The morning of June 1 was a tense one at the White House.
President Trump, who had been watching three days of increasingly violent demonstrations, was angry and frustrated by what he saw around the nation and outside his own front door.
With state governors and local Washington officials seemingly overwhelmed and undermanned, it was time for someone to take charge.
The president summoned Defense Secretary Mark Esper, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley, Attorney General William Barr, and national security adviser Robert O’Brien to the White House.
Two days earlier, when rioters burned a police station in Minneapolis, Trump has offered the military to restore order.
“Honor the memory of George Floyd. Honor his memory. They have to get tougher,” Trump said. “We have our military ready, willing, and able. … We can have troops to the ground very quickly.”
Now, after a harrowing night in the White House, Trump no longer wanted to wait for an invitation.
While Trump had praised the Secret Service publicly for “easily” handling weekend protesters outside the White House, by Sunday night, Secret Service and U.S. Park Police, backed up by a small number of D.C. National Guard troops, were outnumbered by protesters.
While many protested peacefully, others looted stores, defaced buildings, and lit fires, including a blaze set in the basement of the historic St. John’s Episcopal Church across Lafayette Square from the White House.
“Things were so bad the Secret Service recommended the president go down to the bunker,” Barr later told Fox news. “We can’t have that in our country.”
“Sunday evening, the security elements were almost overwhelmed,” Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy told reporters later. “Our soldiers and airmen, they were in the park with the second row behind law enforcement,” said McCarthy, referring to the guard troops who were supporting police but were not supposed to be making arrests.
“We had five soldiers hit in the head with bricks, one of which has a severe concussion. … There was a lot of confusion and not knowing just what we were dealing with.”
Trump had been advised that as president, he had the authority to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807, which would allow him to order federal troops into city streets across the United States to confront lawbreakers directly.
Esper had already ordered elements of the 82nd Airborne Division from Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and military police from Fort Drum, New York, to be staged outside the city and had placed the 1,600 troops on a heightened state of alert.
But deploying armed, active-duty military forces was literally the last thing Esper and Milley wanted to do, as it would violate the bedrock principle that the military should not be used for domestic enforcement.
According to multiple reports, voices were raised and tempers flared in a heated debate as Esper and Milley pushed back, advocating that using guard troops, who are trained to assist police without crossing the line into law enforcement, was the appropriate response.
“The option to use active-duty forces in a law enforcement role should only be used as a matter of last resort — and only in the most urgent and dire of situations,” Esper said at the Pentagon two days later. “We are not in one of those situations now.”
But to stay the president’s hand, the Pentagon needed to activate a lot more guard troops quickly, and states were reluctant to put any troops, guard or otherwise, on the street of their cities.
In what was supposed to be a private conference call with governors, Trump pushed for the use of the guard and berated the state officials, saying, “Most of you are weak.”
“The word is ‘dominate.’ If you don’t dominate your city and your state, they’re gonna walk away with you,” he said.
Trump was echoing the words of his defense secretary, who had described a strategy of using large numbers of troops to protect buildings and other sites as a deterrent against potential lawbreakers.
“I think the sooner that you mass and dominate the battlespace, the quicker this dissipates, and we get back to the right normal.”
Later, Esper would regret using the term “battlespace” to refer to the streets of cities across America.
At the Pentagon, McCarthy — who, as Army secretary, oversees the D.C. National Guard since the federal city has no governor — was in a mad scramble to bring in thousands of guard troops from other cities to enable Trump’s get-tough strategy.
Failure, he knew, would mean Trump, would likely send in the federal troops, which were just across the river.
“We didn’t want to do it,” McCarthy said later. “We did everything we could to not cross that line.”
McCarthy was able to get 300 additional troops in time for Monday night, the night police and guard troops pushed protesters out of Lafayette Square, which ended up being the last major confrontation in the city.
Eventually, guard reinforcements from 11 states were brought in, and demonstrations calmed down to where some protesters were seen engaging troops in friendly discussions.
Esper ordered that all guard troops be disarmed and ordered the contingency active-duty troops back to their home bases.
The following weekend, an estimated 45,000 demonstrators marched in the streets of Washington with no major incidents reported.
“I have just given an order for our National Guard to start the process of withdrawing from Washington, D.C., now that everything is under perfect control,” Trump tweeted the next day.
As for the role of the guard at the White House, “Guardsmen, Army and Air, held the line and kept people from advancing onto the White House proper,” said Maj. Gen. William Walker, commanding general of the D.C. National Guard.
“We are not a law enforcement agency. We are a protection and defense organization. … So, we did that mission,” he said.
Jamie McIntyre is the Washington Examiner’s senior writer on defense and national security. His morning newsletter “Jamie McIntyre’s Daily on Defense,” is free and available by email subscription at dailyondefense.com.
