WASHINGTON — As sirens wailed and flash-bang grenades popped across the street, President Donald Trump announced from the Rose Garden that he would use the U.S. military to stop the riots across the country that have been sparked by the death of George Floyd.
“I am mobilizing all federal and local resources, civilian and military, to protect the rights of law abiding Americans,” Trump said in the extraordinary address, which was delivered as police fired smoke devices outside to push protesters back from the White House.
"We are ending the riots and lawlessness that has spread throughout our country. We will end it now," Trump said.
"If a city or state refuses to take the actions necessary to defend the life and property of their residents, then I will deploy the United States military and quickly solve the problem for them," Trump said, referring to himself as "your president of law and order and an ally of all peaceful protesters.”
He said he was already dispatching "thousands and thousands of heavily armed soldiers, military personnel, and law enforcement officers" to Washington to stop the violence that has been a feature of the protests here.
Shortly before he started to speak — about 20 minutes before Washington's 7 p.m. ET curfew — the police and National Guard had started using smoke and flash bangs to push away the large crowd of peaceful protesters outside.
It soon became clear why the authorities had forcibly cleared Lafayette Park and its surrounding streets of peaceful protesters. Concluding his remarks, Trump said he was going to "pay my respects to a very, very special place." Then, surrounded by many of his West Wing aides, he walked across the street that had been cleared in order to stand outside St. John's Church, which suffered fire damage in protests Sunday night.
Trump held up a Bible outside the church and posed for pictures, then returned to the White House. He did not go in the church or express any religious sentiments there.
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Critics blasted the move. "The desire for a certain backdrop for a press announcement is not a security requirement," tweeted Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii. "In other words, using the power of the U.S. Military to clear out peaceful protestors for a presser is a massive abuse of power. "
To activate the military to operate in the U.S., Trump would have to invoke the 213-year-old Insurrection Act, which four people familiar with the decision had told NBC News he planned to do.
The military police forces would come from Fort Bragg in North Carolina and possibly Fort Belvoir in Virginia and could arrive in Washington within hours, these people said.
Trump’s decision on whether to invoke the act, adopted in 1807, to deploy troops has come as his frustrations mount over the protests that have followed the death of Floyd, a black man who was killed in police custody last week in Minneapolis. The people familiar with his decision said Trump was angry Sunday night at the destruction some protestors caused in Washington, particularly the vandalization of national monuments.
Some of the president’s aides have been encouraging him for days to invoke the act, as he weighed options for exercising executive powers to address the crisis. The act was last invoked during the 1992 Rodney King riots in Los Angeles.
Trump's remarks came hours after he urged the nation’s governors to get “tough” with unruly demonstrators. “Most of you are weak,” he told them, according to audio of the call obtained by NBC News. "You have to dominate. If you don't dominate, you're wasting your time, they're gonna run over you, you're gonna look like a bunch of jerks,” the president said.
At a briefing with reporters Monday, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany had left open the possibility that the president could invoke the act.
“The Insurrection Act, it’s one of the tools available, whether the president decides to pursue that, that’s his prerogative,“ McEnany said.
Governors can ask that the federal government send active duty troops to help in cases of civil unrest like the widespread protests plaguing U.S. cities over the last several days. But, so far, no governor has requested active duty troops to assist and instead they have relied on local law enforcement and National Guard soldiers and airmen on state active duty.
Governors often prefer the National Guard forces in these cases because they can legally perform law enforcement duties in the U.S., whereas troops on active duty cannot without violating the Posse Comitatus Act, a 1878 law that prohibits the government from using military forces to act as a police force within U.S. borders.
But the president could invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy active-duty troops without a request from a governor. Those troops would be allowed to conduct law enforcement missions. To invoke the act, Trump would first have to issue a proclamation to “immediately order the insurgents to disperse and retire peaceably to their abodes within a limited time,” according to the law.
In the past the Justice Department has drafted such proclamations. And according to the Congressional Research Service, the act has been invoked many times throughout U.S. history, although rarely since the 1960s civil rights era. When it was invoked in 1992 during the Los Angeles riots, the move was requested by then-California Gov. Pete Wilson, not invoked solely by President George H.W. Bush.
The Defense Department declined to comment on the possibility that the president could invoke the act.
One of Trump’s allies outside the White House, Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., urged Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act “if necessary” so U.S. troops can “support our local law enforcement and ensure that this violence ends tonight.”
Pete Williams and Shannon Pettypiece contributed.
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