The sheer volume of doublespeak continuing to flow from the Trump administration about the June 1 clearing of protestors from the park next to the White House needs to be acknowledged. It shouldn’t be lost in the cycle of outrage that seems to have a hold this country. We may not be living in Orwell’s “1984,” but at the rate things are headed, it’s not unthinkable for that to be a few years off.
As President Donald Trump was proclaiming himself “an ally of all peaceful protestors” in a Rose Garden address two Mondays ago, an assortment of agencies including the U.S. Park Police and National Guard cleared out a group of seemingly peaceful protestors from neighboring Lafayette Park. The offer of friendship? Tear gas and projectiles.
Despite the evidence from video, witnesses and materials found at the scene, the White House and law enforcement officials involved have tried to dispute that certain crowd control measures were used. It was pepper balls and smoke canisters, not tear gas, according to U.S. Park Police.
As the libertarian magazine Reason strongly and succinctly put it in a recent headline, that ridiculous pushback essentially boiled down to, “It wasn’t tear gas, it was a gaseous substance that causes tears.” This attempted distinction would be laughable if it weren’t so terrifyingly consequential.
“The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears,” Orwell wrote in 1984. “It was their final, most essential command.” Officials seem to keep trying to get people to ignore what happened last Monday evening in Lafayette Park.
Attorney General Bill Barr in particular has attempted some serious mental gymnastics over the past week, first trying to distance himself from the decision to clear the park — which preceded Trump’s photo op stroll over to St. John’s Church, a procession that America’s top military official, Gen. Mark Milley, has now apologized for joining, saying “I should not have been there.”
“I’m not involved in giving tactical commands like that,” Barr told the Associated Press last Friday. “I was frustrated and I was also worried that as the crowd grew, it was going to be harder and harder to do. So my attitude was get it done, but I didn’t say, ‘Go do it.’ ”
Setting aside for a moment that White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany has said it was Barr “who made the decision to move the perimeter,” his comments deserve some unpacking.
In this statement, Barr, the nation’s top law enforcement official, strains credulity by attempting to distinguish between the “attitude” he was conveying and giving a direct command. It would be like the boss at any office across America saying, “I didn’t tell you to go get pens, I just reminded you that we’re out of them and you’re in charge of buying office supplies.”
Only this wasn’t about pens. It was about protestors getting tear gassed outside the White House, while the president of the United States claimed to be their friend.
The inconsistency underlying Barr’s claim about the decision to clear the park should also undermine his assertion that protestors in the park had been violent that day. Plus, members of the National Guard present have pushed back in interviews with Politico against officials’ claims that the crowd had turned violent.
Barr can spin all he wants about the “ canard” that many people think the park was cleared specifically for the photo op. Even on that point, he continues to talk in circles. No amount of explanation changes the sequence of events, or the images it produced.
The American people can see the videos from Lafayette Park, compare that to the attempted explanations, and should be able to see the reality of the situation for themselves.