Business Insider reports that President Trump was in a riff with the military over the option of putting troops on the streets of DC to deal with the current protests.
At a heated Oval Office meeting on Monday, President Donald Trump demanded that 10,000 soldiers be deployed to the streets of Washington DC to quell anti-racism protests, according to multiple reports.
However top Pentagon officials Mark Esper, the defense secretary, and Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Attorney General Bill Barr, all resisted the request, a top administration official told ABC News.
Milley was involved in a “shouting match” with the president over the request, a senior military official told the New Yorker, telling Trump, “I’m not doing that. That’s for law enforcement.” The president eventually backed down.
The White House disputed the account. Chief of staff Mark Meadows told the publication, “there was no shouting match, in terms of any directions or any operational decision that was made.”
In the end, 1,600 active-duty troops were deployed on standby in the US capital, and 5,100 National Guard troops mobilized to reinforce DC police, Parks Police, and the US Secret Service during the protests.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the reports. (source)
Both sides have differing stories. However, it is not unlikely that Trump would find himself in the middle of such a conflict.
This is a man who has clearly shown an ignorance of the Constitution he swore to protect, a disdain for due process and the rule of law, and behaves more like a tyrant than a President of a nation. This has been demonstrated many times, and if the events are as they have been reported, it would be just another line in a long trend of events.
But noting this, one should be very concerned for the future, as Trump’s actions are setting a precedent for future behavior that Democrats may use also on the basis of Trump’s logic, and could cause some very dire and unintended consequences.