Tiny, Little, and Short

President Donald Trump on Wednesday denied media reports that he was rushed for his safety to the White House bunker while protests raged in the streets outside. "It was a false report," Trump told Fox News radio, before elaborating that he did go into the secure area but only for a "tiny, little, short period time."

Outside the White House, in Lafayette Square, crowds of people protesting police brutality fought running battles with officers and set fires. According to Fox News, Trump was taken to the bunker on Sunday. Trump said he'd gone down but only during the day, not the night, as reported, and that he was partly doing so to carry out an "inspection."

Reports of Trump taking shelter sparked a wave of online mockery, which is believed to have contributed to his decision on Monday to make a controversial walk across Lafayette Park to visit the partly damaged church of St. John's. Officers violently dispersed mostly peaceful crowds of protesters to clear a path for Trump. To cap his show of strength, he stood outside the church for pictures of him holding up a Bible.

  

American religious leaders castigated Donald Trump for posing in front of the church. "It was traumatic and deeply offensive, in the sense that something sacred was being misused for a political gesture," Washington's Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde said.

Other Episcopalian leaders denounced Trump's visit to the church as "disgraceful and morally repugnant." "Simply by holding aloft an unopened Bible he presumed to claim Christian endorsement and imply that of The Episcopal Church," bishops from New England said in a statement.

GOP senators criticized also:

The News-Gazette  06/03/2020

On Tuesday the president and his wife followed up with a visit to the St John Paul II National Shrine in the capital's northeast, immediately infuriating the country's Catholic leadership as well. "I find it baffling and reprehensible that any Catholic facility would allow itself to be so egregiously misused and manipulated in a fashion that violates our religious principles," Washington's Archbishop Wilton Gregory said in a statement. The pontiff, who died in 2005, "certainly would not condone the use of tear gas and other deterrents to silence, scatter or intimidate them for a photo opportunity in front of a place of worship and peace," he added.