President Donald Trump is echoing a Republican congressman in calling for the removal of a peace vigil that has been outside the White House for seven presidents.
“Take it down. Take it down today,” Trump told reporters Friday at the White House.
Trump was asked about the vigil, considered the country’s longest continuous act of political protest after it was founded in 1981 by William Thomas, during an Oval Office press conference convened for him to announce he was changing the name of the Department of Defense to the Department of War and that he would host next year’s Group of 20 Leaders Summit at his golf course in Miami after an earlier proposal to do so in 2020 were scrapped because of ethics concerns.
But the president was asked about the vigil in Lafayette Square under the assumption it was a homeless encampment amid his 30-day public safety emergency in Washington, D.C., during which his administration has tried to rid the district of its homeless sites. The half-dozen protesters who maintain the vigil, however, maintain residences elsewhere.
The White House did not respond to the Washington Examiner‘s request for clarification.
Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-NJ) wrote a letter to the Interior Department in May complaining that the vigil is a permanent structure on public land that “creates public safety hazards, degrades the appearance of one of our most iconic parks, and burdens both the District and the National Park Service.”
“I will defend the First Amendment to my last breath,” he wrote. “Even if I strongly disagree with many of the wrong and distasteful messages advocated for by this protest, Americans have every right to protest their government. But they do not have the right to hijack a national park and turn it into a 24/7 eyesore.”
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To that end, the vigil must be constantly manned for the protest to be considered a First Amendment demonstration.
Van Drew has asked the Interior Department to review the vigil’s legality and remove it if appropriate.
