Tear gas floats in the air June 1, 2020, as police move demonstrators away from St. John’s Church, across Lafayette Park from the White House in Washington, as they protest the death of George Floyd. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
“It didn’t surprise me that of all the historic buildings standing around Lafayette Square, these rioters would go after a sacred house of worship,” Meadows writes. “It all seemed terribly on brand for them.”
After news of the fire got out, Meadows said, he and other prominent Republicans were inundated with calls from outraged conservatives across the country.
“To them, the sight of a church being burned in the United States of America — just a few hundred yards from the White House, no less — was simply too much to take,” he writes.
Ivanka Trump also received calls about the fire, according to Meadows. In response, she hatched a plan: She suggested the president “give his address in the Rose Garden as planned, and then lead a group of his closest aides and advisors over to St. John’s Church, where he would deliver a short message to the American people.”
Ivanka’s goal, Meadows said, was to signal that “law and order would prevail” and “send a message to people of faith.”
“As I watched President Trump listening to his daughter, I could tell he loved the idea,” Meadows writes.
Meadows also writes that Trump’s aides scrambled to find a Bible for the president to use on June 1, pulling ones from their offices and stacking them on a desk outside the Oval Office. Trump, he says, ultimately chose one of the Bibles less because of its appearance and more for “the way it felt in his hands.”
Later that day, Trump gave a speech in the Rose Garden denouncing mob violence and the burning of St. John’s, saying the nation needs “security, not anarchy.”
The president then began his walk across Lafayette Square, over which, Meadows said, “wisps” of smoke still lingered from the “smoke bombs” used by law enforcement to clear the crowd, “more as a diversionary tactic than anything else.”
A U.S. Department of the Interior’s inspector general report revealed in June 2021 that in addition to clubs, riot shields, smoke canisters and pepper spray used that day by federal law enforcement to expel people from the park, local police also tossed tear gas canisters at demonstrators as they fled.
Meadows’ book does not mention the clergy who were among those cleared from the park by law enforcement or that an Episcopal priest and seminarian were expelled from the patio of St. John’s. The faith leaders were working at the church at the behest of their bishop, Budde, and had been handing out water to demonstrators.
“They turned holy ground into a battleground,” the priest, the Rev. Gini Gerbasi, told Religion News Service at the time.
