhead and big men in combat fatigues in the streets of the capital. There are thousands of protesters clamoring for action over police abuses and racial inequality. And then there is Trump, bashing CNN on Twitter and claiming, without irony, that he has personally done more for African-Americans than “any President in U.S. history, with the possible exception” of Abraham Lincoln. What struck me, though, wasn’t that the President and his Pentagon chief were lying so shamelessly to the public, nor even the embarrassing lameness of their lies. This is, in fact, a farce with consequences. There are checkpoints being patrolled by combat units, and images of armed thugs targeting and beating students and journalists on live TV in the name of protecting the President. Admiral Mike Mullen, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he was “sickened” by the use of security personnel to clear the way for Trump—and that it was a gross misuse of American military might. On Wednesday, Trump’s former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis broke his silence about the President to denounce his “bizarre photo op” and to call the action a violation of protesters’ “constitutional rights.” Trump may be a clown, but he has managed, in the week since Floyd’s killing, to present the world with dystopian images of America as Egypt or Russia or Turkey or any of the other unfree places that we Americans are used to smugly lecturing about freedom.

Under the cover of the chaos that he is so adept at generating, Trump has made several decisions in recent days that amount to a radical reordering of the international scene, as well as an intimidating show of force at home. On Friday, before his “inspection” of the bunker, he held a press conference to announce that he was pulling the United States out of the World Health Organization, in the midst of the COVID-19 outbreak, because he claims that it is too pro-China. On Saturday, after German Chancellor Angela Merkel said she would not attend, Trump cancelled the G-7 summit of world leaders that he planned to hold in Washington later this month, called the collection of close U.S. allies “very outdated,” and invited Russia to rejoin the group for a September gathering. Europeans quickly rejected the idea, including British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, a Trump ally whose unlikely premiership had been boosted by the American President. Undeterred, Trump called Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday morning to formally propose the plan, hours before he announced that he was ordering the U.S. military to Washington to defend his White House from American protesters.

Inviting Putin to the United States just weeks before the American Presidential election and torching the G-7 alliance at a moment of international economic crisis are no less malevolent acts because they are being carried out by a clown. These past few days have shown, once again, that Trump is in permanent burn-it-down mode. It’s just that he is smashing windows in the way that rich, entitled types do, and the damage will be much harder to fix than broken glass and looted sneaker stores.

On Tuesday night, as I headed back toward my car, just before the city’s curfew, I ran across protesters shouting across Sixteenth Street at a group of D.C. police officers who seemed to be arresting someone in a car that they had pulled over. The protesters begged the police to reconsider and demanded to know what the suspect had done wrong. “It’s not your concern,” one of the cops said testily. “It is my concern,” one young woman yelled back, from across the road. “It’s all of our concern,” a young man shouted. The police officer ignored them. A helicopter buzzed overhead, and, less than a block away, soldiers were blocking traffic. I could not help but notice that this surreal scene, so redolent of every display of police-state might that I covered as a foreign correspondent in the former Soviet Union, was unfolding in front of the Russian Ambassador’s ornate Beaux-Arts residence. Vladimir Putin would have loved it.