Trump’s Visit to St. John’s Church Was an Iconic Mistake

The president’s short field trip is likely to be remembered as one of the most shameful stunts of his entire presidency.

I had it in my mind that I would write something about the odd way that President Trump physically handles the Holy Bible, but I hadn’t come up with anything specific before I saw how McKay Coppins went about it:

He wielded the Bible like a foreign object, awkwardly adjusting his grip as though trying to get comfortable. He examined its cover. He held it up over his right shoulder like a crossing guard presenting a stop sign. He did not open it.

“Is that your Bible?” a reporter asked.

“It’s a Bible,” the president replied.

I misread this the first time I looked at it. I thought Coppins was asking me to picture President Trump holding a red octagonal sign like he was presenting a gift. On my second reading, I understood he instead meant that Trump looked like a crossing guard holding up traffic, only with a Bible in his hand.

Either image does the job of conveying that there’s something unnatural going on. When Trump flashed the Bible on Monday at St. John’s Church off Lafayette Park in Washington, DC, he was holding it upside down and backwards, almost as if the book–or any book–has an unknown purpose.

This made is painfully clear that he was using the Bible as a prop, and that his appearance in front of the church was an effort to pander to the religious right.

In order to reach the spot, a block from the White House, he’d used the National Guard and the Secret Service to disperse protestors in his path. They utilized tear-gas and flash-bang grenades and rubber bullets to clear Lafayette Park, even though it was only a half hour before an announced citywide curfew and there had been no violence or other threatening disturbances.

Linda Tirado, a freelance photojournalist, was blinded in her left eye by a rubber bullet in Minneapolis. She also lacks heath insurance and is looking perhaps as much as a quarter million dollars in health care costs. Rubber bullets are no joke.

As for tear gas, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says, “prolonged exposure, especially in an enclosed area, may lead to long-term effects such as eye problems including scarring, glaucoma, and cataracts, and may possibly cause breathing problems such as asthma.”

Using tear gas outside is less likely to cause serious harm, but it’s not without risks. It’s highly immoral to blast tear gas and rubber bullets into a crowd without a corresponding risk you’re looking to counteract.

In this case, the risk was that some harm would come to the president of the United States if he attempted to stroll through Lafayette Park while the crowds were still there. But all risk could have been avoided if Trump had decided that a visit to St. John’s Church a half an hour before curfew wasn’t a good idea.

No one in the White House thought to notify the Church that they were coming, and this brought severe condemnation from both the city’s Episcopalian bishop and St. John’s presiding priest:

The Rt. Rev. Mariann Budde, the bishop of Washington who helped organize the clergy presence at the church, said Trump’s arrival at St. John’s happened without warning and left her “outraged.”

“The symbolism of him holding a Bible … as a prop and standing in front of our church as a backdrop when everything that he has said is antithetical to the teachings of our traditions and what we stand for as a church — I was horrified,” she told Religion News Service.

“He didn’t come to pray. He didn’t come to lament the death of George Floyd. He didn’t come to address the deep wounds that are being expressed through peaceful protest by the thousands upon thousands. He didn’t try to bring calm to situations that are exploding with pain.”

The Rt. Rev. Michael Curry, presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, also criticized the move, accusing the president of using “a church building and the Holy Bible for partisan political purposes.”

The president’s behavior was widely criticized throughout the capital, but some on his campaign team believed it had been a success.

By late Monday, campaign officials were already tweeting a black-and-white photo of him walking to the church with a coterie of aides in his wake. Tim Murtaugh, the campaign’s top spokesman, posted the picture without a caption.

This was just one incident in an extremely violent day that saw the president implore the nation’s governors to get tough and “dominate” and then watched many of them try to comply.

 

The president’s short field trip may have given his campaign a nice picture of him “walking to the church with a coterie of aides in his wake,” but it’s likely to remembered as one of the most shameful stunts of his entire presidency.

Author: BooMan

Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.

10 thoughts on “Trump’s Visit to St. John’s Church Was an Iconic Mistake”

  2. Let’s not forget to mention that before his call with the Governor’s, he called Putin. BEFORE. That’s an important detail.

    .

  4. Martin, I hope you are right about the outcome. The history is unwritten. I will do all I can do to ensure that you are right about the outcome.

    My wife joined me in a protest on Sunday for only the second time in our three decades together. She’s totally ideologically down for the fight, but she is becoming aware she will have to lend her body to the struggle.

    I question whether the videos you share here reflect direct efforts by Governors Inslee and Wolf to “…try to comply” with Trump’s imperious order. Here is a joint statement Mayor Kenney signed onto which explained the Philadelphia action shown in the video here:

    https://www.phila.gov/2020-06-01-mayor-kenney-and-police-commissioner-danielle-outlaw-issue-statements-on-the-use-of-tear-gas/

    Mayor Durkan has not made a statement about last night’s violence perpetrated by her P.D., but here’s the joint press conference she held the previous day:

    https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/aftermath-of-seattle-george-floyd-protests/281-7a7c3685-d4c6-44ab-adca-7d243ba53e25

    We need to ensure that the general act of policing can only happen with our consent. We have consented for too long. I worry that we may descend into greater levels of police violence if we do not figure out the best methods to sustain our peaceful fight against this scourge of police gang activity.

  5. It looked to me like he was afraid a bolt of lightning was going to come out of the sky and blow the book out of his hand…but that’s just me and my wishful thinking…

  6. If you follow the McKay Coppins link to the Atlantic, lots of big name Christian Right leadership, Robert Jeffress types, were very favorably impressed by that stunt.

    I wonder if all the rank and file followers were also impressed favorably, or how many not so much.

  7. Not a good look blasting through peaceful protestors to wave a book about peace in front of a house of worship. As a mainline Protestant denomination, Episcopalians are advocates of peace and tolerance. This should offend anyone else in a mainline Protestant denomination, definitely Quakers, and the more mainstream Catholics. This will be the topic of many a sermon come Sunday.

  8. It’s weird how they don’t know enough about churches to get this right, or even approximately right. They don’t know that not all churches are the same, or that there are different denominations. They don’t know what any of the differences might be. They don’t know who to ask about that. They don’t know anything about their neighbors, after living a block away for three years. They don’t know how churches work.

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