Following the killing of George Floyd in June of 2020, White House aides allegedly drafted a proclamation to invoke the Insurrection Act due to interest from President Donald Trump. The proclamation would have allowed for the deployment of active-duty troops in Washington to quell protests, according to two senior Trump administration officials, the New York Times reported.
The aides drafted the proclamation on June 1, 2020, after a heated debate inside the administration on how to respond to the protests.
Trump reportedly told the attorney general, William Barr, the defense secretary, Mark Esper, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of staff, Gen. Mark Milley, that he wanted thousands of active-duty troops responding to protests on the streets of the nation’s capital, one of the officials said.
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The former president was talked out of the plan, insiders said, but a separate group of White House staff members left the option open for him to invoke the Insurrection Act and call troops down to streets of the capital. It was decided to complete the document in case it was necessary due to unrest.
Trump was reportedly aware the document was prepared but never chose to invoke the act. He even went as far as to deny that he ever wanted to deploy the active-duty troops.
“It’s absolutely not true, and if it was true, I would have done it,” Mr. Trump said.
June 1, 2020, was the exact date that Trump made his way through Lafayette Park, where he reportedly cleared out protestors. It has since been alleged that the United States Park Police had planned to clear the park before they knew of the president’s walk through the area.
A trump advisor has also echoed the former president’s comments on not wanting to deploy the troops, according to the New York Times.
The Insurrection Act is a rarely used authority that presidents use when in need. It was invoked twice in the previous 40 years -- once to quell unrest after Hurricane Hugo in 1989 and again during the 1992 Los Angeles riots.
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Trump had reportedly wanted to invoke the act to not “look weak," according to one of the officials.
Throughout the protests last summer, Trump had been on his Twitter account, calling for “LAW AND ORDER,” demanding that local mayors and state governors deploy the national guard and use force to get their cities under control. Despite this, he never went forward with invoking the Insurrection Act.
Later in the day, on June 1, 2020, Mr. Trump delivered a Rose Garden address later in the evening, threatening that the military was prepared if the rioting did not cease.
“If the city or state refuses to take the actions that are necessary to defend the life and property of their residence, then I will deploy the United States military and quickly solve the problem for them,” Trump said.