Contradictory Stories

Attorney General William P. Barr sat for a lengthy interview June 8 with Fox News, during which he very notably contradicted the White House’s claim that Trump did not retreat to the White House bunker in the face of protests recently.

The confirmation was merely the latest example of the White House’s dodgy and false narratives colliding with one another.

Reports of Trump’s bunker retreat surfaced last week, when The New York Times reported and others including The Washington Post confirmed that Trump had retreated to it on the night of May 29 during particularly heated confrontations on the streets of Washington, D.C. This is a narrative that Trump didn’t like — for obvious reasons — and he quickly set out to deny it.

Trump at first suggested he had not gone to the bunker, but then confirmed he did — but only for an “inspection.”

“Well, it was a false report. I wasn’t [there]," he said. He then added: “I went down during the day, and I was there for a tiny little short period of time, and it was much more for an inspection. There was no problem during the day.”

Barr’s flub emanates from two very contradictory and suspect narratives that the White House is peddling. On the one hand, Trump is suggesting that he was not actually retreating in the face of unrest; on the other hand the White House has tried to argue that the scenes in Washington were so bad that they necessitated the violent advance on the protesters on the evening of June 1 that just so happened to precede Trump’s visit to the vandalized church for the photo op.

St. John's Episcopal Church before Trump posed in front of it, June 8

Barr wants to defend his role in clearing the protesters, and so he has understandably erred on the side of playing up the supposed dangers that existed just outside the White House. Unfortunately for him, in doing so, he contradicted something the president himself had claimed about the scene.

Now he is in the position of either correcting himself — despite sources continuing to confirm that Trump had indeed retreated to the bunker that evening because of the unrest — or leaving it out there as having confirmed a scene that cuts to the core of Trump’s attempts to portray himself as an impervious and tough president in the face of violent protesters.

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The Washington Post     06/09/2020 

Just a couple more things:

Ivanka egged him on
The Times reports that Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter and senior adviser, “urged” him to take the short walk to St. John’s Episcopal Church, where a small fire briefly burned during protests Sunday night. White House chief of staff Mark Meadows has given her even more credit, telling some people that the whole thing was her idea. In either case, Ivanka later accompanied her dad to the church, carrying a Bible in her $1,540 handbag.

Ivanka accompanies her father

No one thought about what Trump would do when he got to the church

With their attention turned to how to get Trump through a throng of protesters, White House officials tell the Times they gave little thought to what the president would do once he got there. And so he stood, showing off a Bible, and posing for photos.