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Twelve Days in June is a work of speculative fiction. The Lodestar

magazine and Max Ezer are fictitious entities. Public figures and entities are
depicted in a fictitious context—their actions and statements are presented
hypothetically as satirical political commentary protected
under fair use and the First Amendment. All other characters are wholly
fictitious, and any resemblances to persons, living or dead, or events that
take place after the publication of this work are purely coincidental.

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The Lodestar

Twelve Days in June

The untold story of the American Spring
MAX EZER | MARCH 2022 ISSUE | _U.S._

This is the second story in a five-part series on the greatest crisis in American democracy since the

Civil War, as it unfolded over just twelve days in June 2021. Drawing on newly available sources and

exhaustive research, Max Ezer recounts the gripping drama of those events from the perspectives of

key participants, and places the violence in the context of the political turmoil that preceded it. This

issue’s story, “The Square,” details how a brazen shooting led thousands to spontaneously

demonstrate across the nation in peaceful protest. It reveals how Trump’s overreaction led to tragedy,

and tells for the first time the real story behind the horrifying images that solidified the Trump Out

movement.

Part II: The Square

J
ULIA GLAZER SCREAMED. Her husband, Washington Post reporter

Michael Glazer, lay motionless on the concrete with a gunman

looming over him. The painfully loud shots were still echoing
around the plaza—not sharp little cracks that could be mistaken for
fireworks, but earsplitting bangs like someone hitting a steel trashcan with a
baseball bat. There was a beat where time seemed frozen solid. She
remembers looking down at Michael’s face to see if his eyes were open, but
can’t recall what she saw. She had time to wonder why nobody around her
was doing anything. And then, everything happened at once.

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People shrieked, shouted, ducked for cover. A car alarm wailed. Ron
Benavidez, the leader of their Amazon security detail, had been facing away
from the first shots—toward EagleBank Arena—and turned around in time
to see Dale Lee Baker fire three more rounds down at Glazer and throw his
hands up in surrender. Now, the former linebacker barreled toward Baker
and launched himself at him. Benavidez lowered his shoulder into the
smaller man’s chest and drove him to the ground hard, pinning his arms in
case he had another weapon.

Stan Correll, another Amazon bodyguard, was the first to reach Michael. At
first he had hoped that Glazer had just been stunned by the impact of bullets
against his Kevlar vest, but as he began a first-aid assessment, immediately
noticed scarlet blood spreading from under the collar of his dress shirt.
Michael’s eyes were closed, but he was breathing. A patch of his hair was
wet and matted. Correll spread the slick hairs apart with his fingers,
revealing a small, slightly oblong hole in his skull that was oozing blood.
Correll pointed at a bystander with a cellphone, and shouted at her to dial 9-
1-1. Then he called out to see if anyone there was a doctor.

Just inside the lobby of EagleBank Arena, Dr. Ravi Parekh had been
speaking with the coach of his daughter’s computer team at the time of the
shooting. His wife, his daughter, and her friend Gabby Glazer were all
together with them, chatting amiably in the afterglow of the Thomas
Jefferson High School for Science and Technology commencement. Gabby
said she wanted the coach and Dr. Parekh to finally meet her father Michael,
and said she was texting him to come back in and see them. Perhaps 20
seconds later, they all heard a shattering BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM out on the
plaza. People in the lobby started running back toward the arena, even as

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more shots rang out. Someone shouted “Active shooter! Get down!” A few
dozen teachers, parents, and graduates hunkered down in the bleachers.
Then a cop came running in asking for a doctor. As Parekh followed him
outside, he got the facts—the shooter had been disarmed, and there was one
male down with a gunshot to the head.

A UCLA-trained heart surgeon, Parekh hadn’t treated a multiple gunshot

victim since his emergency medicine rotation decades before, but when he
reached Glazer’s side, his instincts kicked in immediately. Correll had
checked the back of Glazer’s suit and reported that the neck and head
wounds were the only injuries. But now Parekh removed Michael’s mask
and saw that frothy blood was flowing from Glazer’s mouth, and his
breathing was becoming labored. He suspected lung damage. Parekh lifted
his suit jacket and dress shirt, and slipped a hand between the Kevlar and
the back of Glazer’s t-shirt. It came out bright red. He realized at once that
these wounds would be fatal if Glazer didn’t make it to a full trauma center
soon. All he could do was try to prevent him from going into cardiac arrest
before the ambulance arrived. While Correll applied pressure to the neck
wound, Parekh manipulated the unconscious Glazer’s jaw to help open his
airway, and then, with the help of another TJ parent with EMT training,
stabilized his back as best they could and rolled him onto one side to
prevent him from choking on his own blood.

Julia and Gabby clung to each other close by, calling out to Michael that
they loved him and that more help was on the way. With all the people
working on him they could barely see him, but they could see a lot of blood.
It was obvious that it was very bad.

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A crowd had formed all around them, looking on in horror. Some took
photos or videos on their phones. At 9:59 p.m., the first Periscope video
started, just as the ambulance was pulling up. Shawn Wallace, the uncle of
one of the graduates, announced to viewers: “I am here at GMU arena where
Michael Glazer has been shot. The dude who Trump said should be killed
just got shot up by some nutjob, man. They got him right there.” Wallace
panned the camera from where Glazer was lying to a police car that had
Dale Lee Baker handcuffed in the backseat. Within minutes, the stream’s
audience had grown from dozens of viewers to thousands.

As the paramedics got to work, they saw that Michael was fast developing a
hemopneumothorax—blood and air filling his chest cavity and compressing
his right lung—which was making his breathing fast and extremely labored,
and causing his vital signs to quickly deteriorate. Unless they could stabilize
him, his heart might stop before they could get him to the trauma center.

While Glazer still lay there, major news outlets began picking up the story—
sharing images taken in the moments after the shooting and linking to
Wallace’s livestream. “Michael Glazer shot in VA,” Jake Tapper tweeted at
10:06 p.m. “Absolutely sickening. If anyone can pull through, it’s Michael.”
CNN, NBC, ABC, and CBS all broke into their programming to bring viewers
the unfolding news. Tens of thousands of people expressed their dismay or
sent well wishes using the hashtag #MichaelGlazerShooting.

Back at EagleBank Arena, the paramedics got Michael intubated and gave
him oxygen, and used a large-bore needle to let out some of the air pressing
on his lung. His vitals improved, and his breathing started to ease. Now,
they’d need to get him into surgery to stop his bleeding and treat his head

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trauma. He was loaded into the ambulance and it took off with screaming
sirens for Inova Fairfax Hospital. Julia and Gabby wanted to ride along, but
there was no room, so a police car took them close behind.

That night at IFH, Dr. James Ecklund was just getting out of a three-hour
surgery treating the victim of a gang-related shooting when he learned
about the inbound patient from EagleBank. There was perhaps no physician
in the country better prepared to treat him. Ecklund had deployed as a
military doctor to both Iraq and Afghanistan, and spent nine years as the
chief of neurosurgery at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. He had
personally treated virtually every type of ballistic brain injury, and his unit
had saved American servicemembers from some of the most catastrophic
and complex traumas ever survived by human beings. In 2011, he had been
called to Arizona to consult doctors for Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords
after she was shot in the head in Tucson. Now, nurses watching CNN found
out the incoming casualty’s identity while the ambulance was still en route—
Ecklund contemplated the wider implications of the story for a brief
moment, but did not have time for reflection.

While Dr. Margaret Griffen, the hospital’s chief of trauma surgery, was
summoned from home, Dr. Ecklund huddled with the on-call trauma team
to get on the same page. Once the patient arrived, they would have just
minutes to determine which tests and surgical repairs were most urgent.
Saving someone with injuries that severe usually requires making the right
calls under pressure, so all the different specialists—anesthesia, surgery,
neurology, radiology, vascular, respiratory—need to work in a perfect
symphony.

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In the ambulance, Glazer was given IV fluids to keep up the volume in his
circulatory system, and he began to show increased consciousness. He
moved his lips faintly. His eyes fluttered. One hand tried to paw at the
breathing tube. The paramedics spoke to him loudly and reassuringly, but
he soon went back unconscious. More blood was pouring into the space
around his lung, and the wounds in his neck and back continued to
hemorrhage. His vitals were deteriorating again. They radioed updates to
the hospital.

At 10:16 p.m., Glazer was wheeled into the trauma bay at Inova Fairfax, and
the team sprang into action. A doctor put in a chest tube to start draining
the blood from his thorax, while another made a preliminary assessment of
the head wound, and nurses initiated a massive blood transfusion. Then, it
was off to imaging—the doctors needed a CT scan to confirm the findings of
the preliminary x-rays and ultrasound and get a better understanding of the
patient’s injuries so they could plan the surgery.

The results were daunting. The gunman had used .50 AE ammunition—
huge, powerful slugs half an inch wide that punched right through Glazer’s
Kevlar vest. One round had clipped a rib and torn into his right lung,
missing major arteries but causing massive diffuse bleeding. Another
shattered a rib and drove bone fragments into the center of the thoracic
cavity, missing his heart by less than an inch. A third had impacted the
midline of his back, severing his spine between the T7 and T8 vertebrae. The
fourth struck a rib at an oblique angle and lodged under the skin near his
left armpit. The shot to the base of the neck had torn the muscles open and
damaged Glazer’s subclavian vein. A sixth round ricocheted first—otherwise
it would have blown his head wide open—but still had enough force to

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penetrate his skull just above the left ear. The round came to a stop in the
temporal lobe of his brain, which is responsible for language processing.
Treating these wounds would take several simultaneous surgeries, with no
time for delay. The trauma team formed its game plan, and wheeled Glazer
into the operating room for what they knew would be an uphill battle to save
his life.

A
S GLAZER WAS going into the OR in Fairfax, across the river in

Washington, crowds were already gathering outside the White

House. News cameras mobilized to the scene captured about 150
people, holding lit candles or cell phone flashlights and chanting “Shame!”
No one had even had time to write a sign. Kayla Weber, who came straight
from her shift at the Dupont Circle Shake Shack when she got the news
alert, recalls the start of the demonstration as completely spontaneous.
Georgetown law student Caleb Broadlie, who arrived around half an hour
later, took an Uber downtown when a few classmates in one of his group
chats said they were going and suggested that friends join them. Denver
social worker Angela Poole walked two blocks from her hotel when she saw
that Comedy Central host Samantha Bee had tweeted a suggestion for her
620,000 followers to join the protest. By 11:30 p.m., there were an
estimated 500 people along Pennsylvania Avenue and spilling back into
Lafayette Square and Black Lives Matter Plaza. More press was showing up.
AP photographer Jacquelyn Martin caught her famous image of a doctor in
scrubs and a Catholic priest singing “Amazing Grace” arm-in-arm. And as
journalists urgently texted administration officials for comment, they were
met with stony silence.

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At Inova Fairfax Hospital, Julia and Gabby Glazer sat in tearful silence in a
room near the OR. Just after midnight, Dr. Ecklund came out to give them
an update. He didn’t sugarcoat things. They had managed to repair some of
Michael’s most urgent thoracic injuries, but there was a long way to go. And
although they’d successfully removed the bullet from his head, his brain was
swelling badly from the injury, so they were performing a decompressive
craniectomy. Basically, Ecklund explained, a swelling brain will press up
against the inside of the skull and be damaged. Temporarily removing part
of the skull allows the brain to expand as it swells. The operation was their
only chance of buying Michael more time, but there was no guarantee it
would be successful.

Across the Beltway, work phones were buzzing on nightstands as political

comms staffers were called back into the office. Cable news was showing
over a thousand protesters gathered outside the White House, and elected
officials on both sides of the aisle needed to prepare responses. Republicans
had to choose whether this was, at long last, the final straw that would cause
them to withdraw their support from the president. A handful favored
calling on him to resign, but most pointed to Trump’s televised apology as
mitigating his responsibility. On a 3:00 a.m. Zoom session, one GOP
strategist said he couldn’t decide yet whether to act—“it depends on if he
dies.” Democrats, in turn, had a different choice. Since one impeachment
had already been tried and failed, what real steps could they take? Some
Democratic advisors suggested a walkout from Congress on Monday. On
one conference call, two senior Obama administration officials pushed for
lawmakers to stay off Capitol Hill and refuse to return until President
Trump resigned. But there was no consensus. Speaker Tim Ryan signaled

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willingness to call for a resignation, but wasn’t ready to approve any unified
and dramatic gesture in the course of making that demand.

In Lafayette Square, protesters with megaphones announced updates to the

crowd as they trickled in through the wee hours of June 13. They knew that
Glazer had been taken to the hospital with critical injuries, but news reports
contained conflicting information. Most coverage believed that he’d been
shot directly in the head, and a few stories said that he’d only been shot in
the neck instead. Some pieces claimed that he had gone into cardiac arrest
outside EagleBank Arena, and that the paramedics had been performing
CPR. One purported eyewitness called into CNN and claimed to have seen a
second gunman flee through the parking lot. After Dale Lee Baker was
identified as the shooter, there was a flurry of only-partly-accurate
information as internet sleuths scoured social media trying learn about him
and reported their findings on Twitter—which got retweeted by major anti-
Trump figures and read out over the megaphones to the demonstrators
outside the White House.

At around half past six in the morning, Dr. Ecklund and Dr. Griffen finished
leading an eight-hour marathon surgery and came out of the operating
room to talk with Julia and Gabby. Griffen had spent the whole night
repairing the damage inside Michael’s chest—following the tracks of the
bullets to extract fragments of metal and bone, cleaning out bits of clothing
that had been forced into the wounds, controlling internal bleeding, and
restoring circulation so tissue wouldn’t die after they closed him up.
Meanwhile, Ecklund had been working against the tide to control the
swelling and bleeding in Michael’s brain. The force of the bullet breaking
through his skull had caused a severe epidural hematoma—pooling blood

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that compresses the brain—and sent pressure waves throughout his
cranium. He was in a deep coma now, Ecklund explained, but it was simply
too soon to assess whether his brain could recover. Right now, the
craniectomy had given them a fighting chance of keeping the swelling under
control, and they would just have to take it hour by hour.

Julia and Gabby were ushered to Michael’s bedside in the ICU, and saw him
lying in a tangle of tubes and equipment. Monitors beeped over the hiss of
the life support machines. Much of his head was covered in bandages, and
the surgery site was draining fluid. His eyes were closed and skin waxy pale.
Julia brushed his cheek and kissed his forearm. Almost every other part of
him was obstructed by something medical. Gabby did the same. They told
him again how much they loved him, what good care he was getting, and
that his mother and sister would be there later in the morning.

By 7:30 a.m., there were about 1,500 people in Lafayette Square. Some had
stayed all through the night, but many were coming now on their way to
Sunday church. Morning news showed Americans images of candlelight
vigils that had been held in at least 30 U.S. cities. Crowds now swelled as
people decided to change their morning plans to join in song and prayer for
the reporter now clinging to life in a Virginia hospital. In the nation’s
capital, police were briefed to prepare for possible civil disturbance. CNN
showed snipers on the White House roof watching the demonstrations
across Pennsylvania Avenue through their binoculars.

Already, the conspiracy-mongers were spreading wild claims about the

shooting. Although Baker had indeed registered as a Democrat while
stationed at Fort Carson in 1990, a popular alt-right blog found registration

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records for a Dale L. Baker in North Carolina who’d voted as a Democrat in
both the 2016 and 2020 primaries. Someone on 4chan claimed to have
worked with Baker as an agent provocateur for liberal political operatives
Scott Foval and Robert Creamer. As they scrolled their newsfeeds over
breakfast, millions of Americans saw allegations that Glazer had been shot
by a Democratic plant in order to make Trump look bad. “SHARE if you
won’t be FOOLED!” blared one post on the TRUMP Patriots USA Facebook
page.

At 9:00 a.m., hospital administrators at Inova Fairfax convened a press

conference to update the media on Glazer’s condition. Networks carried it
live around the country, then replayed it in its entirety for viewers waking
up on the West Coast. Dr. Griffen, still in her scrubs and scrub cap, gave
reporters a briefing on the overall incident and surgery, describing the
victim as being in “extremely critical condition.” Then, Dr. Ecklund—having
had the benefit of a nap and shower—came to the podium in his white coat
to discuss Glazer’s brain injury and field questions about his prognosis.
Asked by a CBS reporter about reports that he had been awake and talking
at the scene, Ecklund answered that “that’s not consistent with the
information we’ve been given.” Pressed for a prediction on his chances of
recovery, Ecklund repeated several times: it is simply too soon to tell.

Journalists’ attempts to get a statement from the White House remained

unsuccessful. Lawmakers weren’t able to do any better, as the West Wing
stopped taking calls from staffers of both parties. The president’s public
schedule for the day was clear, and the cable news talking heads speculated
that he was hunkered down in the Residence watching the coverage unfold

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just like everybody else. Outraged at his silence, more and more area
residents turned off their TVs and made their way toward the vigil.

By noon, spurred by calls to action by #Resistance Twitter accounts, some

10,000 people had crowded into Lafayette Park, with more pouring in on
foot from surrounding streets. Pastors at several D.C.-area churches had
urged their congregations to join the vigil after the conclusion of services.
Footage from this time shows that the gathering was entirely peaceful—
mainly singing and speeches—but a Facebook meme soon circulated
showing a woman with blood streaming down her face, purporting that she
had just been assaulted by Antifa in front of the White House. The photo
had actually been taken in Kyiv in 2014.

Just after 1:00 p.m., Michael Glazer’s vital signs began suddenly
deteriorating. His intracranial pressure was soaring as his brain resumed
swelling. When this pressure got higher than his blood pressure, blood
couldn’t get in and supply his brain with oxygen. Without oxygen, those
tissues would quickly die. Glazer was rushed back into surgery and another
craniectomy attempted to relieve the pressure.

During the long, sickening minutes of waiting, Julia looked out a hospital
window. She could see at least a hundred people gathered outside. Many
were saying rosaries. For a moment, she was confused. One of the nurses
put a gloved hand on her shoulder tenderly. “They’re here for your
husband.”

In the OR, doctors were working frantically to bring the swelling under
control, but Michael’s heart was in trouble now. His body’s regulatory

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mechanisms were malfunctioning due to the brain injury, triggering
cascades of problems that Dr. Ecklund’s team couldn’t keep up with. He
went into cardiac arrest. Aggressive resuscitation was able to restore a weak
heartbeat, but Michael had lost all brainstem reflexes. Ecklund’s long
experience told him patients with neurological damage this severe could not
recover. He was placed on life support, and Ecklund came out to deliver the
crushing news.

Julia’s hopes had been faint, but she still gasped for breath as soon as she
saw Dr. Ecklund approaching. She saw it in his face. Michael’s mother
Barbara and his sister Laura were there now, too. Gabby had been having
lunch downstairs with her aunt and uncle Katherine and David Barnes.
Julia texted her to come right away. They all sobbed together. After a while,
a doctor summoned them to Michael’s final room to say their goodbyes.

TMZ, citing sources close to the family, announced at 2:48 p.m. that
medical treatment had been withdrawn, and that Michael Glazer was
expected to die. 15,000 people choked Lafayette Square and Black Lives
Matter Plaza now. An audible sigh passed through the crowd as the news
was announced by megaphone. The story was blanketing nationwide news
coverage now, as networks brought on neurosurgeons to talk about the case,
frequently cutting back to live shots of the White House, where no
statement was yet forthcoming.

At 3:30 p.m., Dr. Ecklund returned to the podium at Inova Fairfax and
delivered a short statement. TV control rooms raced to bring up the live
feed. Michael Glazer, Ecklund announced to the cameras, “died at 2:55 this
afternoon.”

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T
HE CROWD OUTSIDE the White House let out an anguished wail.

Almost immediately, though, the sounds of grief turned to sounds

of rage. Thousands now chanted “Trump out! Trump out!” and
“Blood is! On your hands!” Drums thudded in time with the call-and-
response. Airhorns blasted without any particular rhythm. Demonstrators
saw on their phones images from New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Seattle,
Portland, and Berkeley, where large protests were calling for the president’s
resignation.

Inside the White House, staffers could hear the rumble of the protest and
felt the situation spiraling out of control. Watching the coverage on Fox
News, they saw a string of incendiary calls to violence from figures on the
left. Sisterhood Without Banners activist Emerson Eden Hatch tweeted to
her 17,000 followers that those in the crowd should “Pull down those gates
and drag 45 out.” Another activist tweeted that the demonstrators should
“Gut him like a fish.” Several accounts linked to Antifa promised vengeance
for Glazer’s murder. Administration officials couldn’t remember ever seeing
the Secret Service more nervous.

The president was still—just like the pundits suspected—holed up in the

Residence. According to Ben Smith in The Endgame, Trump was on the
phone with Sean Hannity and chief of staff Rudy Giuliani for much of the
afternoon, and also had a lengthy conversation with political hatchet man
Roger Stone. They all counseled him not to show weakness. He had
denounced violence on TV earlier in the week, and that was enough.
Anything else would legitimize Democratic efforts to blame the shooting on
Trump.

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Then, at 3:47 p.m., the Washington Post reported that Dale Lee Baker had
told police officers in custody that he expected a full pardon from the
president. Immediately, pressure from Republican lawmakers started
ramping up. If the White House didn’t issue a statement right away, Sen.
Mitch McConnell’s office told the West Wing, the majority leader would
have to go on television himself to attempt damage control. Giuliani arrived
in the Residence and informed Trump that D.C. police thought there were
35,000 people outside the gates now. The crowd—swelled by action alerts
from Voices Rising and Women’s March leadership—had spilled out of
Lafayette Square and into the surrounding streets, blocking traffic. Riot
units were mobilizing across the area, and SWAT teams put on standby.
Now, even Giuliani recognized that they were losing control of situation,
and urged his boss to try to get ahead of the story.

At 4:45 p.m., the White House released a terse written statement from the
president. “I absolutely condemn all acts of violence,” it said in part,
“including the murder of Michael A. Glazer. The killer deserves the
maximum punishment of the law. I call on all Americans to join me in
mourning the loss of this talented journalist and offering our sympathies to
his beautiful family.” But the belated words did nothing.

Melissa Mack, a 39-year-old D.C. social studies teacher, was watching the
coverage on CNN with her husband Jason and their toddler twins Leo and
Alexander. She told Jason she had to be there. “All the talk means squat if
you’re not willing to get into the streets,” she said. Melissa packed a bottle of
water, a bag of trail mix, and a portable charger for her iPhone. She slipped
on hiking boots and a white t-shirt with “LOVE WINS” in large red letters.

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Jason worried about the risk of violence. What if she got tear-gassed, he
asked? Or trampled? Or mistaken for an Antifa member and arrested? But
Melissa wasn’t worried. A petite 5’2’’ with fiery red hair, she hardly looked
like a rabble- rouser. She would stay within peaceful areas, she promised,
and come home before it got dark. Her plan was to Uber as close as she
could to Lafayette Square and then join the protest on foot. Despite
misgivings, Jason saw that she was determined. Colleagues at Brookland
Middle School knew that look—and administrators rightly feared the “Mrs.
Mack stare.” He told her to be safe and come home soon. The car arrived,
and Melissa kissed the boys goodbye and went off to add her voice to the
thousands demanding justice at the White House. She had never protested
before.

Back at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller had
come up to the Residence to strategize crisis management. Riot police
outside were caught off guard by the speed with which the crowd was
growing, and the Secret Service was taking seriously the online incitements
to storm the fence. Cars leaving the Eisenhower Executive Office Building
were being blocked by masses of protesters. Spotters on the White House
roof reported people wearing Antifa-style outfits in Lafayette Square.

Trump railed at D.C. police chief Peter Newsham over the phone for his
department’s slow response. He wanted the MPD to break up the
demonstration altogether, but Newsham was wary of repeating the
unprovoked assault on peaceful protesters that allowed Trump’s disastrous
June 1, 2020 photo op in the square. He reminded the president that his
request to “crush them” wasn’t legal. The National Park Service normally
requires 10 days’ notice to issue a permit for a large gathering, but by policy,

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spontaneous protests in response to breaking news were exempt. Until there
was violence, or attempts to clear protesters from the streets voluntarily or
with individual arrests failed, they couldn’t give a general order to disperse.
The heads of the Park Police and Secret Service Uniformed Division were
more compliant, but the protests were growing faster than anyone had ever
seen, and they lacked the ready manpower to dominate such a large crowd
on their own. So at Miller’s urging, Trump decided to call up the National
Guard.

Ordinarily, such a request would go through the Secretary of Defense, but

J.J. Jack was traveling halfway across the world, and the retired four-star
general had acquired a reputation in the West Wing for questioning too
many of the boss’s decisions. Likewise, a president would normally consult
the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff about such a sensitive deployment.
But ever since General Mark Milley publicly apologized for striding behind
Trump in fatigues during that 2020 photo op, POTUS had seen him as
unreliable. Instead, he went straight to the Secretary of the Army, Matt
Caesar—a 38-year-old former Heritage Foundation scholar known as an
unconditional Trump loyalist. Caesar, according to two aides who overheard
the call, referred to the D.C. Army National Guard as “your Praetorian
Guard,” assuring the president: “They are well trained, and they are loyal to
you.” Liking the sound of that, Trump told him “you’re in charge.” With
that, Caesar put out the urgent order to mobilize Guard troops and armored
vehicles to protect the White House.

When several minutes passed without seeing any tanks on the front lawn,
Trump became anxious that things weren’t moving fast enough. So he
personally phoned Major General Aaron Dean II, commanding general of

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the District of Columbia National Guard, requesting immediate deployment
of his forces. It would take hours, Dean explained, but they were moving as
fast as they could. Trump hung up sourly and called Matt Caesar again to
complain that Dean wasn’t very bright.

Near the southwest corner of Lafayette Square, under the statue of the
Comte de Rochambeau, Deborah Katz and Sharon Olson had been singing
and chanting themselves hoarse since lunchtime. The two law-school
friends had gotten Sunday brunch together across the street at Old Ebbitt
Grill, as they had almost weekly for forty years—sometimes with their
families, and sometimes just together. Horrified by the news of Glazer’s
shooting, they had walked over together to join the vigil, and run into
several friends in the crowd through the afternoon. Both had participated in
the Women’s March in January 2017, and had also attended several other
protests against the administration in 2018, 2019, and 2020. But this
somehow felt different. Katz couldn’t put her finger on it, but there was a
sense in the square that a tipping point had been reached. After the
announcement of Glazer’s death, a man had come through handing out
“TRUMP OUT” buttons, and they’d each put one on. They struck up a
conversation with the man, who introduced himself as Reggie, and spent at
least half an hour talking.

Reggie Myles was retired after running his own barbershop in Carver
Langston for 43 years. He’d served in the Air Force in Vietnam, doing
maintenance on F-105 Thunderchiefs, and then come home to the District
to cut hair and serve up hot lather. His clients over the years had included K
Street powerbrokers, Washington Redskins, and several members of
Congress. His shop had proudly hung signed portraits of Rev. Al Sharpton,

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Julian Bond, and James Lawson, who’d all come under his razor at one time
or another. Ever since the horrors of Charlottesville in August 2017, Reggie
had poured his restless energy into protesting an administration he saw as
sympathetic to white supremacists. Now, he pointed out to Deborah and
Sharon the rumbling dark shapes of armored personnel carriers closing in
on the demonstration.

As Stephen Miller and his staff looked anxiously out the north-facing
windows of the White House, their newsfeeds were flooded with fervid
speculation about the protest. Self-proclaimed citizen journalists claimed to
have uncovered posts by Antifa suggesting that the protest would be used as
a cover to storm the White House. Photos appeared online purporting to
show heavily-armed Black Lives Matter activists piling into cars bound for
Lafayette Square. According to three witnesses in the West Wing,
speechwriter Peter Bartos was listening to a livestream by Red Ice TV, a
white supremacist media platform (Bartos denies this). Red Ice, the
witnesses say, was promoting the idea that suicide bombers might be used
to breach the White House fence.

Trump and Miller reached Attorney General William Barr by secure video
link around 5:20 p.m., whereupon the president expressed his displeasure
at the slow law enforcement response and told Barr he was putting the DOJ
in charge of organizing the defense. Soon, they could look down into the
open spaces around the square and see hundreds of riot police gathering—
MPD in dark blue helmets, Park Police in light blue helmets, and Uniformed
Division in all black. Soon a contingent of officers on horseback rode up,
massing in front of Blair House with their face shields lowered. All the
while, Miller or one of his subordinates called Chief Newsham every few

21
minutes to hammer him for faster progress on containing what they
repeatedly referred to as “the riot.”

Finally, at around 5:45 p.m., MPD headquarters was confident that they had
enough force on scene to start pushing back on the demonstration. Large
formations of officers with body armor, riot shields, and batons advanced at
a walk northward up 17th Street—a block west of Lafayette Square—followed
by armored vehicles blaring over loudspeakers “Clear the street! Get off the
street!” There were several scuffles and arrests, but most of the crowd faded
back toward the square. Two blocks to the north, riot police marched into
Farragut Square and McPherson Square, which were both serving as staging
points for people joining the demonstration. Squad cars and police SUVs
parked askew across the surrounding intersections as the MPD tried to stop
the steady flow of protesters toward the White House. Whoops and sirens
echoed down the long canyons of limestone buildings.

Rising Georgetown senior Emily DiNucci had been filming the

demonstration on her phone from the intersection of 17th Street and H
Street when the police came through. She saw a man with a bandana over
his face throw a water balloon at officers and then sprint back into the
crowd on the sidewalk. Then someone threw a glass bottle of soda or beer
that shattered in front of the police line. A flashbang grenade went off not
far away, and the crowd started retreating. Her ears were ringing. Emily
hurried back toward Lafayette Square, where she saw two people about her
age marching with a long “Justice for Journalists” banner past the statue of
Baron von Steuben. She turned on the camera and asked their names. Claire
Lavoie and Sean Ralston were good friends who had both just finished their
sophomore years at George Mason University. She was from Toronto. He

22
was from San Diego. Together, they kept moving toward the White House
gates.

Overall, the MPD’s strategy of clearing the streets and directing the
demonstrators into lawful assembly areas was proceeding swiftly and with
only minor violence. Officers on the ground reported over the radio that the
crowd was overwhelmingly peaceful—an assessment confirmed by police
observers circling overhead in a helicopter. Some of the protesters were
leaving the scene, but most converged on Lafayette Square in an orderly
manner and packed into the seven-acre grassy plaza.

But confining the crowd in front of the White House was the opposite of
what Trump and his inner circle wanted. There was a pervasive and genuine
fear in the building that an armed assault could break out at any minute.
Staffers saw memes on Twitter of Trump’s face photoshopped onto Libyan
dictator Muammar Qaddafi being brutalized and killed by a mob in Sirte, or
onto Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini strung up by his ankles after
being beaten to death by partisans. Trump, aides recall, was still deeply
traumatized by the June 2020 “siege” and believed that weakness would
invite his own overthrow—or worse. He looked out a window of the
Residence and jabbed his finger in the direction of the crowds: “Get them
out of here!”

One Trump advisor, as recounted in The Endgame, jokingly suggested

announcing over loudspeakers that there were suicide bombers in the crowd
in order to cause a panicked stampede out of Lafayette Square. The
president seemed to consider the idea seriously for a few moments until

23
communications director Kayleigh McEnany and social media director Dan
Scavino shot it down as flagrantly irresponsible.

At last, under intense pressure from the Secret Service, the MPD agreed to
move down Pennsylvania Avenue in force to move the protesters back. As it
was, the demonstrators were massed outside temporary barriers just 20 feet
from the main 13-foot ornamented fence. In a matter of seconds, they could
climb over the barriers, overpower the Uniformed Division and Park Police
officers standing guard, and begin scaling the inner fence. More space
meant more time to react. When the order was given, a police captain in a
BearCat armored personnel carrier came over his vehicle’s LRAD acoustic
system and informed the crowd that for safety reasons, a wider perimeter
needed to be established between Lafayette Square and the White House
fence. His tone was reasonable, and the crowd soon began to withdraw.
Voices from the square could be heard shouting “Let’s pull it back!” and
“Give ‘em room, guys!” Several protesters initially sat down and refused to
move, but other activists came over and convinced them to de-escalate the
situation. A line of MPD and Park Police BearCats drove slowly down the
roadway, and riot police formed a double-line shield wall penning the crowd
back into the square itself. More police trucks arrived carrying portable
metal barriers, which the officers erected along the sidewalk between
Lafayette Square and Pennsylvania Avenue. Tensions palpably eased.

T
HEN, ANOTHER ORDER. The White House had been badgering

Mayor Muriel Bowser’s office with reports of demonstrator

violence, and at 6:34 p.m., Bowser reluctantly declared a public
safety emergency. The MPD’s emergency operations center escalated to
Response Level RED, its maximum department-wide mobilization level—

24
cancelling leaves, suspending non-emergency police services, and
authorizing use of all emergency equipment. With these conditions in place,
Chief Newsham authorized a general order to disperse, and the BearCats
along Pennsylvania Avenue immediately began blaring messages that the
assembly was unlawful. “If you do not leave Lafayette Square immediately,”
the LRADs thundered, “you will be arrested.”

The crowd was confused. They had been following police commands
peacefully. What had changed so suddenly? Near the center of the square,
off-duty paramedic Connor McVeigh had been talking to a man in an
American-flag bandana named Parker. When they heard the order to
disperse, Parker looked at him and said “Oh, hell no!” He pulled the
bandana down over his nose and mouth and went running toward
Pennsylvania Avenue. Parker was 28-year-old Parker Lewis, a software
engineer at Apple who was in town for his UCLA roommate’s wedding. At
6:42 p.m., he tweeted “Police trying to break up lawful protest. Getting hairy
out here.. #trumpout #michaelglazershooting.”

The sudden reversal in strategy was self-defeating. After first working to

herd everyone into Lafayette Square, law enforcement was now trying to
make everyone scatter. And people had become so tightly packed together
that those deep in the crowd couldn’t see which way to go or what police
wanted them to do. Distant verbal commands were hard to hear over the din
of airhorns, shouts, sirens, and occasional flashbangs that echoed off the
surrounding buildings.

But activist leaders in the square understood that the demonstration had
done nothing to warrant dispersal. This was simply a government effort to

25
suppress a protest it didn’t like—no different from the June 2020 church
photo op. Someone raised a megaphone to their lips and shouted back at the
LRADs: “We stay! He goes!” Then another. And another. Soon, thousands of
people were roaring a call and response, punctuated by drums. “We stay!”
Dum dum dum. “He goes!” Dum dum dum. “We stay!” Dum dum dum. “He
goes!”

Emily DiNucci and her new friends Claire and Sean had made it almost to
the Rochambeau statue when the dispersal order was given. They saw some
people heading back toward H Street and away from the White House. But
flashbangs were going off behind them, and hundreds of protesters pressed
instinctively forward toward Pennsylvania Avenue. The three of them were
swept onward, clutching the “Justice for Journalists” sign tightly. Emily
held her phone high above her head and recorded video of the chaos. She
joined in the chant. “He goes! … He goes! … He goes!”

Back up along H Street, at the northern edge of Lafayette Square, tensions

were rising. Video taken from the crowd shows cans, bottles, and rocks
starting to pelt the riot police there with some regularity. Local MPD and
Park Police units responded with rubber bullets and more flashbangs. But
that only served to scare back the members of the crowd who were trying to
leave the square up 16th Street and Vermont Avenue—as they had been
instructed by police back near the White House. Officers along the
Pennsylvania Avenue skirmish line found that the protesters still weren’t
retreating, and called for reinforcements. At 6:49 p.m., the MPD emergency
operations center activated its joint emergency response plans with other
law enforcement agencies around the District. Capitol Police locked down
the Capitol Building and put up additional crowd control barriers, even

26
though the surrounding streets were nearly empty. The FBI began deploying
its D.C. SWAT team, while putting teams in Baltimore, Richmond, and
Philadelphia on standby for additional incident response. The U.S.
Marshals, Supreme Court Police, and District of Columbia Protective
Services Division all implemented their own civil disturbance procedures.

Down at the Rochambeau statue, Reggie Myles, Deborah Katz, and Sharon
Olson were in the thick of the confrontation. They were just a few rows from
the front of the crowd, and found that they couldn’t move forward or back.
But no one around them seemed eager to retreat. A woman came around
handing out earplugs. Several times a minute, the LRADs’ warbling warning
tones swept over demonstration, knifing into their eardrums at 149 decibels.
Reggie tried asking a girl with a painted face to borrow her phone, but
between their ringing ears, the muffling of the earplugs, and the deafening
roar all around them, neither could hear a word the other was saying.

Observing the crowd from a drone, MPD tactical commanders on

Pennsylvania Avenue identified two individuals in the crowd who appeared
to be leading the resistance—leading chants through bullhorns and
beckoning people back toward the White House barricades. “Snatch squads”
were deployed onto the avenue and given information from above about the
location of the persons to be arrested. At a white-shirted lieutenant’s
command, officers along the shield wall opened holes in the barricades
between themselves and the crowd, and teams of eight officers charged into
the crowd in flying wedge formation. The sudden impact bowled people
over, forcing others off to the side and catching protesters by surprise.
Reaching their targets, the officers physically grabbed them and carried

27
them—protected from recapture by their riot shields—back to the shield
wall, where the barriers were closed behind them again.

After the arrests, other activists around the square—who’d had experience
confronting riot police at Black Lives Matter or Voices Rising protests over
the past year—began shouting instructions for the others to close ranks and
lock arms. When another snatch squad appeared back up near the von
Steuben statue a few minutes later, the crowd was ready. The shock of the
officers’ momentum knocked back the first few rows of demonstrators, but
those behind them quickly recovered and locked arms. Footage from a
human rights group drone hovering illegally overhead shows a man in a
bike helmet grab at an officer’s uniform. The officer strikes back at him with
his baton and other hands in the crowd tear the baton from his grasp. The
demonstrators surge forward and the officer gets separated from the rest of
the squad. In seconds, it’s an all-out brawl between the eight police and
about a dozen protesters. Punches, kicks, and baton strikes fly. Another
officer loses his footing and falls to the ground. Several men surround him
and start stomping on him, but he’s well protected—their boots land
harmlessly on his anti-riot helmet, polycarbonate face shield, and burly
“Robocop” body armor. Then, a muscular man from further back in the
crowd heaves a large metal keg up over his head and sends it crashing down
onto the officer’s arm, pinning him.

Immediately, a whole platoon of Civil Disturbance Unit officers comes

charging into the crowd—lashing out with their batons and knocking people
over with their shields. They fling a volley of flashbangs deeper into the
mass of demonstrators. Officers tackle some of the combatants and bind
their hands behind their backs with flex cuffs. Other police come in from

28
behind and drag the arrestees away. After about a minute, the two sides
disengage again, but the police charge has put more southward pressure on
the crowd, further compacting the people bunched up against the
Pennsylvania Avenue barricades.

A CNN camera following correspondent Evan McMorris-Santoro on H

Street came across two CDU officers helping a grimacing third limp back
toward a mobile command post. One arm hung limply at his side, dripping
blood from an obvious compound fracture. Up the street, platoons were
donning gas masks. McMorris-Santoro turned to the camera. “As you can
see—” BANG. A stun grenade went off practically at his feet. He whirled to
find the officers who threw it: “Press! Press! Press!” They shouted back:
“Get off the street!”

The violence was now forming a sort of malign loop. Images posted to
Twitter were feeding exaggerated or confabulated claims by far-right
activists—for example, that the injured police officer had been shot—which
were hitting the newsfeeds of political staffers inside the White House in
real time. Those reports were read out to Trump and senior officials in the
West Wing, who were also getting updates from the Secret Service. When
they called MPD headquarters demanding more action, they didn’t make a
clear distinction between eyewitness information from Uniformed Division
spotters and hearsay from Red Ice TV. With the fog of war hanging heavy
over Washington, this alarming information trickled down over the radio to
tactical units—who were repeatedly warned of possible gunmen in the
crowd. This made them jittery and more apt to use stronger force
themselves.

29
A
BEARCAT DRIVEN by MPD officer Blake Wieslander was just
coming up 17th Street past the Eisenhower building when they got
an urgent alert over the common tactical frequency, known as
Interop 1. It warned of “reports of at least one person with a sniper rifle”
near the White House. A lieutenant up ahead motioned Wieslander to stop
and let off the CDU squad that had been riding to the scene on the vehicle’s
running boards. He could see several more platoons donning gas masks
along the street. Wieslander, a 4th-year cop from Annapolis, Maryland, was
at his first civil disturbance incident in more than two months. He’d been on
medical leave for a week in April, after a serious concussion sustained
struggling to arrest a violent protester outside FBI headquarters. He was
prescribed Xanax to deal with anxiety on returning to the job, but found
himself losing weight. For the first time, he noticed gray creeping into his
sandy blond buzz cut, even though he was only 26. Now, as the BearCat’s
heavy diesels idled around the corner from Lafayette Square, Wieslander
felt an onrushing sense of dread that somehow he would be killed.

As Evan McMorris-Santoro and his cameraman hustled down the western

edge of the square toward the White House, he overtook a group of women
and asked where they were from. LRADs tones warbled in the background.
“Arlington,” said one. “Visiting from New York,” said another. “Here in
D.C.,” said a third. This was middle school teacher Melissa Mack.

Down on Pennsylvania Avenue, another CNN crew was capturing live

footage of the stalemate. Confusion and conflicting orders had slowed the
departure of those who wished to leave Lafayette Square, and thousands of
people still defiantly chanted back at the officers’ dispersal commands “We
stay! He goes! We stay! He goes!” Some of them were geared-up activist

30
diehards in goggles and breathing masks, but viewers at home saw that
most looked more or less like they did—ordinary citizens in t-shirts and
jeans with the faces of people well and truly fed up. Many of the protesters
in the first rank were African-Americans in their Sunday best—men in natty
bowties and tailored suits with pocket squares, and women in bright mono-
color dresses. They all linked arms tightly together.

Back up on H Street, skirmishes had broken out again, as a few dozen

activists ostensibly leaving the square sat down in the road and refused to
budge. Officers pounced to arrest them, and someone threw a cluster of
fireworks into their formation. The human rights group drone overhead
recorded throaty bangs, followed by sharp cracks and showers of sparks.
This time, the police responded with smoke grenades, OC spray, and sting
balls—small tear gas-packed explosives that scatter hard rubber buckshot
with painful force. The stream of protesters that had finally decided to
disperse northward now turned around and retreated back towards the
center of the park.

At a distance, the fireworks sounded like gunshots. The MPD and

emergency services channels filled with reports of possible shots fired.
Officers on H Street quickly came on the radio to explain that it was
fireworks, but the reports continued—and some officers there remember
thinking that the calls must have been about actual gunfire somewhere else.

Incident command wanted to know why officers weren’t getting the protest
to disperse. At 7:14 p.m., orders came down from Special Operations
Division commander Roberto Reyes for a move in force into Lafayette
Square. About 300 CDU officers formed up on the pedestrian plaza of

31
Pennsylvania Avenue just outside Blair House, with instructions to hit the
demonstration’s vulnerable corner near the Rochambeau statue and then
roll the crowd all the way up to the center of the square. Three BearCats
followed behind, one with an LRAD on top, and others with gas mask-
wearing observers standing in the open hatches.

As the formation came into view of the demonstrators, they advanced

slowly, beating their batons on their shields in unison, and halted about 90
feet away from the main protest line. An officer came over his LRAD’s audio
system and issued a final command to disperse. Two minutes later, police
fired a barrage of tear gas into the crowd, followed by sting balls. Then the
thick shield wall started advancing toward them, beating their shields again
and chanting “Move back! Move back! Move back!” The BearCats rolled
ahead behind them at a walking pace.

Near the front of the crowd, Deborah Katz and her friend Sharon Olson had
been locked arm-in-arm when someone put a reassuring hand on their
shoulders and said “We’re about to get tear-gassed. Close your eyes until the
cloud passes.” Sharon joked that she liked the spiciest curry at Rasika, a
nearby Indian restaurant, so this would be nothing. But the next thing
Deborah remembers is being on the ground, coughing and gasping for air.
She could hardly see. Someone helped her up and led her toward the center
of the square for medical attention. By the time she caught her breath, she
and Sharon had gotten separated.

The shield wall crashed into the demonstrators with a visceral crunch. There
were screams and shouts. The officers’ momentum forced the corner of the
demonstration backward step by step, but the line held. The protesters

32
resolutely kept their arms linked, and the weight of thousands of people
packed in behind them eventually propped them up and stopped their
grudging retreat. The tactical commanders, watching from behind the line,
realized that pressing the assault further would only risk suffocating people,
so they called they ordered the shield wall to disengage and withdraw. As
they did so, the crowd surged back into the space it had just vacated. In the
moment, this seemed to police like an aggressive move, but the MPD’s
subsequent after-action report concluded that much of this was simply
people trying to get out of the crush.

Around this time, frantic word started flying around the tactical channels
that someone was setting up a rocket launcher in Lafayette Square, aimed at
the Residence. It remains unclear—and the MPD report was unable to
determine—how the warning originated. But within the space of a minute or
two, just about everyone on the radio net had heard some version of it.
Some said that word had been relayed from Secret Service spotters on the
White House roof. Others thought it had come from the MPD helicopter
overhead.

Inside the Residence, Secret Service agents burst into the sitting room
where the president was watching the demonstration through a window,
and hustled him down to “the Batcave”—a state of the art command bunker
under the White House lawn completed during the Obama administration
at a cost of $376 million. The building went into full lockdown. Uniformed
Division officers with tactical vests and assault rifles piled into a couple of
SUVs parked near the West Wing and awaited deployment orders.

33
Urgent queries were coming down the MPD chain of command now. Why
haven’t officers taken back Lafayette Square? Get it cleared. Near the
Rochambeau statue, the Civil Disturbance Unit shield wall formed up again.
CNN showed tear gas grenades and sting balls going off in the crowd,
sending thick, curling clouds of irritant wafting over the demonstration.
Occasionally, protesters would catch the bouncing grenades spewing smoke-
like fumes, and hurl them back toward the police in arcing trails. The line
prepared to charge again, with the BearCats close behind.

In the center of the formation, driver Blake Wieslander turned to MPD

sergeant Jason Tucker, the vehicle commander, and asked whether he could
see anyone in the crowd with a weapon. Tucker said he couldn’t—but
because of the sniper warnings, he was staying inside with the turret closed
now, and didn’t have a good vantage. Wieslander could hear more sharp
cracks in the distance, and wondered whether it was shooting. Others on the
radio were thinking the same thing.

A second time, the shield wall slammed into the demonstrators, officers
churning their feet to get some kind of leverage. But the crowd was still too
dense. After driving about 30 feet into the square, the advance stalled, and
the commanders pulled their formation back again. Inside Wieslander’s
BearCat, both he and Sgt. Tucker were absorbed by radio chatter about the
rocket launcher, and didn’t realize that the officers on foot were retreating
until they were already behind them. Now, protesters rushing back into the
space vacated by the riot police found themselves face-to-face with the huge
black armored bulk of the BearCat. A group of them sat down on the asphalt
to block its path.

34
The MPD, which had gone on a BearCat-buying spree with Trump
administration money after the George Floyd demonstrations in D.C., still
hadn’t had time to train all its personnel in properly coordinating foot units
and armored vehicles during civil disturbances. Tactical commanders about
350 feet behind the line couldn’t clearly see what was going on amidst the
billowing tear gas, and were heatedly ordering everyone forward again into
the protest line. Just then, someone from Park Police came over Interop 1
and warned that a Secret Service drone had seen someone possibly pointing
a rocket-propelled grenade from near the Rochambeau statue. Commanders
were screaming for a third assault there to clear the way for SWAT: “Now!
Now! Now!”

Wieslander squinted ahead through the gas and saw a line of protesters
standing about 20 feet ahead. He laid on the horn and blared the emergency
siren. The protesters weren’t getting out of the way. Sgt. Tucker called on
the radio to the foot units: “Get those guys out of there!” But Wieslander
thought it was an order to him. He revved the engine hard. Behind the
BearCat, one of the CDU officers threw a flashbang into the midst of the
protesters, trying to clear the path in front of the vehicle. Someone caught it
and flung it back. The grenade landed on the screen over the BearCat’s
windshield and exploded right in front of the driver. Stunned and
disoriented by the searing light and loud report, Wieslander believed that
the vehicle had come under RPG attack. In desperation, hoping to force the
standing demonstrators out of the way with the BearCat’s plow, he pressed
the accelerator.

35
T
HE ROLLING CNN camera had a full view of the horror. The BearCat

suddenly lurched forward, running over the sitting protesters and

plowing through those standing behind them, scattering bodies
until it crashed into the white granite pedestal of the Rochambeau statue.
The images were hideously graphic. Several people were dramatically
mangled. One woman’s head had been crushed under one of the huge black
tires, spilling bright red gore onto the asphalt.

In the Atlanta control room, there were gasps and shouted profanities.
Executive producer Stuart Mann had just a few seconds to order the delay
feed cut before the video went out to CNN’s live audience. The crew was
already getting ready to do so. Mann’s instincts as a broadcast news veteran
were howling at him to crash the feed, but he also instantly understood that
he’d just seen something world historic on the monitors. He thought of the
famous “Tank Man” in Tiananmen Square, the Challenger explosion, the
plane hitting the South Tower. Shielding viewers from the reality of what
just happened seemed tragically naïve. “Stay on it, stay on it, stay on it!”
Mann ordered. It was 7:27 p.m.

Reggie Myles had been one of the ones sitting down in front of the BearCat,
and remembers his state of mind as being “angry, just angry.” The
protesters at the Rochambeau corner had been hit with sting balls and
rubber bullets. Their ears rang from flashbangs and LRADs. Their eyes and
throats burned from the tear gas and pepper spray. Some had cuts and
bruises from the batons and riot shields. Myles hadn’t come to Lafayette
Square with the intention of getting arrested, nor had most of the others he
spoke to. But after enduring more than half an hour of pain and fear at the
hands of the riot police, something in the crowd just turned. He couldn’t

36
explain it, but they all shared a sense that enough was enough. Nobody
wanted to let these masked, faceless Robocops—and by extension, Trump’s
government—beat them. That’s what was on Reggie’s mind when the
armored behemoth roared right over him.

Overall, Myles was lucky. The BearCat’s plow—made for powering through
rioter barricades—caught him on the shoulder and spun most of his body
out of the way. His right leg was so badly crushed that doctors described it
as one of the most severe lower-limb traumas they’d ever managed to spare
from amputation. But he lived. Melissa Mack—whose husband Jason was
watching live from home without realizing she was in the frame—was
sucked under the plow, where her head got caught under the left front
wheel. She was killed instantly. Sharon Olson the lawyer and Parker Lewis
the software engineer were both sitting next to her. Both were run over and
fatally dragged. Several other protesters sitting next to them received severe
injuries. Of those standing behind them, Claire Lavoie and Sean Ralston, the
GMU students, both died at the hospital—but Georgetown student Emily
DiNucci, who’d been holding the same banner with them, was thrown clear
and survived with a broken wrist and fractured pelvis. In all, five people had
been killed, and 29 more injured were transported to area trauma centers.
Countless others were knocked down or dove out of the way just in time.

About 2.75 million people watched the ramming on live television. Within
minutes, the footage was all over every news channel. Following CNN’s lead,
ABC, MSNBC, and CBS also elected to show it uncensored, following
warnings to their audiences. Within 25 minutes, the clip had become the all-
time most retweeted video, as Americans spread the word to friends and
loved ones: Have you seen? Check your phone. Turn on your TV. As prime

37
time began on the East Coast, the networks preempted normal
programming to bring viewers minute-by-minute coverage of the crisis in
Washington. The reported death toll rose from one, to three, to five, to six,
then back to five. The police, jarred out of their rocket-launcher paranoia by
the tragedy, had pulled back and not made further efforts to clear Lafayette
Square.

As the late-setting June sun went down over the Potomac, tens of thousands
more people took to the streets. Many were responding to online calls to
action by figures ranging from Sen. Cory Booker to singer Ariana Grande.
But many others were just going out by instinct. They felt they had to be
there outside the White House, to stand up and be counted. Randy Bugg, a
retired Trump voter who walked 30 blocks to join the protest, hadn’t
previously turned against the administration because it was too exhausting
to sort out all the claims and counter-claims about fake news. “I didn’t know
what to believe anymore,” he told Vice News’s Elizabeth Landers, “but that
video … just makes it crystal clear.”

D.C. police, now essentially ignoring renewed calls from the White House to
crush the protest, took only a public safety role—directing pedestrians along
sidewalks to keep the streets clear, except around Lafayette Square, where
several blocks were closed to automobile traffic. Nobody wanted another
Charlottesville to compound the tragedy. Mayor Bowser announced a
citywide 9:00 p.m. curfew, but the city had no intent to retake the square
itself that night, and federal forces on scene were still too small to do it on
their own. Fortunately, MPD units reported that the main gathering was
mostly peaceful, despite a flareup of violence around the Trump
International Hotel about six blocks away.

38
There, a few hundred members of Smash Racism DC and other black bloc
groups set fire to a parked cop car, smashed the windows of a Brazilian
steakhouse, and vandalized building entrances. Despite tight security at the
hotel itself, four agitators managed to infiltrate the grand atrium lobby, in
the soaring nine-story heart of the Old Post Office building. Conservative
powerbrokers chatting on federal blue couches and out-of-town elites
sampling $140 sips of wine out of crystal spoons at the marble bar were
startled when a few young men and a woman began screaming about “blood
on Trump’s hands”—smashing rose-filled vases, flipping gilded chairs, and
breaking open magnums of champagne to pour them onto the polished
floors. But they were quickly cornered by police, tased or tackled, and
hauled out. On the streets outside, redeploying CDU units easily
outnumbered the rioters, and after about 15 minutes of street fighting and
pepper spray, surrounded them with a kettle maneuver and took 189 off to
jail.

Meanwhile, enormous crowds were forming in cities across America—from

an eye-popping 350,000 in New York City’s Central Park, to about a dozen
people holding “Honk 4 Trump Out Now!” signs in front of the tiny city hall
of Macedonia, Iowa (pop. 242). In Downtown Los Angeles, tens of
thousands of marchers blocked traffic, and protesters chained hands across
14 lanes to shut down the 405 freeway. Major rioting broke out in Berkeley,
Seattle, and Portland, Oregon. In almost every media market, television
viewership reached higher peaks than any time since the Super Bowl attack.

By 11:15 p.m. in Washington, the MPD estimated that up to 120,000 people

were in the area roughly bounded by Lafayette, Farragut, McPherson, and

39
Franklin Squares—with another 25,000 gathering on the Ellipse opposite
the South Lawn of the White House. Chief Newsham arrived on scene in his
chauffeured patrol car and met with demonstration leaders at the parish
house of historic St. John’s Episcopal Church. News cameras caught
protesters heckling him as he got out of the cruiser with two aides, all in
their dress uniforms. “You’re fucking killers,” one man shouted. Others
chanted: “No justice, no peace! No fascist police!” and “When fascist cops go
on the attack, what do we do? Stand up, fight back!” Women’s March
activist Lucía Campos-Herrera shepherded the chief through the angry
crowd, and on the way to the church’s meeting room, they passed a massive
line snaking out of the building and around the block. “Are they here for
me?” Newsham asked. “No,” she answered. “That’s the line for the
bathroom.”

As he entered the protest’s improvised nerve center, Chief Newsham cut an

impressive figure. Standing 6’4” with slicked-back hair, a chest full of ribbon
bars, and four stars on his shoulders, he was used to commanding rooms
and dictating terms. He was widely respected by beat cops, but despite
recent attempts at outreach to the community, had earned a reputation on
the activist left for harsh tactics stemming all the way back to his
involvement in mass protester arrests in 2002. Just hours after one of his
officers had killed five citizens, he was under no illusions that the room
would break out into applause for him.

Sitting across the plastic folding table from him were some of the
demonstration’s self-appointed leaders—most of them female, and all of
them under 45. In addition to Campos-Herrera, there was Women’s March
co-founder Vanessa Wruble, Voices Rising national campaign co-chair

40
Daniela Saez, Indivisible co-founder Leah Greenberg, It’s On Vets co-
founder Evan Vrabec, and Sarah Turk, a former DNC staffer with over
350,000 Twitter followers who’d started the main Facebook group for the
vigil-turned-protest. Some had known each other loosely before, but their
presence and collaboration that night was organic and largely
happenstance.

“I want to start by saying that our goal here is to keep this peaceful and help
you keep everyone safe,” Chief Newsham began. “I’m told people are
planning to stay out here overnight,” he said, “but when do you expect—at
least an estimate—that this will wrap up?” He had run the numbers with the
department, and was prepared to offer to truck in bottled water, and to
provide buses to help people leave.

Saez looked him dead in the eye. “We’ll be here until President Trump
resigns, plus about another 12 hours or so to celebrate, depending on what
time the announcement comes out.” Activists snapped their fingers in
agreement from the sides of the room.

“No, but really—”

“Chief Newsham, this is not a joke,” Saez said evenly. “I am telling you what
the Trump Out movement is going to do, and I hope we can work together
to minimize the conflict that causes.” As organizers explained their
activities, Newsham struggled to believe what he was hearing. The speed
and sophistication of their organization was staggering.

41
They had already collected $775,000 dollars in online donations at the start
of the conversation, both in dollars and half a dozen cryptocurrencies. Over
the course of the meeting, that total was repeatedly revised upward until it
broke $1 million. Volunteers around the East Coast were already packing
truckloads of water, food, sanitary supplies, toiletries, and sunscreen to
sustain the demonstrators. Others were bringing flashlights, batteries,
sleeping bags, tents, and warm clothing. They had already set up a first aid
station staffed by off-duty doctors and nurses, and were putting out a call
for more medical supply kits. Thousands of D.C.-area residents had offered
through Twitter or the Facebook group to let out-of-towners crash on their
guest beds, couches, and floors. Slouched in the hallway outside, a pair of
Google employees were putting the finishing touches on a mobile app that
would match hosts and guests up directly. In the corners of the cramped
parish meeting room, a dozen other organizers frantically tapped away on
laptops and smartphones, extemporaneously pulling together logistics.
Sitting cross-legged against the table, a Lyft employee was busy coding a
free ridesharing app for protesters, while an AirBnB product manager next
to him sketched out functions for a central app that could combine all the
others. Every minute or so, some new success was squeaked out in marker
on one of the five whiteboards that had been set up to keep track of the
chaos.

The only sticking points were the heavy logistics. The organizers were in the
process of arranging delivery of 1,500 porta-potties—enough for 450,000
people—from as far away as New York, but the companies wouldn’t install
them without proper permits. Likewise, they were working to order portable
shower trailers, garbage dumpsters, electric generators, and speaker
systems, but couldn’t get installation without approval from the MPD and

42
Park Police. So they asked Chief Newsham for help—for his department to
permit everything in the morning, and to pressure the National Park Service
to do the same. They also wanted the permitting and health code review
process waived for food trucks—“Do we want slider-size banh mi plating, or
the full size?” a volunteer called to Campos-Herrera with a phone at his ear.
She grimaced, deciding. “Better do sliders in case we’re underestimating on
numbers.” Turning to the Newsham, she added, “We’ll need police to let the
food trucks and all our trucks bringing supplies through the roadblocks.”

Saez added that although they were getting a steady stream of donations,
the temperature was already dropping, and it would be a major show of
good faith for the authorities to make emergency overnight gear available.
FEMA had a major distribution center just up the road in Frederick,
Maryland. If they loaded up trucks with cots, blankets, tents and sleeping
bags, they could have them in Lafayette Square before sunrise. “Enough for
twenty, thirty thousand should be a big help,” Saez said. “I know it’s not
your department, Chief, but I know what you say carries weight.”

Newsham was reeling. “I can’t make any promises right now tonight,” he
said, “but we’ll keep the line of communication open.” Then he asked the
organizers about tomorrow’s plans. “What about civil disobedience?”

“We don’t have a centralized agenda,” Sarah Turk said. “We’re leaving that
up to individuals for right now. But … we’ve been really sticking our necks
out here to keep everyone from the Sisterhood and Antifa reasonably chill.
If our relations with D.C. police break down, and we can’t show everybody
that this is getting results, I can’t speak for how they may feel.” As Newsham
heard it, the threat was clear: play nice with us, or we’ll turn the black bloc

43
loose. And so, the meeting ended inconclusively. He pledged again to keep
open communications, and gave organizers his cell number—but was
already thinking of measures the department could take to get back the
upper hand. Campos-Herrera led him and his aides back out through the
jeering crowd to Cruiser 1, which turned on its flashing lights and eased
back out toward the police line.

The clocktower atop the Trump International Hotel read 12:00 midnight.
Michael Glazer had once reminded Julia that although people in the
political class thought about the administration’s abuses constantly, “for 95
percent of Americans, life goes on.” Outside the Beltway and the partisan
blogosphere, the great, silent majority of Americans still spent their days
focused on little league, on church groups, on volunteer service, on watching
sports or superhero movies. It sounded trite, like an Iowa caucus cliché, but
it was true. As the days got warmer, they were out boating and fishing,
barbecuing and hiking in nature after a whole quarantine-darkened year.
Many, run ragged by the daily grind of soulless jobs, simply came home at
night and blissed out with a six-pack of beer. For nearly all, though, each in
their own ways, it was family, friends, work, hobbies—in short, the business
of life—that absorbed much more of their interest than whatever was going
on in Washington. But this was the day—day 1,606 of Donald Trump’s
presidency—that everyone else had finally started paying attention.

A
FTER MOST PEOPLE on Eastern time had gone to bed, Midwestern

and West Coast audiences continued to watch, transfixed, as the

White House demonstrations went on. Video of the ramming was
replayed on a seemingly endless loop, though now blurred on most
channels. On CNN and MSNBC, panelists were fiercely divided between

44
certainty that Trump would have to resign and “how many times have we
said he’s finished before?” cynicism. In between talking-head spots, all the
networks went back to live shots of Lafayette Square, where protesters had
erected a stage and portable spotlights. A parade of celebrities delivered
passionate speeches demanding President Trump’s resignation—novelist
Stephen King, actor Mark Ruffalo, and documentarian Michael Moore,
interspersed with political activists like Van Jones and Jason Kander.
Hamilton playwright Lin-Manuel Miranda led the crowd in “Trump out!”
chants, freestyling raps about standing up to government oppression. Left-
wing Harvard professor Cornel West turned toward the White House and
addressed Trump directly: “Come out, you coward, and face what you’ve
done!” The demonstrators took up the taunt, heard live by millions around
the world: “Coward! Coward! Coward!” At the makeshift ramming memorial
under the Rochambeau statue, a group of Washington Football Team
players raised their fists in silent rage. A light projector in the square
splashed “TRUMP OUT” in huge letters onto the north front of the
Residence.

By 3:30 a.m., with no response from the president forthcoming, the protest
had started to quiet down. Many of those who had brought sleeping bags
were tucking into them. Others had slipped back out through the police
lines for a few hours’ rest at home or on nearby couches, with plans to
return first thing in the morning. Those who had arrived later in the evening
stayed awake and talked with those around them. The MPD was drawing
officers off the police line so they could get some sleep for what they knew
would be another long day. Inside the protest’s command center at St.
John’s, organizers chugged Red Bull and instant espresso as they made
arrangements for the coming day’s protest. Fundraising dollars were still

45
pouring in, and every hour, over a hundred thousand more people were
posting their intent to demonstrate in Washington. Only a couple more
hours until dawn.

On Massachusetts Avenue, two miles southeast of the White House, a long

column of National Guard vehicles was finally rolling toward the scene. The
first troops had been ordered to report to the D.C. Armory across from RFK
Stadium by midnight. There had been delays locating some of the riot-
control equipment, and certain prescribed ammunition had to be trucked in
from a temporary holding site after it had been moved during maintenance
work. Now, troops from two companies of the 372nd Military Police
Battalion were rolling down deserted streets in a mix of armored personnel
carriers, Humvees, and 5-ton trucks—with a third company still forming up
at the Armory. Commanded by Major Reed Harrison, they had orders to
help seal a total cordon around the protest area, turning away any new
demonstrators who tried to join in the morning. Roadblocks would be set up
to allow admittance only to select federal employees and some hotel staff
who worked inside the perimeter, and to ease the process, buses were
presently being chartered to bring in the workforces at the White House,
Treasury, National Security Council, and the Office of Management and
Budget.

Most of the guardsmen had deployed back in March during the Alyson Kopp
riots or over the inauguration weekend, so they had experience working
together as a team during civil disturbances. But just about all of them had
seen the ramming video already. They’d seen the speculation online about
suicide bombers and Antifa assaults, and heard the activists’ promises to

46
occupy Lafayette Square until the administration fell. They knew this would
be different from anything that had come before.

In the St. John’s meeting room, Daniela Saez got a call on her cell phone
from Peter Balakrishnan, the bookish Boston Dynamics engineer who was
acting as the demonstration’s coordinator of security. He cut straight to the
chase: “People on Mass Ave are tweeting that tanks are going past their
windows right now.” Saez asked him to gather more info and keep her
informed—then turned to Evan Vrabec. She asked how many of his veterans
were out on the square. A couple hundred maybe, he guessed. A lot of guys
had been there since the previous morning and had gone off to crash on
couches. Saez told him to tweet at all recent vets on the square and gather
them for a meeting. If tanks were coming their way, she wanted folks with
military backgrounds—largely privileged white men—to be the ones staring
them down in their gunsights.

Word of the approaching danger spread like a rustle of wind through grass.
Protesters groggily read the tweets and retweets, leaned over toward
another screen-lit face nearby. Are you seeing this? A nod. Then they’d both
be up, rousing buddies in their sleeping bags. Tanks. Wake up. They’re
sending tanks. Vanessa Wruble took the stage, trying to prevent a panic.
She confirmed that the government was sending additional forces to the
area, but tried to instill a spirit of defiance. “You remember what Liz Garbus
told this president when his supporters threatened her body, her life.” And
here Wruble extended two fingers into the air in a Churchillian ‘V,’ pumping
her arm with each word for emphasis—“‘I. Am. Not. Afraid.’” Thousands of
Vs rose up in the crowd, and thousands of voices. “I am not afraid.”

47
The National Guardsmen rumbling toward the White House could hear the
thunderous chant echoing through the cool night air from a few blocks
away, even over their vibrating diesels and heavy military tires. There were
no true tanks among them, but the people tweeting sightings through
cracked-open blinds on Mass Ave had been referring to armored cars called
M1117 Guardians. In the lead Guardian, Captain Brian Davis, a high school
history teacher in civilian life, radioed his platoon to slow down. Up ahead,
there were two MPD motorcycles parked with their red-and-blue flashers on
across the intersection of New York Avenue and 14th Street. The Guardian
pulled up to them, and Davis leaned out the hatch to talk to one of the cops.
A block ahead, he could see more flashers where the main police line was,
and a thicket of protest signs peeking out over the cruisers. “How long you
been on?” he asked. “Eleven hours forty-five,” the helmeted officer
answered. “We’ve got you covered,” Davis answered. “The Guard is setting
up roadblocks a few blocks back, and all the way down to Constitution. But
I’ve got orders to make a show of force first right outside Lafayette Park.”
The cops pulled their motorcycles out of the way, and the armored column
drove on toward the square.

Evan Vrabec was standing along the police line in the pedestrian plaza at the
eastern edge of Pennsylvania Avenue when the National Guard came into
view. Along with about twenty other It’s On Vets members, he was chatting
with the MPD cops, trying to keep tensions down. There had been hundreds
of people sleeping or resting in the plaza before the tank rumors got them all
stirred up, and the police were alarmed to see them rouse so suddenly,
joined by many hundreds more, and start actively protesting again. The
sudden echoes of “I am not afraid” chants from the square out of the cops’
line of sight had them on edge, and more patrol cars had come whooping in

48
with flashing lights to reinforce the line. Now the lieutenant talking to
Vrabec got a call over his radio and looked back. Half a dozen beige
Guardians and Humvees were pulling up behind the cruisers. The crowd
had their camera phones up and ready for a showdown. Doors and hatches
opened, and National Guard soldiers in camouflage and body armor piled
out with their M4 assault rifles. Vrabec called out to their closest officer,
reading the name and insignia on his uniform. “Captain Davis!”

Brian Davis was startled to be addressed like that by someone in the crowd.
At first he thought it must be someone he knew, but as he got closer realized
that the man’s face was familiar, but from the television. “You’re
Commander Vrabec, right?” He’d followed the story about the resigned
officers closely. He was used to seeing Vrabec’s Navy file photo on social
media, or watching him in sharp suits on MSNBC. In person, his square jaw
and chiseled frame were impeccably military, even in a t-shirt and jeans.
They shook hands. “I’m one of the lead organizers of the demonstration,”
Vrabec said, “and I just want you and your guys to have me as a point of
contact … if you have any concerns about security or keeping things
peaceful.”

The gesture meant a lot. Before taking over company command, Davis had
been on the receiving end of vicious abuse as a platoon leader during the
Alyson Kopp riots. Demonstrators had called him a Nazi, wished him a
range of deadly diseases, and spat curses about his family. So to now relate
to Evan Vrabec as a fellow military officer was disarming. Vrabec reassured
him that the rumors about an Antifa assault on the White House were total
bullshit and that he didn’t know of anyone armed in the crowd and that
things had been mostly quiet since the ramming.

49
Things weren’t quiet, though, in the small office room at St. John’s where
senior organizers were locked in a dispute about whether demonstrators
should blockade the federal offices around the protest area. Vanessa Wruble
and Leah Greenberg, representing the more establishment-aligned
attendees, argued that breaking the law and obstructing ordinary
government function would risk turning moderates against the movement,
and would weaken their legal position to resist dispersal efforts by the
administration. Perhaps most importantly, it would make it harder for
congressional Democrats to support them, and embolden the president’s
supporters.

Daniela Saez and Sisterhood Without Banners activist Chelsea Fair took the
opposite position, arguing that nonviolent direct action would allow Trump
Out to control the tempo of events—keeping up the pressure on the
administration, and hopefully escalating the situation until the president
had no choice but to resign. “We can’t be like Occupy,” Saez said. “If this
turns into people just camping out in the park for months on end, people
will lose interest and go home, and nothing will change.” Fair was even
more blunt: “Strategically, it’s better for us if they do use force again.
Obviously we hope that doesn’t happen, but it hurts them more than it hurts
us collectively. For folks who understand the risks, it’s good to put bodies on
the line and push the envelope.” And frankly, she added, the Sisterhood was
committed to action with or without organizers’ say-so. So they might as
well get on the same page.

That swayed Sarah Turk, who was emerging as the tiebreaker vote on
contentious decisions. But she implored Fair one thing: “Strictly nonviolent.

50
No property damage, no throwing anything at anybody. Or everybody’s
going to look bad.” And so, it was agreed, with the understanding that they
would continue to take the temperature of both leadership and the
demonstrators as a whole, and to seek outside perspectives. They had
already arranged to fly in Erica Chenoweth, a world-renowned scholar of
nonviolent resistance at Harvard, to advise in person later in the day, and
they’d scheduled Zoom calls with several other theoreticians of protest from
around the world.

Outside under a lightening blue-gray sky, several thousand activists had

crowded tightly around the Andrew Jackson statue at the center of Lafayette
Square and formed a human microphone—where the crowd repeats in
unison the words of a single speaker. At 5:15 a.m., local minister Wallace F.
Hurd recited a 1964 speech by Berkeley activist Mario Savio, echoed by the
whole gathering, phrase by phrase. “There is a time… there is a time… when
the operation of the machine becomes so odious… when the operation of
the machine becomes so odious… makes you so sick at heart… makes you so
sick at heart… that you can’t take part… that you can’t take part. You can’t
even passively take part… you can’t even passively take part! And you’ve
got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels… and you’ve got
to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels… upon the levers…
upon the levers… upon all the apparatus… upon all the apparatus… and
you’ve got to make it stop… and you’ve got to make it stop! And you’ve got
to indicate to the people who run it… and you’ve got to indicate to the
people who run it… to the people who own it… to the people who own it…
that unless you’re free… that unless you’re free… the machine will be
prevented from working at all… the machine will be prevented from
working at all!”

51
Soon, several hundred demonstrators had gathered around the Treasury
Building just to the east of the White House, and just to the west, the
Eisenhower Executive Office Building—the enormous Second Empire-style
edifice that houses staffers from the National Security Council, Executive
Office of the President, and Office of Management and Budget. Mostly
veterans of numerous protests over the past four and a half years, they were
geared up with goggles, earplugs, gas masks, and heavy coats. Some had
umbrellas or wooden shields. A few had spray-painted signs. Before police
could intervene, they were sitting down blocking the sidewalks around all
the entrances. Others laid down in the street itself. Many shackled
themselves together with handcuffs so it would be harder for law
enforcement to arrest them.

CDU squads in riot gear appeared within minutes, and began hauling
flailing protesters out of the street while news cameras rolled. Several were
pepper-sprayed in the face at close range as they bellowed about police
brutality. But once the streets were clear, incident command decided to
avoid ugly scenes removing the much larger mass of demonstrators blocking
the sidewalks. The business day wouldn’t start for more than three hours
still, and MPD brass—in consultation with the other law enforcement
agencies on scene—didn’t want to force a confrontation before it was
necessary. Besides, the National Guard promised that it would soon be able
to deploy its three Active Denial System units, which were being brought
online at the Armory. The ADS, looking like giant Humvee-mounted
satellite dishes, projects invisible “pain rays” that they hoped could scatter
the protesters without need for a CNN-friendly melee.

52
J
UST AS DAWN was breaking, a convoy of two pickup trucks and two

big rigs was wending its way into the capital after driving most of
the night from New York City. In the passenger seat of the lead F-
150, Columbia University adjunct professor Jasper Rice Sullivan sat texting
back and forth with Daniela Saez about the crucial supplies he and his
fellow activists were bringing. A 38-year-old North Carolina native, Sullivan
taught courses on the history of protest, anti-colonialism, and the civil
rights movement. His long beard, shaved head, horn-rimmed glasses, and
penchant for flannel struck his undergrads as hipsterish, but he was hardly
one to loiter around East Village cafes. Every summer, he led students on
trips to South Africa and Northern Ireland to learn about the peace
processes there. In 2017, he’d been at the Charlottesville counter-protest,
and in a February 22, 2021 tweet, Donald Trump Jr. had called Sullivan an
“enemy of the state” after he led a protest against PAP/AFEO detentions
outside Trump Tower. Now, as the convoy approached the intersection of
New York Avenue and 10th Street several blocks east of the protest area, they
saw National Guard soldiers manning a roadblock that barred the way
forward. Sullivan told the driver to stop for a moment, and got out.

On the other side of the roadblock—two Humvees parked broadside across

the westbound and eastbound lanes of New York Avenue—a squad of D.C.
guardsmen watched the approaching vehicles with trepidation. They had
already waved off several cars, but these were clearly no casual looky-loos. If
the huge Kenworths rumbling behind the pickup tried to ram them, they
would have just seconds to escalate to lethal force, and they’d been briefed
on just such a scenario back at the Armory. Nice and Las Vegas loomed in
their minds. Captain Davis, out inspecting the roadblocks on foot, called up

53
to the men in the Humvee turrets to signal the approaching drivers to stop
and back away.

But they kept coming. Very slowly. The lone figure walking in front of them
kept an easy walking pace, as the trucks crawled forward behind him. Davis
ordered verbal warnings. A sergeant picked up a bullhorn and began issuing
firm, sharp commands every few seconds: “Stop! … Stop, reverse, and turn
around! … Stop immediately! … STOP!” Squad members were showing their
assault rifles from behind the Humvees. The man and the trucks were still
getting closer.

Davis ordered a smoke grenade to show they meant business. A guardsman

loaded a round into the launcher under his M4 and yelled “Smoke out!” It
landed about 150 feet ahead of the roadblock, blooming into a dense red
cloud that momentarily obscured the convoy. There were several tense
seconds of apprehension as they waited to see whether the vehicles would
turn around. Radioing for backup, Davis ordered his troops to stay calm.

For an instant they saw a dark shadow in the smoke, and then the man burst
through the swirling red eddies. Slow, implacable. Like a zombie in a horror
movie. They saw that he was wearing a hockey helmet and heavy jacket.
Now, he raised a megaphone of his own and called back to the guardsmen in
a voice that echoed off the midrise hotels and offices lining the avenue. “We
are bringing food and water to a peaceful demonstration,” he said. “We are
going to pass through this intersection, but intend no one any harm.” The
squad repeated its verbal warnings, more urgent than ever. But the man
kept walking. And the trucks rolled along in line behind him. “I am
currently livestreaming everything I see to millions of people on the

54
internet, and any force you use against this peaceful group will be seen and
judged by the whole world, and by your children and grandchildren for
generations.”

But only one fact mattered to the guardsmen: the man and the trucks were
still getting closer. At 100 feet, with lesser means exhausted, Captain Davis
ordered the sergeant to fire a nonlethal 40 mm rubber round at the man’s
torso. It bounced off his chest with a loud slap, and he staggered for a
moment. But kept walking. He raised the megaphone again. “I am not afraid
to die. If you use force against me, the whole world will see it.” Two more
rubber rounds went into his gut, and still he kept walking. “You are
responsible for your own actions. Force is not necessary.”

The squad was fast running out of options. Davis had spent 10 months in
Afghanistan in 2012, but roadblocks there operated under different Rules
for the Use of Force, due to the ever-present threat of car bombs. Overseas,
the Humvees had .50 caliber machine guns mounted in their turrets, and
could easily disable most onrushing vehicles if they refused to stop. But here
in the streets of America’s capital, the Guard didn’t have any heavy weapons
mounted. And during their briefing at the Armory, the battalion had been
informed that lethal force was only allowed against imminent threats to life.
That was a judgment call, though. If they opened fire before the threat
became imminent, the soldiers could be criminally liable. Yet if the trucks
were planning a surprise ramming, they would have just a second or two to
engage them before getting smashed aside. Davis ordered the designated
marksmen to chamber rounds in their carbines and heard the reassuring
clatter of the charging handles.

55
“I am not afraid to die,” the man called out again. “We are bringing these
supplies through to a peaceful demonstration, or you will have to kill me in
front of a watching world.” The squad leader, a 28-year-old guitar salesman,
shouted a last warning to back away and aimed his M4 at the walking man’s
center of mass. Warning shots were forbidden as too dangerous, so lethal
force would be the next step. “STOP!” the staff sergeant bellowed. “Stop
right now or you will be shot!”

The man said nothing, and kept approaching. A couple of the guardsmen
called out to Davis, asking what they should do. Someone shouted “Waste
this motherfucker!” The captain’s mind was racing. He saw the horrible
image of the BearCat plowing through the protesters the day before. And he
could already picture the footage of soldiers in camouflage gunning down an
unarmed protester blocks from the White House. Davis ordered them to
hold their fire.

The man led the convoy across the intersection itself. Still no sign of an
imminent threat. The guardsmen were pointing their guns and screaming at
him to stop and get on the ground. When he was a little over a car length
from the Humvee parked across the westbound lane, he started walking
around toward the back side of the vehicle, with the F-150 close behind.
There was a gap just wide enough along the bike lane and curb for the trucks
to pass around the roadblock. Davis realized what was happening and
ordered his men to get out in front of them—but it was too late. The
helmeted protester approached them with his hands raised, and the trucks
behind him sped up and barreled by the guardsmen running to catch them.

56
The convoy dodged past one of the Guardians rumbling up to reinforce the
roadblock, and veered around some parked police cruisers before rolling
unhindered into the protest zone outside Franklin Square. One MPD officer
drew his service pistol and fired seven shots at one of the big rigs as it
passed—because, he later told investigators, he saw the driver steering
erratically and thought he was trying to ram the crowd. Fortunately, no one
was hurt. As the trucks pulled to a stop on I Street, the protest line closed
behind them. Police without riot gear tried to get through to arrest the
drivers, but found themselves blocked by a dense mass of demonstrators,
and were ordered to withdraw in order to prevent further violence.

Meanwhile back at the New York & 10th roadblock, Jasper Rice Sullivan was
being arrested by D.C. police and stuffed into the back of a holding van for
transport to jail along with several other activists. As the convoy sped
around the roadblock, a guardsman had fired another rubber round into his
face—breaking his nose and knocking him onto his back almost into the
path of an accelerating 18-wheeler. The soldiers physically pinned him to
the ground until the MPD arrived to take him into custody. The GoPro on
his helmet—although livestreaming to just a few dozen people as opposed to
the millions he had claimed—caught it all.

At the St. John’s command center, protest leaders were getting an inventory
of the supplies that had gotten through on the New York convoy. It was
hardly enough. According to their best guess (largely supported by the
subsequent MPD review), about 30,000 people had stayed overnight within
the police cordon, which formed a trapezoid around Lafayette, Farragut,
McPherson, and Franklin Squares. Inside that line, there was enough food
to provide perhaps 40,000 cold meals. Two other convoys had already been

57
turned back by the National Guard, and there was no indication anything
else would get through. By midday, people would be getting hungry and the
sustainability of the occupation would fall into serious question. “Supply
drones?” someone suggested. But the Secret Service would shoot down
anything getting that close to the White House. And while local businesses
had been generous in giving out free water, there weren’t nearly enough
bathrooms—already, some demonstrators had taken to using bottles and
plastic bags instead of braving the endless lines. It was becoming
increasingly clear that Chief Newsham would be under intense pressure not
to meet their logistical demands even if he wanted to. Sarah Turk was
feverishly networking trying to figure out who they could appeal to next, but
most key officials were still asleep.

At 6:00 a.m., staffers who’d been stuck at the White House overnight met in
the Batcave to begin coordinating the day’s contingency plans. So far, the
Uniformed Division had managed to keep two street exits clear of
protesters, but if crowds became too thick around them, the presidential
limousines might not be able to safely extract POTUS during an emergency.
So HMX-1, the aviation squadron that operates Marine One, was advised to
prepare additional helicopters to either extract everyone necessary for the
running of the government if the West Wing became unsafe, or to insert
heavily-armed units to reinforce the Residence if it came under attack. In
the meanwhile, the Pentagon was advised to call up additional National
Guard troops from Pennsylvania, Virginia, Maryland, West Virginia, and
Delaware, including—at Trump’s insistence—several formations of Abrams
main battle tanks. WMATA, Washington’s mass transit authority, was
instructed to prepare to shut down part or all of the D.C. Metro system (in
addition to the McPherson Square station that was already closed) if civil

58
disorder worsened. Law enforcement agencies in Northern Virginia and the
Baltimore area were alerted to make additional jail space available in
anticipation of mass arrests overwhelming facilities in the District.

Over the next two hours, tens of thousands of people started waking up and
streaming on foot back toward the protest area. Others had driven all night
from as far away as Chicago, and were just arriving. The National Guard
kept them back with tear gas and nonlethal rounds. So the Ellipse, on the
opposite side of the White House from Lafayette Square and outside the
cordon, began swelling with crowds. Others congregated along the Mall and
up the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Some laid down in the streets around
the mayor’s office and MPD headquarters, disrupting traffic and sparking
another series of made-for-TV scenes as officers in Robocop armor pepper
sprayed flailing protesters and hauled them away.

A
T 8:00 A.M., Homeland Security stood up a new Unified Area
Command to manage incident response, headquartered at the
Armory. Key UAC members included Chief Newsham, Maj. Gen.
Dean of the D.C. Army National Guard, Park Police chief Christopher Gross,
Capitol Police chief Steven Sund, Secret Service Uniformed Division chief
Tom Sullivan, District emergency management director Hudson Black,
Acting Deputy Assistant Attorney General Paige O’Scanlan, and DHS Office
of Operations Coordination director Tony DiFranco. Mayor Bowser was also
present to oversee the city’s participation. This structure would serve to
coordinate law enforcement responses to both legal and illegal protest
actions around Washington, but would also provide a crucial layer of
insulation from the White House, so tactical commanders wouldn’t be

59
under as much pressure to process information and orders from outside
their proper chains of command.

At the UAC’s first meeting, the principals got a briefing on the protesters
still handcuffed together blocking the entrances of the Treasury Building
and Eisenhower Executive Office Building. Brigadier General Daniel Hazell,
the D.C. National Guard’s task force commander, reported that all three of
the Guard’s ADS weapons were ready, so they decided to use one on the
demonstrators at Treasury, one on those blockading the EEOB, and hold
one in reserve in case access to the White House became obstructed. Once
the workforces at all three sites were safely in their offices, the crowd at
Lafayette Square would be given a final opportunity to disperse. If they did
not comply, it was decided, riot police and ADS units would sweep in from
the west, clearing the square and forcing hardcore demonstrators back to
the smaller three parks where they could be more easily controlled.

Just after 8:45 a.m., the first dish-equipped Humvee rolled into view
outside the Treasury. About three dozen masked and goggled protesters still
blocked the entrance, chanting “Trump out!” and “We stay! He goes!”
without rest. Skirmish lines of riot police forced back the ABC and CNN
cameras that were covering the action live, and an MPD lieutenant
addressed the demonstrators by bullhorn with one final warning to
disperse. Thirty seconds passed, but everyone stayed put. Then, with the
pull of a trigger, the Active Denial System sent waves of pain rays washing
over them. In an instant, the top layer of their skin began cooking like
microwaved hotdogs from the 95 GHz energy. It took a second or two to
register the excruciating burning sensation, but then they began screaming
all at once. A few got up and ran away, but most—shackled together and

60
weighted down with sandbags—couldn’t get out of the beam’s path even if
they wanted to. The MPD’s internal review later concluded that while ADS
blasts were limited to six seconds for safety reasons, some protesters were
exposed for over 40 seconds in total. Once their resistance was broken by
this treatment, “cut teams” equipped with bolt cutters and rotary saws
forcibly separated those handcuffed together or chained to weights. CDU
squads swooped in and carried them bodily away from the entrance and off
to waiting police vans. Much the same played out on the opposite side of the
square at the EEOB.

As soon as the entrances were clear, MPD radioed the chartered buses idling
a few blocks away, and federal employees were led into work under heavy
guard. Officers with submachine guns were posted at the entrances with
authorization to use lethal force against anyone trying to storm the
buildings. All around the capital, workers arrived at their desks uncertain
how the crisis would impact the government’s daily functioning. For most,
on that Monday, business went on as usual even as civil servants and
political staffers compulsively refreshed their newsfeeds. At 9:03 a.m., the
White House sent out a terse notice to the press corps that the press briefing
scheduled for 2:30 p.m. had been canceled. Likewise, President Trump’s
planned lunch with Vice President Pence and working meeting with
Romanian president Klaus Iohannis were absent from the revised daily
schedule released that morning.

As U.S. stock exchanges opened for the Monday, June 14 session, markets
were in chaos. The DOW started 801 points down from its Friday close, and
the selloff continued throughout early trading. Following tense predawn
skull sessions, Democratic comms teams now started getting signoffs from

61
elected officials, and strongly-worded statements started hitting the wires.
Eight senators—Booker, Gideon, Gillibrand, Harris, Hirono, King, Warren,
and Wyden—called on Trump to resign immediately. Several dozen
Democrats in the House did as well. But neither chamber’s leader, Chuck
Schumer nor Tim Ryan, were quite ready to nail their colors to the mast in
such stark terms. Instead, they led most Democrats in denouncing the
president’s conduct and threatening unspecified future consequences.
Members of both parties called on President Trump to launch an
investigation into the cause of Sunday’s tragic ramming. But with the
situation still so fluid and uncertain, few Republicans would go further than
that.

Freed from the calculations of holding office, the three living former
presidents—Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama—issued a
joint letter that morning calling on Trump to leave office. “The President’s
actions,” they said, “have cost innocent lives and inflicted grave wounds on
the unity of our nation.” But advisors to all three, especially in the Obama
camp, cautioned that more active intervention could further inflame the
crisis and make a peaceful resolution more difficult.

In the White House Residence, the sitting president slept in late. It was his
75th birthday, and staff brought bacon and eggs up to his bedroom while he
watched the demonstrations on TV and took calls from supporters. Whether
he was watching Fox News or CNN, he probably saw the protesters who
wheeled a giant birthday present up to the Pennsylvania Avenue barriers.
Inside was an orange prison jumpsuit. A couple hundred feet away,
protesters were holding up a nude, poorly endowed effigy of the president,
topped with a polka-dotted party hat. A pink sash read: “BUNKER BOY.”

62
By 10:30 a.m., the MPD was marshalling its CDU units for the planned push
to clear Lafayette Square. At St. John’s Episcopal Church, protest organizers
were getting tipoffs of the impending assault. Studying the area’s street
layout on Google Maps, they identified likely routes of police movement,
and advised direct action teams where they would be needed to block the
police advance. Chelsea Fair and several other Sisterhood activists went
over their plans with demonstration leadership. Groups of women were
linking themselves together near the perimeter of the square using a tactic
called “sleeping dragons.” They would chain their arms together inside a
length of PVC pipe run through holes cut in a 55-gallon drum. The drums
were then filled with quick-drying cement. When full, each drum weighed
more than 1,000 pounds, so even large teams of riot police couldn’t move
the entire interconnected dragon. To clear the way, officers would have to
cut or drill through the drum and the concrete, then through the PVC pipe,
and finally through the chains connecting the protesters. Doing all this
without risk of causing severe injury would take hours.

But Evan Vrabec was worried. The sleeping dragons, he said, could only
delay the inevitable. The punitive use of pain rays earlier in the morning
suggested that the government might be willing to simply torture the
demonstrators until they opened the self-release carabiners inside the PVC
pipes and surrendered. And even if the tactic managed to delay the
onslaught into Lafayette Square for several hours, the final result would be
the same. Daniela Saez said she’d put out a mass message on the new
Trump Out app, calling for anyone with very thick clothing to loan it to the
sleeping dragon activists, in hopes of maximizing their resistance to ADS
rays. But everyone knew that could only buy them time. Sarah Turk

63
reminded the group of the stakes: if the protest was forced out of Lafayette
Square, the authorities would be able to divide the demonstration into
isolated pockets and stamp it out block by block. They had to find a way to
hold the square.

Several blocks away, National Guard captain Brian Davis was briefing his
platoon leaders on the upcoming assault. Because so many MPD units
would be taken off cordon duty to support the push into Lafayette Square,
the Guard was being stretched thin to pick up the slack—their company
would have to cover four more intersections than before. Davis had been
harshly reprimanded after the protester convoy had broken through to
Franklin Park, and battalion was insistent that nothing else get through.
Area command had warned of possible vehicular terrorism or armed groups
mingling with peaceful protesters, citing alerts from the Secret Service. As a
result, the Guard’s Rules for the Use of Force (RUF) were being modified to
allow faster escalation and warning shots if protest groups refused to stop
when approaching roadblocks.

Davis could see the apprehension on his officers’ faces. He’d only been
promoted to company command in April, but they all looked up to him. He
was around ten years older than most of them—and had a commanding
presence developed over a decade as an assistant football coach. With an
encyclopedic knowledge of the Civil War, he led his history students on field
trips to key battlefields, and as a teenager had appeared as an extra in Gods
and Generals. Several times, when giving leadership talks to his guardsmen,
he had reflected on what it must have been like during that terrible conflict
for Americans to kill Americans. Yet now, Davis had to relay orders that
they all knew might well result in just that. One of the platoon leaders asked

64
about the legality of the RUF change—he said he’d seen no sign of the armed
Antifa elements they’d been warned about, and that it seemed like the
government was trying to suppress legitimate protest. Others nodded in
agreement.

In his heart, Davis knew they were right. But he also knew that higher
command had made up its mind. Someone was going to man those
roadblocks no matter how he or the lieutenants huddled around him behind
a Humvee felt about it. Davis reminded them that all they could control was
their own judgment in following the RUF to minimize the risk of a tragedy.
“Follow your consciences,” he told them, “and don’t let anyone shoot unless
you’re willing to stand before God in the certainty that it’s a real threat… I
don’t care what you hear on the radio. Nobody shoots unless you can verify
a lethal threat with your own eyes.”

As the morning wore on, more and more protesters were taking to the
streets all around the nation’s capital. With MPD units focused on the
demonstrations in front of the White House, there was little manpower in
reserve to break up the crowds choking traffic from the State Department all
the way to Union Station. By 11:30 a.m., Unified Area Command received an
estimate of 250,000 people protesting across the whole area, and DHS
reported that hundreds more were streaming into the District every minute.
Based on FBI information that many of the arrested activists had come in
from Boston and New York by train, Amtrak was notified that all Acela
Express and Northeast Regional service into D.C. would be suspended for
the rest of the day.

65
At 11:37 a.m., the order finally came over the radio to the police and
National Guard units staging just west of Lafayette Square—start dispersing
the demonstration. Right away, BearCats rolled up to the edges of the
protest and used their LRADs to issue final verbal warnings: everyone in the
square had five minutes to disperse, either up to Farragut, McPherson, and
Franklin squares, or by crossing police lines and going home. Shrill warning
tones underscored the urgency of the command. But the crowd, forewarned
of the coming action via the new Trump Out app, resolutely stood its
ground. Thousands of voices chanted back: “We stay! He goes! We stay! He
goes!”

Five minutes passed quickly. Then one final two-minute warning: “If you do
not cease your unlawful behavior and disperse peacefully, you will be
arrested.” Tactical commanders radioed back to the Armory that virtually
none of the demonstrators had obeyed the repeated dispersal orders. There
was a brief debate among Mayor Bowser and the UAC principals. Bowser
opposed a prompt assault and wanted more time to meet with protest
leaders and negotiate a peaceful solution. But the others—even those
inclined to let the demonstrations proceed elsewhere—were concerned that
thousands of protesters just yards from the White House fence left the
situation too vulnerable to a catastrophic escalation. And none of them
wanted a repeat of the previous evening’s ramming. Better, they decided, to
use tear gas, pepper spray, pain rays, and cut teams now than risk someone
scaling the fence that night and setting off a shootout with the Secret
Service. So the order was sent back to the units near Lafayette Square: begin
the assault.

66
N
EWS CAMERAS EMBEDDED with the protesters saw dense

formations of riot police in Robocop armor appear in long four-

deep lines that spanned the streets and sidewalks from window
to window. An ominous clatter echoed off the buildings as they beat their
batons against their shields in unison. Behind them, the large dishes of the
ADS Humvees stuck out over the heads of the police.

As the assault force slowly advanced in the distance, a lone figure emerged
from the crowd and walked into the intersection of H Street and 17th Street,
just northwest of Lafayette Square. The bearded man staring down the
approaching riot police wore jeans and a plain white t-shirt. Local bartender
Amber Rederle, who was at the front of the protest line just behind him, saw
that he was carrying a red object, but she thought it was a large camera case.
Colin Burge, who was shooting a livestream for Voices Rising, saw that he
had a megaphone in the other hand, and thought the red object must be an
amplifier.

The man with the 5-gallon gas can was retired Army staff sergeant Jake
Hecht—an It’s On Vets member who’d become friends with Evan Vrabec
through their activism. Hecht, 37, had spent four combat tours in Iraq and
Afghanistan, serving with perfect conduct and winning the Army
Commendation Medal. He’d been active in several veterans’ charities after
getting out, but had battled PTSD and alcoholism in the years since. His
marriage fell apart in 2018, and in early 2021, he had lost custody of his two
children following domestic violence charges over an incident with his then-
girlfriend.

67
Now, he raised the megaphone to his lips and called out to the advancing
formation. Identifying himself as “a veteran, a father, and a proud
American,” Hecht announced “I am here to protest a terrible crime by the
President of the United States.” He continued: “You have no lawful reason
for dispersing this constitutionally-protected protest. If you assault these
peaceful protesters, I am prepared to sacrifice my life to … show my fellow
Americans the injustice of what is going on here… If you do not stop now, I
will have no choice but to act.”

At area command headquarters at the Armory, DHS officials were clustered

around a monitor showing the live feed from an MPD drone hovering over
the scene. There was no audio, but they saw the gas can and deduced that
the man on the screen was planning to set himself on fire. They barked
warnings at the IT staff, who quickly brought the feed up onto the
principals’ main projector. There was a very quick conversation—nobody
wanted another graphic video plastering the airwaves, so the police chiefs
suggested halting the assault until a SWAT team could disable the man with
nonlethal weapons and prevent him from killing himself.

On H Street, the line of police was now within 200 feet of where Jake Hecht
stood in the intersection. “I am not seeking to end my life,” he told them, as
news cameras from around the world rolled. “Stop now. Allow your fellow
citizens to protest our government peacefully, and there will be no need for
me to act.” But they kept coming.

Hecht sat down, calmly unscrewed the cap, and poured out the entire can
over his head and torso. Up the street, SWAT officers had dismounted from
a BearCat and were racing forward with orders to incapacitate the sitting

68
man with nonlethal rounds and flex-cuff him before he could act. But they
were too far away. Hecht raised his megaphone again. “If you advance one
more foot, I will have no choice.” The shield wall had stopped now—having
finally received urgent orders from the Armory via the tactical
commanders—and so had the ADS Humvee. But the SWAT team still
thought they could get to him in time. In one fluid motion, Hecht set down
the megaphone, revealing a lighter in his palm, and held the lit flame out in
front of his chest.

The flame flickered for a long second, then dropped into Hecht’s lap. The
networks, uneasy over their decisions to air uncensored footage of the
ramming, all cut away. But millions of people were watching half a dozen
livestreams of the same scene—and they saw everything.

In an instant, a bloom of bright orange flame spread across Hecht’s body

and splashed onto the asphalt around him. All the cameras could see was a
dark shape inside the blaze, gradually tilting forward as gray-brown smoke
curled into the air and drifted toward the police.

SWAT officers reached Hecht within 30 seconds and threw a fire blanket
over him. But he was too badly burned to save, and their very public CPR
was futile. Behind them on H Street, and along Pennsylvania Avenue at the
southwest corner of the protest, the riot police and ADS units stood at a
halt, waiting for orders.

Soon, censored footage of the self-immolation was playing wall-to-wall

across every network in America. Viewers saw a lone man facing a phalanx
of Robocops with a sci-fi pain ray close behind—an image commentators

69
immediately compared to Tiananmen Square’s famous “Tank Man.” Many
watching the news over breakfast on the West Coast called in sick to stay
home and keep watching the unfolding drama. Others listening to the
coverage on their morning commutes stayed in their cars long after reaching
the office to continue following the story from the parking lot. At workplaces
across the country, people huddled around televisions and smartphones to
get the latest updates.

In New York City, the Secret Service was preparing to transport Melania and
Barron Trump to LaGuardia Airport, where they would meet Don Junior,
Eric, and other family members and fly down to Washington to celebrate
the president’s birthday. But with chaos engulfing both cities, agents were
instructed to keep everyone bottled up safely indoors. Likewise, the details
for Ivanka and Jared Kushner and younger daughter Tiffany were informed
that moving them to the White House for dinner was too risky. There would
be no family celebration. In the Residence, aides coming in to brief POTUS
on the situation found him watching television alone with a Diet Coke,
letting the self-immolation video wash over him again and again.

At St. John’s Episcopal in D.C., the Trump Out organizers were feeling a
conflicted mix of sadness and relief. The disturbing public suicide had taken
them by surprise, but it had also stopped—for the moment—a police assault
they couldn’t have defeated on their own, and provided more searing
imagery that could convince the public that its government had gone off the
rails. Sarah Turk chaired a strategy session for how the movement could
best capitalize on the incident—but she and most everyone involved felt
deep guilt and discomfort talking so transactionally about the loss of a
human life. Evan Vrabec, still struggling to come to terms with what had

70
just happened, was sent out to do news hits about his friend’s death.
Organizers identified other friends of Hecht via the protest app and
summoned them for media appearances.

Trump Out leadership was also getting reports of massive decentralized

actions elsewhere in the city. The self-immolation had seemingly brought
everyone who could walk out into the streets—and helicopter footage on TV
showed cars backed up all the way into Virginia as traffic around the District
came to a standstill. #Resistance figures on Twitter were telling anyone who
was healthy and could afford to miss a few days’ work to descend on
Washington and get themselves arrested so the jails would be choked to
capacity. Here and there around the capital, activists were already carpeting
roadways with their bodies—and in many cases, MPD resources were simply
stretched too thin to respond. Many members of Congress found themselves
trapped in their office buildings, and heavily-armed National Guard troops
were being deployed to protect executive-branch departments around D.C.
as officials activated contingency plans to extract their employees at the end
of the day if the blockades continued that long.

Although she was grateful for the overwhelming public response, Sarah
Turk was worried that some of these uncoordinated actions would be
counterproductive. Ambulances and firetrucks responding to unrelated
emergencies would inevitably get stuck in protest-caused traffic jams,
jeopardizing innocent lives. And footage of demonstrators causing random
chaos on the streets would distract from the movement’s message and take
media focus away from President Trump’s crimes. So Turk, Leah Greenberg,
and Vanessa Wruble convened a brainstorming session on how to better
communicate with this new flood of protesters and coordinate effective

71
collective action. Coders who’d worked on the Trump Out app reported that
it had been highly effective in getting organizers and the crowd on the same
page—but people now joining actions far from the main Lafayette Square
protest had little way of finding out about the app.

So the group came up with four solutions. First, they would send a message
through the app, asking users outside the police cordon to approach as
many people as possible and urge them to download it. Second, the
communications team would make sure that organizers plugged the app
during all media appearances. Third, since Trump Out’s war chest had
swollen to over $5 million by noon, they would make a six-figure ad buy on
Facebook and Instagram, letting people geolocated in D.C. know about the
app as an essential tool for participating effectively in the protest. And
fourth—most importantly—they would pay whatever it took to bolster
wireless coverage around the protest zone. Even though permanent cell
service capacity around the Mall had been beefed up tenfold anticipating
overflow crowds for the inauguration and parade, it still wasn’t enough—the
enormous protest turnout was already slowing local networks to a crawl,
and many hundreds of thousands more had indicated they were coming. So
they arranged with AT&T and Verizon to install a forest of portable cell
towers the next day—truck-based units called “super COWs” and standalone
“masting balls.” That would run almost a million dollars up front, but there
was no way around it. Protesters needed bars. In addition, the lead
organizing team (“L-team”) in the war room authorized hefty payments to
nearby homes and businesses willing to make their WiFi public for the
duration of the demonstrations.

72
At the Armory, the drone feed view of Hecht’s self-immolation had set off a
storm of profanity in the command center. Everyone knew instantly that
this would badly inflame the situation, perhaps beyond law enforcement’s
ability to control. DHS officials wanted to proceed with clearing Lafayette
Square as soon as the lifeless body had been taken away, but radio reports
coming over Interop 1 said that demonstrators in the crowd were warning
that additional activists were preparing to set themselves on fire if the police
got any closer. Mayor Bowser threatened to end the city’s cooperation with
the UAC unless the other principals agreed to stand down the assault until
they had a chance to attempt negotiations with protest leaders. The police
chiefs were now inclined to agree. The strategy of choking off the protest
with police and National Guard cordons was failing dismally—as hundreds
of thousands of people simply congregated outside the cordon and engaged
in civil disobedience there. What they needed was a pause that would allow
efforts to de-escalate the situation, and hopefully shift the balance of power
back in their favor by nightfall—as protesters got tired and went home, the
rest of the D.C. National Guard activated, and the 1,600 Guard personnel
being mobilized in surrounding states started to arrive. Almost 2,000 police
from across the region would be reaching D.C. by then as well.

At 2:04 p.m., orders went out pulling the assault force back. As the
hundreds of Robocops began retreating and the ADS vehicles turned
around, the crowd in Lafayette Square broke out into riotous cheers.
Chants, supported by countless drums, thundered around the square and
made themselves heard inside the White House. “We stay!” Dum dum dum.
“He goes!” Dum dum dum. “We stay!” Dum dum dum. “He goes!”

73
Although the mood was jubilant on the square, Trump Out organizers
feared—correctly—that the pause was a bid to buy time until even greater
force could be mobilized elsewhere and brought to the capital. So they
quickly took stock of available resources and began working to make their
position more defensible.

This effort was advised by Valentyn Kravchenko, a Ukrainian visiting fellow

at Georgetown who had been a leader of the 2013-2014 Euromaidan
protests in Kyiv. Those who had cars and trucks inside the police cordon
were asked to park them broadside across the major streets, and plans were
drawn up to commandeer and overturn other vehicles into improvised
fortifications if it became absolutely necessary. Bike chains were locked
together and strung across key intersections at man height to impede troops
that might try to enter the square on foot. In some places, where business
owners had been allowed through the cordon, organizers went from door to
door purchasing heavy furniture at generous prices—volunteers soon
arrived to haul it out and pile it up into makeshift barricades. Others filled
sleeping bags with jugs of water and stacked them around the furniture for
added weight and bulk.

Several veterans of the 2019 Hong Kong unrest showed demonstrators how
to keep police away from the barricades, supergluing bricks and chunks of
masonry to the street and duct taping a crisscross of PVC pipes between
them at ankle height. Elsewhere, activists cut and twisted nails and scrap
metal into caltrops—medieval spike obstacles that they scattered along the
sidewalks. At the K and 13th Street barricades, a Broadway musical director
led a group of protesters in choreographing and filming a rewritten

74
rendition of “Do You Hear the People Sing?” from Les Miserables. The video
was professionally edited and going viral on YouTube within two hours.

A
T 2:50 P.M., Sarah Turk got a call on her cell phone from Chief
Newsham. He told her that law enforcement wanted to meet with
her and the other lead organizers to discuss ways of achieving a
peaceful solution and avoiding any more loss of life. We’re sending a police
SUV, he said, and we’ll take your delegation to the Armory for a sit-down.
The other organizers listening in on speaker shook their heads vigorously.
Any move to separate them from the protest could be a ploy to arrest them,
or at least prevent them from returning to Lafayette Square. No, Turk
answered. If you’re serious, come to us. There was a long wait on hold as
Newsham consulted with the rest of area command.

Newsham hadn’t been planning any surprise arrest—although a DHS official

had raised the possibility—but there was concern that extremist elements at
the protest could attempt to assassinate government officials or take them
hostage. Mayor Bowser wanted to go in person, but she was strongly advised
against it. They were at an impasse until Tom Sullivan of the Secret Service
suggested just having the meeting via Zoom—that would avoid the security
worries for both sides and allow them to get right down to business.
Newsham proposed that to Turk, who quickly polled the other lead
organizers and agreed to a video conference at 3:30 p.m.

As the St. John’s war room prepped for the call, volunteers popped in and
out every few minutes to scrawl updated app adoption numbers on a
whiteboard—whoops and high-fives greeted each revision as the total
skyrocketed. At the same time, on every screen, organizers were seeing

75
worsening chaos throughout Washington D.C., as decentralized protest
groups disrupted traffic and overwhelmed the overstretched police lines.
Campos-Herrera read aloud tweets by GOP lawmakers blockaded in their
offices. Capitol Hill was paralyzed. The organizers were getting the sense
that Trump Out’s leverage was growing. “What if,” Daniela Saez wondered
aloud, “we play some hardball here?” She started pushing to cancel the
video call and make Chief Newsham and the others come to them. There
was a brief and spirited debate, but in the end Turk and Greenberg
overruled such a powerplay. They correctly assessed that Mayor Bowser was
broadly sympathetic to them, and saw prospect of forging a non-
confrontational relationship with other officials as well.

At the Armory, the Zoom account the principals were using required a
software update unexpectedly, and the call didn’t go through until four
minutes after the appointed time. After a civil round of introductions, Turk
informed the UAC that her team had a proposal. Although the protests are
decentralized, she explained, the Trump Out organizers have strong
influence through the app and social media. She rattled off the latest
adoption and engagement statistics. Affirming Trump Out’s commitment to
nonviolence, she explained how the local authorities could facilitate the
peaceful demonstrations they all hoped for.

First, the nighttime curfew would have to be formally lifted—the

government was not to interfere with protesters gathering in public spaces
to peacefully exercise their First Amendment rights. Their material
demands included immediate permits for 250 food trucks, 1,500 porta-
potties, 200 mobile shower trailers, and a two-page list of other logistics,
along with delivery of the FEMA supplies they’d asked Newsham for at their

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first meeting. Some of the proposed facilities were to be installed in
Lafayette and Franklin squares, but most would form a sprawling protest
camp along the National Mall. Police would make no attempt to disperse
peaceful demonstrators there. In return, Trump Out would make every
effort to end the office blockades and traffic stoppages around the capital.

Mayor Bowser asked about the costs to the city, and the expensive cleanup
that would likely follow. Everything, Greenberg assured her, would be paid
for by Trump Out from the donations they’d received, and they would
ensure that all trash was removed and environmental damage repaired after
it was all over. Tony DiFranco of DHS, who was leading the UAC’s
negotiation, asked how long they planned for the protests to last. Turk and
Saez answered that the stated goal of staying until Trump resigned was not
an empty slogan—they believed that he would be forced to resign over a
combination of Michael Glazer’s killing and the Lafayette Square ramming,
and that this would happen soon. “We’re not planning on hanging around
‘til Christmas,” Vrabec said, eliciting faint laughs from the Armory. With
that, DiFranco told them that he and the other principals would consider
the proposal and reply soon.

As soon as the call ended, DiFranco went around the table prompting the
other principals to offer their assessments of the opportunities and
challenges presented by Trump Out’s proposal. DiFranco, who’d spent a
quarter-century as a Marine officer, struck those around him as surprisingly
soft-spoken. With wire-rimmed glasses and a discount black suit, he looked
more like a midlevel bureaucrat at some obscure Interior agency than the
seniormost emergency operations official in the federal government. But he
had a reputation for quiet competence that impressed even the swaggering

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Chief Newsham. He’d cut his teeth at DHS managing the chaotic aftermath
of Hurricane Katrina, and subsequently working to ensure that the
department learned its painful lessons. Now, DiFranco was trying to
facilitate strategic thinking—he knew that if they got caught up in reacting
to minute-by-minute incidents, they would lose sight of the big picture.

The bottom line, DiFranco argued, was that the protest’s growth was
outpacing law enforcement’s ability to mobilize a response. MPD now
estimated half a million demonstrators across D.C., and police commanders
reported being completely overwhelmed by the scope of civil disobedience
across the city. As a result, they couldn’t enforce the curfew anyway.
Detention facilities were filling up fast, and some officers were forced to
hold blockaders at gunpoint until more flex cuffs could be found to bring
them under arrest. Under these conditions, the authorities’ best move was
to buy time and lower the temperature, even if it entailed short-term
concessions. With varying degrees of reluctance, the other principals
agreed. They would lift the curfew, and supply the requested permits in
hopes of clearing the streets and penning the demonstration safely on the
Mall. The one exception was the FEMA supplies—that was a non-starter for
both political and legal reasons, and pushing back there would signal at
least some strength in the government’s position. UAC public information
officer Marlon Greene drafted a statement, which was swiftly approved and
emailed to the Trump Out organizers at 4:51 p.m.

When Turk read the message to the rest of the team, the tightly-crowded
volunteers began exchanging hugs. Someone at the back of the room started
a chant. “Sarah! Sarah! Sarah!” She waved them off modestly. Right away,
they began drafting a statement to go out over the app. At 5:15 p.m., users

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got a push notification: “IMPORTANT VICTORY! … The government has
agreed to our demands for protest space on the National Mall and the food,
water, and bathrooms we’ll need to stay here until Trump is Out.” Of course,
there was a catch. “In return,” the message said, “we have agreed to allow
normal traffic to resume in most other parts of DC, and to allow elected
officials and government employees to leave their offices freely this evening.
We call on all Trump Out participants to respect these terms, and keep their
eyes on our goal: removal of a lawless president.”

Not long after, Turk, Greenberg, Vanessa Wruble and security coordinator
Peter Balakrishnan were eating takeout pizza in a small side room when
booted footsteps and screamed curse words jarred them away from their
dinner. A second later, Chelsea Fair appeared in the doorway with two
Smash Racism DC activists close behind her. Fair brandished a phone at
them. “Fucking this?”

She launched into a breathless assault on the treachery of the L-team

negotiating a deal with the government without so much as consulting the
black bloc groups that had been out on the streets getting their skin boiled
by pain rays all day. It was undemocratic, she said, and had no power to
bind the whole mass of protesters. Fair lit into them as neoliberals, anti-
progressives, and corporate shills—observing with disgust that half the
leadership team seemed to be Google and Facebook “brogrammers” with fat
stock options. If the L-team thought it was okay to just appoint themselves
in charge of the whole movement and make secret bargains behind everyone
else’s backs, the Sisterhood and anti-fascists wouldn’t bother keeping them
in the loop either.

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Balakrishnan stood up and started arguing with her, but Turk stepped
between them. She apologized that the negotiations hadn’t been more
inclusive, insisting that the way things had played out was due to the chaotic
and rapidly evolving nature of the situation. But she implored Fair not to
give the police and National Guard an excuse to assault the demonstration
again, as that could get more people killed.

According to all four organizers in the room, Fair replied something to the
effect that another massacre would only strengthen their position—though
Fair strongly disputes this, as do Smash Racism DC activists Tonya Crowder
and Michael Owiti, who were also present during the exchange. Whatever
was said, a heated shouting match erupted, continuing for several minutes
until Daniela Saez arrived and tried to mediate. Fair saw Saez as more of an
authentic progressive, and was more amenable to her pleas for nonviolence.
If tonight’s newscasts were full of black-bloc types smashing windows and
setting fires near the White House, Saez said, that would give Trump an
enormous propaganda victory. Most Americans were still making up their
minds about what to do, and if they saw Trump Out as a lawless mob, they
would be more forgiving of harsh measures used to restore order. Brawling
and destruction, she said, was simply bad strategy right now.

When push came to shove, Saez said, she would side with rest of the L-team
in condemning anyone who used violence—but if Fair and her fellow
activists got with the program and agreed not to work at cross purposes
from the rest of the demonstration, she would fight to ensure they got a
voice going forward. Fair wanted assurances from the other organizers, and
after some wrangling back and forth, left with promises to give her a seat at

80
the table in future negotiations, and to set up a democratic governance
structure for the movement within the next two days.

Yet the black bloc was never a monolith. While Fair, Crowder, and Owiti
tried to discourage violence that evening, some defied their requests. Riot
police manning the cordon near Lafayette Square were pelted with rocks
and glass bottles, and MPD made over a hundred more arrests across the
city that night for crimes ranging from torching cars to assaulting counter-
demonstrators. On the whole, though, the truce held, as most streets cleared
peacefully and protesters who couldn’t fit into Lafayette Square began
congregating on the Mall. Trump Out released a strongly-worded statement
condemning the scattered incidents of violence, and calling for investigation
into whether the Victoria Road Group or other hired provocateurs had been
involved.

As such, outside of Fox News, most coverage from D.C. that Americans saw
over dinner focused on the self-immolation, the police retreat, and the
staggering number of peaceful protesters still converging on the capital.
Elsewhere, interactions between crowds and police were a mixed bag. In
New York City, Chicago, Boston, and Houston, massive demonstration
marches were mainly peaceful. Meanwhile, Los Angeles, Seattle, Oakland,
Portland, and Baltimore saw violent riots. Clashes in L.A.’s Boyle Heights
neighborhood turned deadly as 23-year-old prep cook Luis Reynaldo
rammed an LAPD shield wall with his Honda Civic before being killed by
police sharpshooters. Less than three miles away, near the University of
Southern California, wanted gang member Calvin “Ruzz” Fisher pointed an
AR-15 down from a rooftop at a formation of riot police and emptied two
full magazines into them—killing five. But with so much happening at once

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around the country, the shooting didn’t get nearly the coverage it would
have at any other time. That night, although NBC gave an unsourced
estimate of 20 million that was widely repeated, subsequent analyses
suggest that around 12 million Americans were participating in hundreds of
protests across the country.

A
S THE EVENING wore on, SWAT vans, armored personnel carriers,

and buses full of riot police began rolling into D.C. from
surrounding states. In the White House’s Batcave, a couple
staffers had unrolled a large map of the District and were plotting their
deployment with plastic Risk tokens as the Armory called with the latest
updates. Up in the West Wing, someone had told Trump about the Bonus
Army—the 1932 incident where some 15,000 veterans brought their families
and set up camp in Washington seeking cash payment for their service
bonuses, only for President Hoover to send in cavalry and tanks to disperse
them. Now, the president was obsessed. He cornered everyone he could find
to ask them if they knew about the Bonus Army, marveling that “most
people” had never heard about it before.

NSC official Harry Katsouros had been listening to various harangues all
day, and now skulked through the halls trying to avoid enduring yet
another. Katsouros, 27, had graduated Pomona College in 2016 and worked
Islam issues at the hawkish Center for Security Policy before being brought
to the White House by John Bolton in June 2019. Although he found some
of Trump’s rhetoric crass, he recalls appreciating his candor about radical
Islam, and saw Trump as the kind of brash alpha male America needed to
prevail in its civilizational struggle against the Muslim world. Before he
deactivated his Facebook upon appointment as Special Assistant for

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International Economic Affairs, Katsouros’s profile picture had been a
MAGA hat-wearing selfie with Sebastian Gorka as they smoked cigars. Over
his two years on the job, he dismissed the cresting wave of scandals around
the president as bitter spin by the Democrat-controlled media. He’d been
sure Trump would be remembered as the next Reagan, and was flattered
when Deputy National Security Advisor Gorka had dropped hints about a
major promotion after the midterms. But now, as the rumble of drums and
chanting echoed from across the street, Katsouros started to feel twinges of
doubt.

“Harry!”

Katsouros turned around. The commander-in-chief was bearing right down

on him. “Mr. President?”

“Did you know that President Hoover used tanks to get rid of one of these
things? They wanted to overthrow the government. Nobody knows this, but
General MacArthur was the one who beat ‘em.” For probably fifteen
minutes, Katsouros remembers Trump raving to him about the dispersal of
the Bonus Army—“that was so strong” and “they’re only doing this because
we haven’t been tough enough” and “why can’t we do that now?”

They were only interrupted when speechwriter Peter Bartos brought a

printout for Trump to read containing several short posts from far-right
blogs. They claimed that Trump Out was being run by known Antifa
members, and that Ruzz Fisher, the L.A. cop-killer, may have been acting on
orders of Daniela Saez—a conclusion based partly on some Maino lyrics
she’d tweeted in 2015. A couple of the posts showed photos of urine-filled

83
bottles, and said that protesters were smearing human waste all over the
statues in Lafayette Square. Another presented tweets ostensibly by left-
wing activists bragging that they were gathering firearms in the square, and
calling for an armed assault on the White House that night to capture or kill
the president. Trump discussed the pieces at a meeting at around 8:30 p.m.
in the Batcave with Giuliani, Stephen Miller, and about a dozen other key
staff. Miller was fuming that Unified Area Command had negotiated with
the demonstrators without consulting the White House, and called the de
facto truce a “Deep State ploy” to undermine the administration. The police
pullback had put them all danger, he said. Even Fox News was reporting
that MPD headquarters had issued a warning about potential terrorists
embedded in the crowd.

“But we have tanks here now, right?” Trump asked. An aide confirmed that
National Guard armored units were on the streets several blocks away. “Get
General Dean on the phone,” he demanded. It took about five minutes to get
the National Guard commander on a secure line. As he later testified to the
Romney-Porter Committee, Dean had been told by the staff officer handing
him the phone that the president was calling with urgent operational
information. He was surprised, therefore, when Trump started asking if he
knew about the Bonus Army, and whether he knew that MacArthur had
probably prevented a communist coup against President Hoover. “These are
bad people, killers, traitors… They killed a bunch of cops,” Trump said,
according to Dean’s testimony. He said he wanted all the protesters around
the White House dispersed during the night, and promised whatever
military facilities might be needed to hold the thousands that would be
detained in doing so.

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It was unprecedented for a president to give tactical orders during a civil
disturbance—but while Dean was surprised, he knew of no reason why such
orders by the commander-in-chief would be unlawful. “I want you to send
those tanks in and clear them out,” Trump told him. “These people are
armed,” he continued, “so make sure you have live ammunition. I don’t
want to hear this crap about bean bag rounds and foam whatever.” Dean
emphasized to the committee that he understood this to be purely a
comment about defensive measures—otherwise he would have stressed to
the president the illegality of shooting civilians who didn’t pose an
imminent threat to his guardsmen. As it happened, Dean told the president
that he would need some time to prepare—the Abrams tanks Trump was so
enamored of belonged to other states’ guards, and the UAC was still getting
all the commands organized. They had never jointly trained for civil
disturbance operations on this scale, so just getting everyone’s
communications on the same page was daunting.

After the call finished, Trump spent several minutes raging to the room
about his belief that the slain officers in Los Angeles had been killed because
of a politically correct order to equip them with rubber bullets. While it’s
true that riot police in skirmish lines are not given firearms, this is a safety
measure that has nothing to do with political correctness—but no one in the
room corrected him. As recounted in The Endgame, Trump repeated again
and again: “These are killers like you wouldn’t believe.” At some point, he
floated to the room that the National Guard would have to be given “shoot-
to-kill” orders. “If they think we’re weak,” he reportedly warned, “they’ll
come in here and kill us all.”

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At 9:16 p.m., New York Times White House correspondent Maggie
Haberman tweeted that firsthand sources had informed her that Trump had
“ordered an all-out assault” on the protest camp and was preparing to
authorize shoot-to-kill rules of engagement for the National Guard.

S
ENIOR STAFF THROUGHOUT the West Wing saw the report hit their

phones in real time. Republicans often resented Haberman, but she

was so well sourced that the story was widely regarded as credible—
and in minutes, GOP officials around Washington and across the country
started bombarding those inside the building with calls and texts trying to
get a sense of what was going on. But no one could say for sure. Trump was
still down in the Batcave, and contradictory rumors were crackling
throughout the White House. As Haberman’s tweet blanketed the airwaves,
and was soon corroborated by several other journalists, a quiet panic set in.
Several junior staffers were seen in tears at their desks, in bathrooms, and
in deserted hallways. Like a head-on locomotive crash, they could see the
catastrophe coming, but felt helpless to stop it.

Attorney General Bill Barr, who had been giving a speech in Michigan,
managed to reach someone who had been in the Batcave during Trump’s
call to Maj. Gen. Dean, and asked if the reports were true. When Barr
received confirmation, he asked to speak with the president personally, and
demanded an explanation. According to two DOJ officials who spoke with
Barr that night, Trump told the AG that “at a certain point, you have to kill
them,” and asked him to find whatever legal pretext was needed for lethal
force. Barr had spent more than two years enabling Trump’s authoritarian
excesses, but the combination of the ramming footage and those chilling
words had sobered him up. Wanting no part of the forthcoming massacre,

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Barr faxed Trump a signed letter of resignation, effective immediately.
Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, hearing similar confirmation and
possibly after speaking with Barr, sent a similar letter about twenty minutes
later.

As his cabinet unraveled around him, Trump could only be cajoled into
taking calls from his old supporters outside politics. Media tycoon Rupert
Murdoch and casino magnate Sheldon Adelson both got him on the phone
down in the Batcave, and reportedly implored him to rethink any rash
National Guard action. Ivanka, who the Secret Service had blocked from
coming to the White House due to the security risks, managed to get her
father on the line shortly after 10:45 p.m., and likely made a similar plea.

Just before 4:00 a.m. local time in Ramstein, Germany, an aide woke
Defense Secretary J.J. Jack and informed him of the situation back in
Washington. Jack, who had stopped over en route back from visiting U.S.
troops in South Korea and Japan, quickly assessed his options. As he
testified during the Romney-Porter hearings, his foremost concern was that
the civil disorder back home might induce Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping to
make an opportunistic move in the Baltics or South China Sea while Uncle
Sam’s back was turned. This, in turn, could easily spiral into a nuclear
confrontation. If Jack resigned in protest at the reported “shoot-to-kill”
comments, that would potentially give a green light to every land-hungry
autocrat and would-be genocidaire in the world, while signaling to
America’s allies that the Pentagon was rudderless amidst the crisis. Better,
he reasoned, to send a strong message of reassurance publicly—and deal
with the president in private.

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Much like Barr and Chao, Jack waited to get verbal confirmation with
witnesses to the Batcave meeting before proceeding. He then tried to get
Trump on the phone directly, but was told—falsely—that the president had
gone to bed. Not knowing that Trump was at that moment pacing the halls
of the Residence ranting about Deep State sabotage, Jack drafted and sent a
sharply worded communiqué advising the president that the proposed order
would be “totally illegal” and warning that he could not countenance orders
“asking American men and women to … use force unlawfully.” Trusting that
Trump would read it in the morning, Jack then placed a brief call to Maj.
Gen. Dean at the D.C. Armory, advising him to push back firmly on
anything resembling unlawful orders, and urging him to remind his
guardsmen not to let all the rumors affect their adherence to the proper
RUF. With that, Jack canceled his morning engagements and started
making arrangements to fly back to Washington five hours early.

Around 11:45 p.m. at the White House, Harry Katsouros was holed up in the
Roosevelt Room doing crisis management with half a dozen other staffers
when he heard a vicious shouting match approaching outside. He peeked
his head out into a hallway, and saw that Trump had come back down to the
West Wing, and was unleashing a torrent of profanities onto senior
legislative advisor Paul Teller, who had been fielding hysterical calls from
GOP leadership all night. Back in 2020, there’d been a lot of bravado from
Congressional Republicans about crushing protesters, but many were now
sickened and horrified by how literally the BearCat on the square had
fulfilled that. Never averse to shooting the messenger, the president seemed
to take Teller’s requests to reassure the Hill as personal disloyalty. During
every pause for breath, the drums and chants echoed faintly from outside.
In the midst of the confrontation, Trump’s personal aide Rory Freylinger

88
arrived to report that Maj. Gen. Dean’s staff at the Armory were saying they
couldn’t get the general on the phone. This sparked fifteen minutes of raging
against Dean that ranged all across the West Wing and finally wound up in
Seb Gorka’s office.

Gorka sent for Katsouros, who arrived to hear the president slamming the
general as a “dope,” a “coward,” and an “affirmative action case”—Dean is
African-American—who should have never been given command. “Where’s
my MacArthur?” Trump asked the room several times. Shortly after
midnight, Trump pulled out his phone and saw reports that a few staffers
still in the White House had handed in their ID badges and walked out the
17th Street entrance. Just as he was bellowing demands to find the identity
of the “very disloyal … traitors,” Secret Service agents burst into the room.
Pyrotechnics had gone off just outside the fence. They said they thought it
was probably just fireworks, but hustled Trump back down to the Batcave as
a precaution.

Katsouros wandered the nearly-empty West Wing in an daze. He’d been

awake for 47 of the 50 hours since Michael Glazer had been shot, getting by
on Monster Energy drinks and Toblerones. Uniformed Division officers in
body armor and ballistic helmets jogged through the hallways with their
submachine guns out, ensuring that all the windows had their heavy drapes
drawn shut. In the press briefing room, the Secret Service was taping
blackout paper over the bare windows. From there, the crowd outside
sounded louder and angrier than before. Back in the Roosevelt Room,
longtime Trump bodyguard and Director of Oval Office Operations Keith
Schiller popped his head in to let everyone know that cots were being set up

89
for everyone down in the Batcave—nobody would be going home anytime
soon.

President Trump was truly panicking now. It felt like everyone was
abandoning him, and the building seemed besieged. He couldn’t get any
satisfactory status update from the National Guard, who he feared were
deliberately dragging their feet to undermine him. Somehow, Trump had to
walk back the last few disastrous hours. At the urging of Dan Scavino, he
recorded a 2 minute, 37 second video denouncing Haberman’s reporting as
“fake news … completely made-up,” and insisting that there was never any
order to disperse the protest, nor any consideration of shoot-to-kill. The
video went up right away on all the Trump and White House social media,
while Kayleigh McEnany, now working from home, called all the networks
asking them to air it immediately.

But the horse was already out of the barn. Administration officials who had
jumped ship weren’t going to unresign, and GOP leaders in Congress
weren’t going to bed for fear that they’d wake up to another Tiananmen
Square in the morning. Out in Lafayette Square, the crowd bellowed with
rage as organizers read the ongoing Twitter reportage over megaphones. “I
am not afraid” chants thundered from thousands of protesters, thrusting V-
sign fingers with each word. Commenting on the density of the gathering,
one of Haberman’s sources in the White House told her “this isn’t some
tents like the Seattle CHAZ, it looks like a Taylor Swift concert out there.”
Around 12:15 a.m., skirmishing had erupted near the White House’s two
usable vehicle exits as small numbers of demonstrators laid down to
blockade the street and were removed with pepper spray and arrests. But
large masses of protesters were still edging closer.

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It was at this point that Mike Monaghan, head of Trump’s Secret Service
detail, suggested relocating him. If the White House became truly cut off,
that made it much harder to keep the president safe, and increased the risk
of sudden, violent escalation. If something happened and thousands of
people tried to storm the fence at once, the Uniformed Division would have
just seconds to react—and have only terrible options to choose from. Trump
objected that leaving would make him look weak. Like the protesters had
forced him to flee his own home. Stephen Miller and Director of National
Intelligence Jim Jordan agreed. But Giuliani, Scavino, Schiller, and most of
the others quickly coalesced around getting out of D.C. as soon as possible.
They argued that this would reassure GOP leadership that Trump was
committed to de-escalation—making it harder for them to consider backing
impeachment and easier for them to resist pressure from the left to
withdraw their support from the administration. Moreover, it would reduce
the risk of bloodshed during the night that could inflame the situation on
the morning newscasts. Best of all, Scavino argued, if Trump wasn’t in the
White House anymore, a lot of the demonstrators would probably get bored
and go home of their own accord.

Trump protested again and again that leaving would project the wrong
image. He would look weak, and hand Trump Out a major propaganda
victory. People might get the impression that he was going to resign. And
this would only encourage mob rule by the left. Ultimately, though, he saw
that the room was lined up firmly against him, and agreed to go. But where?

Trump’s first instinct was to go back to New York and Trump Tower—that’s
where Melania and Barron were. But the Secret Service assessed that as too

91
risky for a spur-of-the-moment operation, entailing a long, vulnerable
motorcade through Midtown Manhattan. Bedminster was easier to get to
just across the Hudson, but the estate was still closed for fire damage
repairs and couldn’t accommodate key White House staff on short notice. So
instead, the president agreed to go south to Mar-a-Lago. HMX-1 was
alerted, and the helicopter evacuation plan put into motion.

At 12:50 a.m., the crowd in Lafayette Square was still packed, and the mood
was energetic and defiant. Reports of the planned National Guard assault
had rattled some into leaving, but others had surged in to fill their places.
Actor Robert DeNiro was speaking on a stage that had been erected near the
barricades, and the demonstration had recently heard speeches by
venerable Democratic representative Maxine Waters and Women’s March
leader Bob Bland. Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib,
and Ro Khanna were also on hand—though the absence of old guard
Democratic politicians other than Rep. Waters was conspicuous. Gradually,
the crowd became aware of the low whine of two helicopters approaching in
the southern sky. Murmurs spread across the square as people stood on
tiptoe and climbed statues to get a better view of what was happening. One
helicopter peeled off, while the other hovered briefly over the South Lawn
and came in for a landing.

News crews tried to get a good vantage, and soon, networks had small panes
running in the corners of their coverage, showing a live shot of the darkened
helicopter as its rotors spun down. Anchors and talking heads dissected the
possibilities. At first, there was some speculation that the helicopter was
bringing Don Junior or maybe Ivanka. But as the minutes ticked by without
any passengers emerging, savvy pundits judged that the chopper was there

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to fly President Trump out of Washington. The crowd buzzed with
anticipation, but the wait for news seemed interminable.

Inside the West Wing, the gloomy siege mentality had given way to hurried
purpose. Keith Schiller briefed staffers on the plan. Marine One would take
the president and his closest aides to Joint Base Andrews, followed by
several other helicopters to pick up more junior personnel. From there, they
would take Air Force One down to Palm Beach International Airport, where
a motorcade would be waiting to whisk them to Mar-a-Lago some 10
minutes away. Everyone would be put up on-property until the crisis was
over. If anyone had loose ends they’d be leaving in D.C.—whether pets that
needed feeding, parents needing medication, or cars that would be towed—
the Secret Service or Trump Organization would send people to sort them
out. While Rory Freylinger helped the president pack important personal
belongings, administration officials swept laptops and important paper
documents into briefcases, trying to imagine what they might need while
they were away.

When Trump came down from the Residence, he spent time shaking a few
hands of White House employees and promising to be back soon. Freylinger
followed rolling a large suitcase and with a garment bag slung over his back.
Close behind was Trump’s military aide, Air Force major Tom Hizer,
carrying the Football—the large black satchel containing the nuclear launch
codes. As they passed Katsouros in the Diplomatic Reception Room, the
president looked shaken to the core.

At last, the news cameras saw the doors open. First out were several Secret
Service agents with long guns, who took up positions on the South Lawn.

93
Then, at 1:46 a.m. Eastern, President Trump’s distinctive frame emerged,
surrounded by his entourage. He covered the distance quickly, returned the
Marine’s salute at the stairs, and disappeared inside the iconic green-and-
white Sikorsky helicopter. Three minutes later, the craft was airborne. As
Marine One gained altitude and emerged over the White House roofline, the
crowd all around—tens of thousands strong—broke into jubilant,
triumphant, mocking song: “Na na na na, na na na na, hey hey-ey,
goodbye!”

W
HEN LUCÍA CAMPOS-HERRERA woke up, she wondered groggily

whether it had all been some kind of dream. She felt herself
facedown on a down pillow, wrapped in warm sheets. Her
mind was still echoing with chants and singing, and every muscle felt wrung
out. Everything around her was perfect silence. After some time lying there,
she opened her eyes, and remembered. As the celebrations on Lafayette
Square had dragged on through the wee hours of the morning, the Trump
Out organizers finally made arrangements to rent out almost all the rooms
and conference spaces of the Hay-Adams Hotel, right across the street from
St. John’s Episcopal. While revelers swayed to Beatles classics and sprayed
each other with convenience store champagne, the L-team had packed up all
the electronics from the church war room and carried them over to the
hotel, now operating with just a skeleton staff. By 4:30 a.m., the new, larger
war room was set up in a Belle Époque-furnished private dining room—
whose ritzy banquet furniture had now been replaced with bare wooden
tables, bean bag chairs, and a tangled carpet of chargers and multiplugs.
The display china had been moved elsewhere, and the hand-painted
wallpaper was obscured by whiteboards, but the room’s crystal chandeliers
still twinkled down on what was surely the strangest gathering in the Hay-

94
Adams’s long history. As soon as she was sure the op center was up and
running, Campos-Herrera had gone up to one of the guest rooms to finally
crash.

Now, she reached for her phone and checked the time. It was almost noon.
The notification counters on all her social media apps were reading 99+.
She stepped over to the window and looked across to the White House. The
square below was still thick with people. She wondered for a moment why
everything was so quiet. Then she became aware of the earplugs she’d
wedged firmly in before going to sleep. In an instant, the din of the crowd
came back. But it was a disordered sound now. No mass chants or songs.
More like the rumble of a full stadium when nothing’s happening—it
reminded her of being at the Rose Bowl during TV timeouts while she was
an undergrad at UCLA. She took a photo of the view and posted it to
Instagram, hashtagged #wedidit #vamos.

But they hadn’t quite done it yet, and Campos-Herrera knew it. Although
many in the square and across the Mall had rejoiced in the belief that
Marine One’s departure signaled an impending resignation, the leadership
team realized that Trump was unlikely to leave office without continuous
pressure. That’s why they’d even bothered moving to the Hay-Adams. As
soon as they’d gotten word that the president had taken off, Sarah Turk had
warned that it was probably a ploy—get out of town, wait for the crowd to
lose energy and get bored, and then strike back from a stronger position.
Campos-Herrera threw her clothes back on, bunned her hair up, and headed
for the elevator—scrolling through the last few hours’ news alerts on her
way to the war room.

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About three quarters of a mile away, near the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting
Pool, Evan Vrabec was giving an interview to the BBC. He’d gotten several
hours’ sleep in the hotel lobby, but was too keyed up for more. By nine
o’clock, he’d been out in the square again, testing the quality of the Trump
Out WiFi hubs on their new Inmarsat portable internet systems—then down
on the Mall, checking on the installation of shower trailers and chatting with
the K-9 officers whose bomb-sniffing dogs were screening the seemingly
infinite line of food trucks that was showing up to provide lunch for the
demonstrators. All the while, he’d been checking his phone for updates
about the president. The White House had initially given no official word as
to his whereabouts, only acknowledging his presence at Mar-a-Lago after
footage of his motorcade arriving at the estate during the still-dark morning
had been playing on cable news for hours.

Anchors vamped and pundits hedged. There was a feeling that Trump would
have his say any minute. Panelists still looking haggard from the long night
before endlessly dissected tiny scraps of news, and the correspondents
who’d descended on Palm Beach snapped up every shred of gossip leaking
from the compound like piranhas to ground chuck. Former White House
Deputy Press Secretary Lindsay Walters called into Fox News claiming to
have heard from an inside source that Trump was presently writing a
resignation speech, at the same time that former policy advisor Brooke
Rollins was on the line with MSBNC insisting that the president wasn’t even
thinking of quitting. Nobody really knew anything. Now, with a BBC
microphone to his lips, Vrabec answered the question on everyone’s minds:
was this the end of the Trump presidency? “No,” he said, to the interviewer’s
visible surprise. “He’s not in Washington right now, but he’s still the

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president. He won’t leave unless Americans give him no other option. That’s
why we need still need everyone out here making their voices heard.”

In the Hay-Adams war room, the morning’s sunny outlook was starting to
darken. Long lines of demonstrators were crossing police lines and heading
back out into the city, and the Trump Out app showed that they were down
to around 190,000 users geolocated in the central protest zone. Organizers
broke out into teams and plotted strategy. The main problem was this: they
had a major city’s worth of people milling around in close quarters with no
idea what to do. When Trump had been inside the White House, there had
been a clear object for their passion and frustration. Chanting and
drumming was cathartic, and it gave people purpose. Now, people were just
standing around scrolling through their phones, chatting with those around
them, or standing in hours-long lines for food truck tacos or bathrooms.
Some were listening to harangues by local cranks attracted by all the
attention. They needed more to keep them busy and engaged.

Idle hands soon turned to destruction. The protesters who’d participated in

the 2020 Lafayette Square demonstrations had unfinished business with the
Andrew Jackson statue at the center of the square. The larger-than-life
bronze sculpture showed the seventh president in his military uniform—
rearing up on a stallion and saluting toward the White House. In the 1830s,
Jackson oversaw the ethnic cleansing of Native Americans known as the
Trail of Tears. And he was Trump’s personal hero. During the previous
year’s demonstrations, several activists had been arrested after trying
unsuccessfully to tear the statue down. Now, with police staying back,
demonstrators had an opportunity for revenge.

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As a cheering crowd chanted “Tear it down! Tear it down!” masked men
clambered up the 9-foot marble pedestal, carrying heavy metal chains. They
scaled the statue and tied them around the horse’s head and foreleg and
around Jackson’s neck. Dozens of people took each of the chains, and at the
count of an activist on a bullhorn, began to heave. Yet the sturdy statue
wouldn’t budge. Protesters grunted and strained, legs churning the grassy
square. Nothing. After about 15 minutes, it was starting to get embarrassing.
But then a guy in a motorcycle helmet climbed up there with a circular saw
and started cutting through the hind legs. Orange sparks spattered onto the
plinth. The people kept pulling. Smoke curled from the deepening gashes.
Then, with an almighty groan, Andrew Jackson toppled and fell.

Watching from the windows of the Hay-Adams, L-team organizers winced.

While many considered Jackson a genocidal racist unworthy of historical
honor, they knew that the footage would make the crowd look violent. And
public debate about Old Hickory’s 19th-century misdeeds would distract
from the movement’s focus on Trump’s own crimes. It didn’t help that a
fake Antifa account on Twitter was taking credit for the incident and
thanking George Soros for “his generous funding - more rioters still needed,
$100 per day… RACIST Lincoln Memorial is next!” So Trump Out
leadership went into overdrive trying to bring focus back to the
demonstrations.

Alex Ross, Trump Out’s coordinator of corporate outreach, staked out a

conference room with about two dozen volunteers, working phones and
emails to pull together a concert that evening on the Mall with A-list
celebrities flying in from around the country on short notice. One floor
above, former Obama staffer Kyle Shuberg and another volunteer team were

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using a guest room to set up transportation to D.C. for people who wanted
to join the demonstration but either didn’t have a way to get there or were
worried about how to get into the protest zone. Using donated funds, they
paid to set up security in open fields all along the East Coast and as far west
as Ohio, then used the app and social media to spread the word. People
could drive there and park their cars (or come by rideshare), where Trump
Out-chartered coach buses would be waiting to take them straight to the
National Mall. Organizers provided helpful information to make it less
intimidating and lower the barriers to participation—lists of what to pack,
advice for what to do if arrested, guides for taking time off work or
arranging childcare, and foreign-language resources for those not
comfortable with English.

Up on the hotel’s rooftop terrace, Leah Greenberg and Sarah Turk were
hammering out a statement warning that the fight was not over and
urgently calling people back onto the Mall for continued protest—while
announcing an even more massive demonstration planned for that Saturday
when more people could be off work. When they brought it back to the war
room for the rest of the team’s approval, a few organizers suggested that the
two statements should be separate. They worried that highlighting Saturday
in the urgent action message might undercut the intense need for turnout
today. But ultimately the consensus was that giving people more
information would help them buy into the plan, and that emphasizing an
escalation on Saturday could put additional pressure on those around
Trump to steer him towards resignation. Just as they were settling one final
tweak to the language, Peter Balakrishnan got an alert on his phone and
interrupted the meeting. Trump had finally released a statement—text only,

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posted to Twitter and the White House website—which Balakrishnan read
aloud to the group.

“Melania and I mourn the tragic incident in Lafayette Park on Sunday

night,” the statement began, “and I thank the many people who have come
to Washington to peacefully exercise their First Amendment rights.” Trump
went on to lament the “few cases of violence, which were caused by outside
instigators paid to interfere in your lawful freedom to gather as citizens.” He
concluded with a promise that his “previously scheduled working trip” to
Florida would be spent meeting with advisors to investigate the BearCat
incident and to expedite disbursement of EFRAF checks to every American
family. The statement was shocking for how defiant and bellicose it wasn’t.
Nothing about the Jackson statue, no threats of violence against those who
pulled it down. The Trump Out war room had been expecting an unhinged
screed that would publicly underscore the immediate need to remove the
president. Instead, they got something which was, considering the source
and the circumstances, stunningly gracious and levelheaded.

As the statement went live, Harry Katsouros was slumped on a brocaded

couch in Mar-a-Lago’s historic walnut-paneled library, scrolling his phone
with one hand and eating a BLT with the other. He’d been watching all day
as more administration officials arrived from Washington and elsewhere,
answering the president’s summons. Trump was relieved when four cabinet
secretaries rushed to his side to affirm their loyalty: Ben Carson of HUD,
Butch Otter of Agriculture, Chad Wolf of Homeland Security, and his old
friend Wilbur Ross at Commerce. They trickled in through the morning,
aides trailing them through the club’s main living room, and were shown by
Secret Service agents to the president’s private wing. But other absences

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were conspicuous, and stung Trump deeply. Acting Treasury Secretary Tom
Barrack Jr., another friend of more than three decades, had a staffer call
from D.C. to make excuses. Matt Bevin’s office at the Department of Energy
said he was sick with bronchitis and couldn’t travel. Labor Secretary James
Comer Jr., CIA Director Devin Nunes, and National Security Advisor Phillip
Genovese all seemed to have other ailments or family emergencies—as did
White House Press Secretary Emerald Robinson and several other officials
from the Executive Office of the President who hadn’t been able to fly down
on Air Force One the night before.

Meanwhile, Katsouros and a handful of other young NSC staffers had been
left to their own devices, wandering in their rumpled off-the-rack suits from
one lavishly furnished room to another, mainly avoiding eye contact with
over-bronzed sexagenarian members strolling the estate in golf attire. Many
wore Rolexes. Some sported MAGA hats. A few had decades-younger
women on their arms, but it seemed most of the wives had bubbly lips and
faces frozen by Botox and plastic surgery. Katsouros and his colleagues
refreshed their newsfeeds constantly, trying to keep up with developments
back in Washington, which seemed a world away. Every hour or so, Seb
Gorka would come back in from Trump’s wing and offer some status
update. At one point, while Trump was locked in a long conversation with
Ivanka after her arrival, Katsouros and Gorka had slipped out to the patio
for cigars.

After a morning’s worth of brooding, Trump had emerged into the club’s
main dining room for lunch. Dozens of his longtime cronies and supporters
were there waiting for him, and rose from gilded chairs in a standing
ovation as soon as they caught sight of him. Most offered words of

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encouragement as he worked the room shaking hands. Lunch was so
successful that he strolled out onto the patio to greet more of his well-
wishers. Several more groups of members burst into applause as he came
into view. He paused to take photos with a lady who was having a luncheon
to celebrate her 70th birthday. “She looks great. Incredible shape,” a waiter
recalls him declaring to the starry-eyed table and anyone else in earshot.
“Doesn’t look a day over 39.”

When Trump returned to his private quarters to meet with senior staff, his
outlook had changed. Even if opportunistic and disloyal elites had
abandoned him, now he felt sure that the country was still behind him.
Katsouros, who was still reeling from the apocalyptic mood of those final
hours in the White House, had looked around the living room full of Mar-a-
Lago members enjoying a carefree Tuesday afternoon and felt inclined to
agree. But Trump’s closest advisors knew that pressure in the outside world
was mounting. America needed a statement from its president. For about
half an hour, Ivanka and Kayleigh worked with Trump to craft a message—
pushing very hard for a unifying and conciliatory tone. At 1:47 p.m., it had
gone out to the public.

Now, Katsouros read the reactions in real time, a frown curling across his
face. The stock market rallied sharply, but analysts remained deeply divided
over whether the president could stay in office. America’s allies were in an
uproar, and news reports leaked that Martha McSally’s State Department
was frantically working to reassure foreign capitals—supported by J.J. Jack
at the Pentagon. Trump, senior administration officials recall, was back on a
couch in his private living room, watching TV with his feet up. Every
channel was filled with speculation that he would be forced to resign. His

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mood soured again. Advisors could tell what he was thinking just to look at
him. They begged him again and again—don’t let them bait you into an
aggressive statement, or even mentioning resignation. That would just
reenergize the crowd in D.C., they said, and that’s the last thing we want.

P
ETER BALAKRISHNAN’S PHONE buzzed with a text: “reps crossing

police line now. escort to HA in 5.” He replied with a brown

thumbs up emoji, and turned to Turk, Wruble, and legislative
outreach coordinator Mina Love to tell them that the congressional visitors
were running just a few minutes behind. He stepped out from the Hay-
Adams lobby and jogged out onto Black Lives Matter Plaza, which was thick
with protesters on foot. Someone was banging a tambourine: “The Catholic
Church is a lie! The Pope in Rome is a lie! The Catholic Church is a lie!”
Balakrishnan craned his head looking two blocks northward. He could see
flashing red and blue lights in the intersection, but couldn’t see the
representatives yet. About half a dozen news cameras were trained on the
hotel entrance. A couple were just setting up. The rest had been there all
day. He went back to the lobby and huddled with some of the security team.
“Still no sign of Booker?” he asked. They all shook their heads. “Follow up
with his people and figure out what’s happening,” he ordered. “And there’s
some nut out there yelling about the Pope. I need someone to take him for a
sandwich or something—before the congressmembers get here and he winds
up on the news.”

About 700 feet up 16th Street, a cheer went up from the crowd as
Representatives Ro Khanna, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Wendy Davis, and
Rashida Tlaib started making their way on foot southward toward the Hay-
Adams. Not entitled to the Capitol Police protection afforded to leadership,

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they were flanked by a private security team paid for by the DNC, and
screened by Trump Out volunteers. Cameras from CNN and ABC followed.
Dressed in carefully calibrated business casual, the representatives waved
and shook hands along the route, as the men in dark suits scanned each face
warily. Demonstrators shouted “We love you, AOC!” and “Impeach that
motherfucker!”—and one voice on the video can be heard shouting “Ask
them about the Wonderbread truck!” in reference to a fringe conspiracy
theory about the Super Bowl attack.

It took 11 minutes to cover the two blocks, but they finally trooped up the
Hay-Adams’s semicircular driveway and into the hotel. The representatives
greeted Turk, Wruble, and Love—waving to more volunteers in the lobby—
then went straight up to one of the conference rooms where other key
members of the L-team were waiting. The meeting was the result of a nearly
48-hour campaign by Love to start a formal dialogue between members of
Congress and Trump Out. At first, even staunchly anti-Trump
representatives had been wary about joining the protest in person—and the
violence presented a security risk that their staffs simply wouldn’t accept.
But since the truce with police and the president’s departure by helicopter,
elected officials had been more willing to show up. In addition to the four
that had just arrived—and Cory Booker, who had promised to attend and
was now AWOL—a dozen more were scheduled to attend a demonstration
along the Mall later that afternoon.

While about half of the L-team updated the congressmembers about Trump
Out’s activities and strategized about ways to build a bipartisan majority for
impeachment, Vrabec, Greenberg, and some of the others were still in the
war room managing minute-to-minute operations. The app had gained 3.4

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million more users on the East Coast since midnight, and they were
desperately pumping calls to action to turn people out again in D.C. that
evening—but the response data was mixed. As of 2:00 p.m., the analytics
team reported, the number of users geolocated in the protest zone was back
up to 249,909, and there was a large but unknown number of others present
but not on the app. But social engagement figures had been sagging, and the
turnover rate was high—many users were spending an hour or so at the
protest and then leaving again.

The social media team believed some users were being frightened away by
online misinformation about threatened attacks against the demonstrators,
but that was anecdotal. Digital coordinator Noah Meyer called the app team
and asked them to throw together a user survey to get a better quantitative
picture of how many people were being influenced by those stories. They
also stood up a moderation subteam to crack down on content that might be
alienating participants, following reports that some activists were doxxing
police officers and posting their personal information to the app, where
people had threatened violence against them. Meanwhile, former Obama
speechwriter David Litt, who’d just been named communications
coordinator, worked with the comms team to workshop response messaging
that could reassure wavering users.

That left Vrabec free to lead a conference call on how they could do better
outreach to conservatives and bring more anti-Trump Republicans into the
movement. And Greenberg was drafting a new press release rejecting
Trump’s latest statement with its gracious posturing and promises of
EFRAF money. Trump Out remained steadfast in its demand: Trump must
resign.

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Down the hall, Saez and Campos-Herrera were leading a team preparing the
agenda and format for a 7:00 p.m. meeting scheduled with Chelsea Fair and
other representatives of activist groups to discuss options for how to make
decisions more democratically without compromising movement cohesion
and leadership focus. At one point, they had five separate Zoom calls going
at once getting advice from political theory scholars across the country.

In the hotel’s Windsor Room, Sarah Turk was having an intense exchange
with Ro Khanna about the effects of Trump Out’s demands. So far, the
movement’s official statements had focused on President Trump’s
resignation. Some of their material also referenced Vice President Pence’s
resignation—but that was due more to sloppy messaging during the chaotic
first days of the protest than to any strategic deliberation by the organizers.
Turk now realized that they would have to be more explicit about their
goals. Rep. Khanna argued that several of his colleagues across the aisle had
quietly indicated openness to having Trump give way in favor of Pence—and
that demanding both resignations would decrease their leverage for
impeachment. But Turk reasoned that the movement’s rank-and-file
supporters—including the people out in the streets getting pepper sprayed
and pain rayed—would never accept such a deal. It was clear to everyone
that President Pence would simply pardon Trump, and reward four and a
half years of lawlessness with a cushy retirement at Mar-a-Lago. Surely
Khanna’s colleagues could stomach a President Ryan, Turk said. “They
couldn’t even stomach Paul Ryan,” Khanna joked.

There was a knock at the door. A volunteer came in holding a phone for
Turk—most urgent. She excused herself and took the call in the hallway. It

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was Tonya Crowder of Smash Racism DC. A line of police buses was loading
up another large crop of arrestees for transit to Capital One Arena for
holding—where people had been flex-cuffed and left on the floor for hours
without food or water. Reports Crowder had heard said that the prisoners
had been suddenly kettled without legal cause, and that the MPD had
violated the working truce. Did the L-team want black bloc activists to lie
down around the arena and blockade the buses from getting there? Turk
asked when they needed a decision. Crowder said now.

J
ASPER RICE SULLIVAN was on one of those buses, wincing in pain as

the flex cuffs dug too tightly into his wrists. “Driver!” he called. “We
were arrested illegally. You don’t need to be doing this. Do not be
complicit in tyranny. Pull this bus over, brother, and let us go!” But the
driver, a sworn officer, ignored him. Sullivan licked his upper lip and felt a
crust of blood in his beard, but with his hands bound he couldn’t wipe it
away. His nose had been broken as he was leading the supply convoy past
the National Guard cordon the previous morning. He’d been handcuffed
and loaded into an MPD prisoner transport van waiting for processing. He
sweltered there for more than two stuffy hours as the morning sun beat
down outside, his eyes burning from the pepper spray fumes emanating
from the clothes of another activist who’d been soaked with it. His phone,
GoPro, wallet, and keys had been confiscated, but he realized that they
hadn’t taken his Apple Watch. His hands were still cuffed behind his back,
but he managed to twist his wrist into view and type out a message to
Daniela Saez asking her to pass his information on to one of Trump Out’s
volunteer attorneys.

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At last, the van had been filled with other prisoners considered to have
committed more serious or violent crimes, and they were driven over to the
2nd Police District station. On the way, Sullivan says he was subjected to a
“rough ride” of intentionally violent driving intended to injure him against
the sides of the van—and in September filed a $1.4 million lawsuit against
the city—but the MPD vigorously denies this, and another arrestee
transported in the same vehicle has publicly stated there was no
misconduct. Whatever the case, they’d reached the station for initial
processing at around 8:15 a.m. that Monday morning. Sullivan had his mug
shot and fingerprints taken, watch seized, and had to sign a receipt for his
confiscated belongings. He’d received medical attention for the injury to his
nose, but police told him it wasn’t broken. He was left in a holding cell, and
watched as more protesters were brought to the station and crowded in with
him throughout the day. He asked the officers on duty what was happening,
but they didn’t know. The civil disturbance engulfing the city was stretching
the department to its limits.

During the maddening wait, he struck up conversations with cellmates. One

was a former Marine who’d seen Jake Hecht’s suicide and hurled a brick at
cops nearby. Another was a recent high school graduate from Baltimore—
he’d thrown a smoke grenade back at police, and was terrified that his life
would be ruined. Around noon, a journalist for Univision was brought in
flex-cuffed. They all asked for their phone calls, but the sergeant on duty
said they’d have to be patient. Sometime in the late afternoon, Sullivan’s
main arresting officer came into the station and filled out the paperwork.
Sullivan learned that he was being charged with three riot-related felonies,
along with misdemeanors for failure to obey an officer and crossing a police
line. He faced more than three decades in prison.

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Around dinner time, the arrestees got disgusting white-bread bologna
sandwiches and small cups of water. Shortly afterward, Sullivan was
handcuffed again and loaded into another van for transit down to central
booking at MPD headquarters. He’d spent the whole night there in another
crowded holding cell, before finally being shackled and led before a judge in
the morning—where he finally got to meet the Trump Out lawyer handling
his case pro bono. He was assigned a court date, and released without bail—
as is typical in D.C. courts.

Shortly after 12:45 p.m., he’d been walking along the crowded sidewalk up
Pennsylvania Avenue toward the White House, trying to join the
demonstration there, when he saw a line of buses parked at the side of road,
discharging Maryland National Guard troops with face shields attached to
their helmets and full riot gear. Someone on the sidewalk hurled a glass
bottle at the side of one of the buses. It shattered loudly against the window.
What seemed like seconds later, they heard whooping sirens as MPD units
pulled up out of nowhere. Virginia state troopers who had been guarding the
Trump Hotel nearby joined them moments after. About 200 people—
including some who’d had nothing to do with the protests—were
surrounded on the sidewalk, arrested, and flex-cuffed. Video footage later
confirmed that the legally-required dispersal orders had never been given.
While Maryland guardsmen stood watch with assault rifles, they were
forced to kneel on the hot pavement for almost two hours while
commanders tried to find free buses to take them the five blocks to Capital
One Arena. Somewhere, a DHS bureaucrat had insisted that it was too far to
walk.

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Now, Sullivan sat near the front of his bus, calling on the driver in
preacherly tones to reject being a pawn of fascist tyranny and pull the bus
over. He felt the bus lurch under hard braking. His eyes had been
momentarily closed, and for an instant he wondered whether he really had
convinced the driver to abandon his post. But then he leaned into the aisle
for a view ahead, and saw why the bus was stopping. Dozens of protesters
were lying down in the road.

Down at the Armory, Unified Area Command saw the same image on their
drone feed. A phone rang in the ops center, and a staffer passed the call
through to Tony DiFranco, who’d been going over deployment orders for the
Pennsylvania guardsmen due to arrive that night. It was Turk and Saez. “We
have video proving that law enforcement illegally kettled hundreds of
people, Mr. DiFranco,” Saez said. “Including complete bystanders.” Turk
added that they had been on a sidewalk, not impeding traffic or police
operations in any way. “That violates our agreement,” Saez warned. “The
only way we can keep the black bloc from using violence is when we show
them that you keep your word with us.”

DiFranco signaled for someone to fetch Chief Newsham and Maj. Gen.
Dean, and scrawled a question for his aides on a legal pad: “Is kettle claim
true?” He tried to stall, promising that they would “look into that
immediately,” but Saez wasn’t playing softball. “We have Antifa leaders
outside our door right now. Listen…”—in the Hay-Adams war room, a
dozen volunteers started raucously shouting and banging on tables on cue,
then fell silent when Saez held up a hand—“they are not waiting. Unless we
get your … assurance that you’ll promptly release anyone you can’t prove
committed a crime, you’re going to have people lying down in front of every

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police building in D.C. in fifteen minutes.” An aide handed DiFranco a note:
“SOD not sure. Conflicting reports.” DiFranco looked back at the National
Guard mobilization numbers. They weren’t strong enough yet. He took a
deep breath. “Alright. We’re turning the buses around.”

At around that same moment, an Amazon Suburban pulled up on 13th Street

just north of the protest area. Armed bodyguards opened the doors, and one
of them helped Julia Glazer out into the sidewalk. Others escorted Gabby
and Michael’s sister Laura along behind her. There were hundreds of people
all around, but they were wearing hats and dark sunglasses, and no one
seemed to notice them. The last two days had been a blur. At first, Julia had
refused all media requests, as friends and family converged on their
Rosemont home to grieve. Neighbors brought lasagna and matzo ball soup
so they wouldn’t have to cook. Michael had long ago expressed his funeral
wishes, when he first traveled to Afghanistan in 2001, but actually making
the arrangements was still emotionally shredding. Yet in sending out
invitations, Julia had been startled by the number of Washington elites who
sent noncommittal replies, citing the chaos unfolding in the city. She’d
known that there had been a large vigil for Michael in front of the White
House. And she’d heard that a police vehicle had rammed a crowd of
protesters. But in the fog of shock and mourning, she hadn’t remotely
grasped the scale of the demonstrations or their national impact. When she
woke Tuesday morning to the news that Trump had fled a besieged White
House for Florida amid multiple cabinet resignations, it began to hit home.
He might actually be done.

Realizing her husband’s central role in the story, she’d finally returned the
voicemail from former State Department official Anne-Marie Slaughter—

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who’d known Michael well—asking if she’d be willing to lend her voice to the
protests. Slaughter had put Julia in touch with Leah Greenberg, who invited
her to the Hay-Adams for a 3:30 p.m. meeting with families of other people
killed during the past few days’ violence. Gabby and Laura wanted to come
along, so their corporate security detail liaised with Trump Out organizers
about how to get them safely into the heart of the protest zone.

Now, they turned a corner just outside the police line, and Julia realized
where they were. In front of the Washington Post headquarters, there was a
makeshift memorial to Michael. Someone had blown up a 24” x 36” photo
from his early days at the paper. His hair was darker, his face less lined.
Bouquets of flowers spread out in a carpet so large she couldn’t even get
close. Julia, Gabby, and Laura held each other for a few minutes and took it
all in. Behind them, the drums of protest echoed off the limestone of the
city. Julia turned to the head of their detail and said she was ready.

The police had set up Jersey barriers along the northern edge of Franklin
Square. There were dozens of cops there, but the mood was non-
confrontational. They’d left two gaps in the barriers to act as entry and exit
points. Most of those entering the protest area were wanded or had their
bags searched, but the lines moved quickly. The officers looked tired and
sweaty. It was a warm, muggy afternoon. They were still wearing riot gear,
but had their face shields up and were making small talk with the crowd. A
few times a minute, a sergeant came over a bullhorn and warned against
committing any unlawful activity in the protest zone. Then he’d rattle off a
list of what they couldn’t bring across the police line: firearms, knives, clubs,
gas masks, explosives of any kind. Julia’s throat clenched. But when their
guards got to the front of the line they flashed their IDs and permits and

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were allowed through without incident. A Trump Out volunteer named
Rebecca was waiting for them on the other side, and they traveled the four
blocks down to the Hay-Adams on foot. On the way, Julia saw the cars
parked blocking the street and passed between the makeshift barricades. It
looked like something out of Eastern Europe.

Just after they entered the hotel lobby, they heard a cheer behind them.
Senator Cory Booker jogged through the double doors, still waving to fans
outside—followed closely by chief of staff Cynthia Hart, who’d finally
managed to track him down after he got sucked into addressing a gathering
at the Lincoln Memorial trailed only by a single aide with a dead cellphone.
Booker locked eyes with Julia, and she saw recognition in his face. She
extended a hand to accept his condolences. He shook it vigorously as he was
walking: “Thank you for your support!”

While the senator was hustled up to the Windsor Room to join the tail end
of the meeting with the congressmembers, Leah Greenberg approached and
introduced herself to Julia’s family. She seemed kind and sympathetic. They
all went up to one of the suites, which Greenberg opened with a keycard.
Following her inside, Julia found herself face-to-face with the other families.
Sharon Olson’s husband Bob was there, as was Melissa Mack’s husband
Jason. Sean Ralston’s parents had flown in from California, and Trump Out
had sent a volunteer to drive Jake Hecht’s disconsolate mother up from her
home in southern Virginia. In all, there were eight of them.

Greenberg addressed the group first, expressing sorrow at the tragedies

they’d faced and thanking them for coming to them at a time that must be
so difficult. In short, she said, Trump Out wanted to help them share their

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loved ones’ stories, which would surely help the American public
understand at an emotional level the crimes of the Trump presidency. But if
they chose to speak out, Greenberg said, she had to be honest—they would
face personal attacks in the media, and possibly by the president.
Conspiracy theories would spread about them online. Probably threats. That
wasn’t a decision Greenberg could make for any of them, and she would
understand completely if they said no. All eight said they were in.

Former Hillary 2016 speechwriter Claire Percy spoke next, explaining that
they would all be given media training for interviews, and have volunteers
go with them everywhere to handle the logistics. Then they’d record video
messages about their loved ones for Trump Out’s social channels. Those
who wished were invited to speak at the concert that evening on the Mall—
they would be assigned professional speechwriters and have teleprompters
for everything. Meanwhile, the organizers would be working to secure
accommodations for them inside the protest zone, and a budget to help
them extend their stays as long as necessary. Jason Mack raised his hand.
Wasn’t Trump’s resignation almost certain? He held up his phone. CNN was
reporting that Pence had just been driven to the Capitol, and cited sources
saying that the president had convened a meeting of top aides at Mar-a-
Lago and was preparing to step down.

I
N DONALD TRUMP’S private living room, aides edged out of the

commander-in-chief’s eyelines as he hurled scatological vulgarities at

the television screen. Mike Pence was at the Capitol on Trump’s
behalf—meeting with GOP lawmakers in an attempt to shore up support for
the president. This was the most despicable fake news Trump had ever seen,
he fumed. They had to pay. This time, they’d be sorry. He reached for his

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iPhone, and there was a collective gasp from the dozen or so people in the
room. Kayleigh McEnany and other senior staff, witnesses recall, begged
Trump not to tweet about it and thus legitimate resignation talk. Besides,
that would only embolden the protesters and make them more determined.
Half of them would probably be gone by morning away. Don’t let the fake
news get to you, they said. He slid the phone back into his pocket.

Back in Washington, a receptionist showed Mark Matulis to a conference

room for his 4:00 p.m. meeting at AFL-CIO headquarters—conveniently
located right across the street from the Hay-Adams Hotel. Matulis, Trump
Out’s coordinator of labor outreach, was a 42-year-old Chicagoan with a
buzz cut, soul patch, and bodybuilder’s physique that strained the seams of
a suit he rarely wore anymore. He’d worked as a union lawyer for the
National Education Association, then gone out west to Google as a legal
counsel before leaving to co-found the Tech Workers Coalition in 2016.
Now, he was meeting with the head of the country’s largest federation of
unions, trying to bring organized labor into the fight as the decisive factor to
force President Trump out of office.

AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka was waiting for Matulis, along with a
couple of his top advisors and Lee Saunders, the head of the country’s
largest public sector union. Matulis had met both men before, but didn’t
know either well. After brief pleasantries, Matulis got right to the meat of
his plan. Trump Out would call for a national general strike—asking all
nonemergency workers across the country to stay home until Trump and
Pence had resigned. Citing these strike actions already occurring, the AFL-
CIO could then call on its members to join in the general strike. Economic
activity would grind to a halt. Government offices would close.

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Transportation would be paralyzed as truckers and airline mechanics
walked off the job, and the losses to industry would be so severe that
corporate interests would pressure the president into a quick resignation.
But before he was halfway through the pitch, Matulis could see in their faces
that they weren’t buying it.

Most of the labor movement was sympathetic to Trump Out’s aims, Trumka
said, but several major hurdles stood in the way of the kind of action that
Matulis envisioned. First, the National Labor Relations Board—the body
responsible for adjudicating the legality of most strikes—had no procedures
in place for handling strikes with political, as opposed to economic, aims.
There had literally never been a national general strike in America, and
organized labor hadn’t backed even citywide general strikes since the 1940s.
Under modern U.S. employment law, strikes may only be held for better
compensation, or against unfair labor practices. Unless they could find a
legally defensible labor-practices justification, one of Trumka’s advisors
said, anyone refusing to work could be legally fired by their employers. “Of
course the law doesn’t govern this,” Matulis said. “This is basically a
revolution.” To succeed, he argued, they would rely not on NLRB rules, but
mass solidarity across the nation—employers could hardly fire strikers if
there was no one to replace them with.

Seeing their unconvinced frowns, he tried a different tack. Maybe the AFL-
CIO could frame this as a sort of meta-strike for the right to use sick days for
political strikes, Matulis suggested. Saunders shot that down as legally
untenable. Or Trumka’s unions could just give Trump Out their
membership information and let his team contact them directly with calls
for unauthorized wildcat strikes, thus keeping the unions’ hands clean.

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Courts wouldn’t see it that way, Trumka’s other advisor concluded. Why
couldn’t they kick it down to the locals and have each community’s unions
find convenient economic or working-conditions pretexts for striking right
now, Matulis asked. Trumka and Saunders were warmer to that, but after
more discussion ultimately dismissed that as bad for long-term labor
relations.

But the anti-Trump movement has momentum now, Matulis insisted.

“What can we do tonight?” The men across the table let out long sighs. They
were willing to explore legally viable options, they said, but it would take a
week or more to get the information they needed and form a strategy.
Assuming they found a workable strike plan, contacting the member unions,
getting everyone’s buy-in and conducting strike votes would push it to
weeks—plural—before, realistically, Big Labor would carry out any mass job
walk-offs. The meeting concluded cordially but in discouragement.

On his way to the elevators, Matulis got a text from one of the volunteers on
the labor outreach team: “Oakland, Buffalo, Detroit.” He clicked the
attached link. NBC was reporting that hundreds of teamsters had walked off
the job in those cities, posting to social media that they wouldn’t return until
Trump and Pence had resigned. Parallel to the AFL-CIO plan, Trump Out
had been making separate overtures to teamsters locals across the country,
but had encountered similar slowness and reluctance to act among union
officials. So they’d gotten $50,000 from the L-team to target teamsters
through Facebook, promoting messages urging them to begin decentralized
wildcat strikes in solidarity with Trump Out. To maximize effectiveness,
they’d focused the ad buy on five cities to begin with—Seattle and
Minneapolis hadn’t seen strikes yet—and aimed similar messages at

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teamsters who’d downloaded the Trump Out app and were geolocated in
those cities.

Matulis turned around and raced back in search of Trumka and the others.
“Look!” He read them highlights of the story. Someone in the office turned
on CNN, and they watched as Jake Tapper gave his panel the breaking news.
All three guests agreed: now, Trump had to resign.

Back at Mar-a-Lago, the President of the United States swore viciously at

the television. He’d been glued to the coverage all afternoon, but the
teamster strike story sent him over the ledge. “They’re making me look
weak,” Trump thundered. Out came the iPhone. Paul Teller begged him to
stop, but Giuliani was the most senior figure in the room, and said nothing.
Ivanka and Kayleigh were somewhere else on the estate. Teller texted
McEnany to come quickly. But she couldn’t get there in time. Trump
pressed send, and dropped another bomb on the news cycle: “I will NOT be
resigning. That will never, ever happen. Let’s talk about the TRILLIONS of
$$$ being destroyed by phoney Soros funded protests. Or maybe you’d like
to hear the ‘other side of the story’ about the SWAT truck crash. Those
people not so innocent? — @realdonaldtrump, 5:02 PM - 15 Jun 2021.” He
followed it up with four more tweets blaming the crisis on “totally fabricated
Fake News reports last night” and “anti-Trump collusion by the media!
Treason?” before Ivanka and Jared showed up to all but wrestle the phone
out of his hands.

Harry Katsouros had been sitting on the cot they’d set up for him in Mar-a-
Lago’s $9-million grand ballroom along with dozens of other junior staffers.
Normally they’d stay at the Hilton Palm Beach Airport, but the Secret

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Service was concerned about having the president’s advisors separated,
given the potential for protester blockades to delay their quick assembly in
the event of a crisis. So they’d closed off the 20,000-square foot space to
guests, and maintenance workers put up rented cubicles and hung tarps as
privacy curtains. The juxtaposition between the Italian marble floor,
Versailles-worthy Austrian crystal chandeliers, and garish blue plastic was
bizarre. Now, there Katsouros sat, reading the tweet again and again. It hit
him right in the stomach. He could understand Trump going after the media
at a time like this, but the ramming victims? Katsouros knew Peter Bartos,
Brian Crudo, and some of the others had been feeding Trump printouts
from fringe websites—and wondered if he had picked up that idea from
some internet conspiracy theory. But he was afraid to check.

In the Trump Out war room, organizers were scrambling to capitalize on the
tweet. The analytics team saw an almost immediate boost, and app
engagement was soaring again. As the sickening message dominated
virtually every news outlet in the country, crowds swarmed back onto the
Mall thicker than ever, and cars backed up on all the Potomac bridges. The
first of their chartered buses were finally starting to bring in more
demonstrators from neighboring states.

The Hay-Adams bustled with frenetic activity on every floor. The volunteer
team had swollen to over 2,500, and hundreds of those were using every
available space in the hotel to manage the dizzying logistics of it all. While
the strategy team huddled to discuss ways of keeping turnout numbers high
each day, dozens of other organizers were working to bring in more tents,
more bedding, more showers, more toilets, more food trucks. Paying for it
all wasn’t a problem, but physically getting necessities onto the Mall—

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despite law enforcement interference, and often from several from states
away—was a supreme challenge. They sent app users push notifications
reminding them of the rideshare feature for those needing transportation
and the homestay feature that connected out-of-towners with people all
over the D.C. metro area willing to host them at night. Others were on the
phone with agents in L.A. pulling together last-minute details for stars set to
perform at the concert. Everything was all happening so fast. It felt like
riding a tiger.

B
Y POLICE ESTIMATES, there were over 1.4 million people on the

National Mall when Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band took
to the stage and powered out the first notes of “Born in the U.S.A.”
More and more kept arriving after the concert’s 7:04 p.m. start—pouring in
through performances by John Legend, Lady Gaga, Will.i.am, and more—
and in all, a combination of photographic analysis and app data suggests
that over 2.5 million demonstrators may have been out across the whole
protest zone that evening. While increased unemployment since the
pandemic and Super Bowl attack played a role in the high turnout, the
decisive factor was the calendar—hundreds of thousands of students were
now on summer vacation and making their way toward Washington by any
means they could.

Knowing that the Tuesday concert would dominate the nightly newscasts,
organizers had bought up over 35,000 miniature American flags and
distributed them to those near the stage. They’d also set aside space at the
front for veterans, senior citizens, and families with small children—the
sorts of people who would look most relatable to viewers at home. But while
excited masses sang and chanted on the Mall, top activists were filing into

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the Hay-Adams for a meeting to hash out what the movement’s governance
would look like going forward. Some wore the bandanas and thick dark
sweats of the black bloc, a few were in sharp suits, and the great majority
sported a range of t-shirts blazoned with everything from anti-Trump
slogans and tech company logos to geeky puns and Marvel superheroes.

They gathered in a large wood-paneled room on the first floor—hotel

workers had set up a lectern and rows of chairs to accommodate 100 people.
Author and activist Sally Kohn had agreed to serve as moderator, and now
called the meeting to order. The agenda, she said, was straightforward but
challenging: reach a consensus on how movement-wide decisions should be
made more democratically, and agree on a plan for implementing that
system. They wouldn’t be holding formal votes on anything, and open
discussion was encouraged to work toward compromise.

The first proposal put to the group came from Chelsea Fair and fellow
Sisterhood activist Geena Murray, along with Black Lives Matter leader
Faye Brooks and former Occupy Wall Street organizers Joe Melton, Kari
Stevens, and Daniel Shim. Instead of electing leaders to make decisions for
the people, they said, this was an unprecedented opportunity to put direct
democracy into practice. To do that, the Trump Out app would be expanded
to allow all users to vote on every issue of movement-wide importance. The
digital platform, they hoped, could replicate Occupy deliberation methods
like “up twinkles” (wiggled upturned fingers signifying agreement) and
“progressive stack” (giving first speaking priority in discussions to people
from groups considered to be marginalized like African-Americans, Native
Americans, undocumented immigrants, and the LGBTQ community).
Online, these functions could be expressed by simple buttons, or an

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algorithm to sort and weight comments according to the ostensible social
privilege of the user. The smooth administration of the process would be
managed by a “Council of Facilitators,” but the proposal envisaged them
having no decision-making authority.

Although this plan seemed to get support from about a third of the activists
in the room, it also got strong pushback—not only from supporters of the
current leadership team, but also from some Occupy veterans, who in
hindsight considered the unwieldiness of those processes to have been a
hindrance to that movement. They argued that the fast pace of events—
everyone marveled that it had been just over two days since Michael
Glazer’s death—would overwhelm consensus decision-making by hundreds
of thousands of people. If they allowed tiny groups to effectively veto any
action, Trump Out would be paralyzed. And so, Michael Owiti of Smash
Racism DC suggested a modified approach. Building on the Occupy model
of one-person-one-vote “general assemblies,” they could break up the
protest by geolocated regions small enough to preserve direct democracy,
and then have each smaller assembly send a delegate to a plenary assembly
at the Hay-Adams. Such a body, he said, would have a couple hundred
members and be representative of the whole movement.

Ultimately, this plan failed to win support, both because there was no
sensible way to break up the highly fluid crowd into thousands of discrete
areas, and because Turk and the rest of the leadership team argued that 200
people was still far too large to make decisions effectively. Even at 20, the
current size, it was hard to keep everyone on the same page. They’d
accomplished that by filling the L-team with a mix of team coordinators,
like Balakrishnan for security and Litt for communications—and at-large

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members like Turk and Saez, who were freer to keep their eyes on the big
picture. For the little decisions, they relied on trust—forged during that
surreal first night in the St. John’s parish offices. Everyone on the L-team
had confidence that Vrabec would make the right calls about veterans
outreach, and that Meyer would make smart moves in digital. For the major
decisions, they’d still relied on consensus as much as possible.

Owiti came back, arguing that all the roles on the L-team should at least be
elected—“if your ideas are really the best, put it to the vote and win an
election.” At least a third of the room responded with finger-snapping,
applause, and whoops that Sally Kohn spent almost a full minute trying to
quiet.

“The reality is, we’re managing this [situation] literally hour to hour and
minute to minute,” Saez said. The current L-team had a full grasp of what
had happened so far, she said, and had built relationships with hundreds of
key allies and adversaries. Greenberg echoed these points: “Right now, that
continuity is crucial to this movement’s success.” It wouldn’t do their shared
cause any good, she said, to disrupt that momentum just a couple days in—
and she feared that Owiti’s approach would cause Trump Out’s leadership to
devolve into squabbling political factions jockeying for control instead of
cooperating to put pressure on the President of the United States. Perhaps a
third of the room—mainly those from the more centrist bloc—responded
with applause and cheering of their own, with even some leftist up twinkles
visible on the video from the meeting.

At that, Sarah Turk finally offered her own proposal—which had the backing
of most of the other senior organizers. They would maintain people in their

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current roles on the L-team, at least for the time being, but would hold
elections via the app to add five more at-large members. These voices, she
argued, could bring fresh ideas and perspectives into the room, helping
their decision-making reflect the will of the whole movement, but without
causing undue disruption to their ongoing operations. Turk was received
politely, but when Kohn took the temperature of the room, about 60 percent
opposed accepting that arrangement. Several speakers were invited to
explain their objections, and they all said much the same thing: five
members would be just a fifth of the L-team—so the idea felt more like a sop
to keep them quiet than a real change to the status quo.

Owiti and Democracy Spring activist Michaela Donaldson made a

counterproposal. They would elect 30 new at-large members, for a total of
50. Team coordinators wouldn’t be ousted, but democratically-elected
representatives would make up a solid majority of the new L-team. Turk
and her colleagues had a brief conversation and came back with a
counteroffer of 10 at-large spots. That set off a rumble of disagreement as
people started talking over each other and the meeting’s orderly turn-taking
process began to break down. Kohn recommended a 15-minute break while
she and several other figures well-respected by both sides adjourned to a
nearby room with Turk, Greenberg, and about a dozen major activists to try
to hash out their differences.

While the rest of the attendees checked their phones or poured coffee from
the Hay-Adams’s elegant silver urns into cardboard cups, just down the hall,
Kohn was trying to steer the key players back into productive territory.
While author and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates tried to figure out where Turk
and Greenberg were willing to compromise, the other activists were sitting

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down for similar conversations with Data for Progress co-founder Sean
McElwee and Erica Chenoweth, the Harvard scholar of civil resistance
who’d flown in from Boston that morning to advise the L-team in person.
Coates managed to talk Turk and Greenberg up to electing 19 at-large
members, while McElwee and Chenoweth brought most of the others as low
as 21—for a majority—but they wouldn’t budge below that. At issue was the
principle: should a majority of the L-team be elected or not?

After the break, they reconvened in the main room to take that larger
group’s temperature on the two alternatives. A narrow majority supported
the Turk-Greenberg option, but that likely just reflected the relative
proportion of centrists versus leftists who’d showed up to the meeting in the
first place. The L-team knew they needed a stronger consensus, so Turk
offered more: an even split half-and-half, and all major decisions like
platform, demands, and binding agreements would be put to a popular vote
via the app. L-team members say that this was the plan all along, but
presenting it as a concession was simply a negotiating tactic—claims that
are backed up by contemporaneous Signal and text messages from the
group.

At any rate, the move was successful, and about three quarters of the room
came out in support of the plan. The agenda briefly turned to other
questions—whether there would be a larger popularly-chosen oversight
body for the leadership team, and whether they would pursue formal
confederation with demonstration organizers in other cities—but those
issues were found to be too complex, and tabled for a future meeting.
Likewise, concerns that movement leadership was too white and that Black
and Indigenous voices were being marginalized were set aside for a special

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session the next day. They concluded with a surprisingly smooth discussion
on the procedural setup for the elections the following day. Anyone could
put themselves forward as a candidate, and upload concise platform
statements and short videos introducing themselves to users. These profiles
would be presented to app users in a randomized order, and balloting would
proceed by ranked-choice voting—open to anyone logged into the app and
geolocated in the Washington D.C. area. The same system would be used to
decide on major movement-wide decisions like whether Trump Out should
change its official demands. The organizing team would work with a
software project called Loomio to adapt tools for richer deliberation and
consensus-building into the main app.

As the activists filed out of the Hay-Adams into the balmy blue evening, they
found the atmosphere buoyant and carnival-like. Organizers publicly
estimated that the total crowd size on and around the Mall had swelled to a
jaw-dropping 3.7 million people (about a 50 percent exaggeration of the
figure supported by later independent analyses), but the demonstrators
were overwhelmingly peaceful. Stephen Colbert was broadcasting a live
episode of The Late Show from a stage near the Smithsonian Castle, with
guests including Tom Hanks, Never Again MSD organizer Emma González,
and former Obama National Security Advisor Susan Rice. Nationals pitcher
Sean Doolittle came on the show and announced that, partly due to player
pressure, Major League Baseball had just suspended all games indefinitely.
In front of the Hirshhorn Museum, Oscar winner Jennifer Lawrence and
activist Natalie Byrne called on American women to start a sex strike until
Trump was out—borrowing a tactic from the ancient Greek comedy
Lysistrata. #TrumpOutSexStrike was soon trending, but appears to have
gotten little real-world traction.

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On the main stage, pop sensation Lizzo thrilled the younger demographic
with “Good as Hell,” followed by YouTube satirist Randy Rainbow’s biting
parody of “Let It Go” from Disney’s Frozen (Make him go, make him go /
Show him what the door is for / Make him go, make him go / Before he
starts a nuclear war”). More musical performances were set to run until
almost midnight. Lucía Campos-Herrera watched the concerts for a while,
then wandered over toward the food trucks along with youth outreach
coordinator Abby Avery and community outreach coordinator Symone
Sanders. As they tore into a late dinner, all three agreed that there was
something in the air—that this would be the last night of Trump’s America.

At almost the exact time they said so, a 3-minute video appeared on
YouTube purporting to be leaked footage from a meeting of Trump Out
organizers. In it, organizers appear to make incendiary statements about the
movement and its goals. Sarah Turk can be seen stating that “violent
revolution is the only way,” calling for Trump and his family to be
assassinated, and demanding “abolition of all prisons, pardons for anti-
American freedom fighters, and peace negotiations with MS-13.” Daniela
Saez, in turn, says that “white people must be assaulted and terrorized if
they stand in our way,” and advocates confiscation of homes of white Trump
voters to house Muslim refugees. Finally, Evan Vrabec announces that the
goals of the Trump Out movement will include “full legalization of
pedophilia and adult-child love” and denounces the U.S. military as “a
bunch of war criminals… who citizens should hunt down and kill whenever
they get the chance.”

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Partly in response to the video, law enforcement officials around the country
noticed a sharp spike in online calls for paramilitary action against the
Trump Out demonstrations. According to the FBI, armed militia groups had
assembled in 37 states by the night of June 15, with mobilizations of at least
500 people in Alabama, Florida, Indiana, Mississippi, Missouri, and Texas.
But federal and state authorities acted quickly to defuse tensions and avert
bloodshed—launching predawn raids against several extremists who had
publicly incited violence, and beefing up police presence around
demonstrations that had been threatened. From coast to coast, the fragile
peace held.

T
HE MORNING OF Wednesday, June 16 dawned over Washington,

D.C. through a thick gray gloom. Most of the protest crowd had
dispersed throughout the city to overnight accommodations, and
those who remained in the demonstration zone woke up chilly and damp in
the tents and sleeping bags that crowded by their hundreds of thousands
from the Lincoln Memorial to the Capitol Reflecting Pool and from the
Washington Monument up past the White House and into Lafayette,
Farragut, McPherson, and Franklin Squares. Along the cordon lines, MPD
officers coming off shift huddled around cruisers sipping coffee from
Styrofoam cups, as National Guard troops in camouflage fatigues and body
armor discharged from buses and trudged along the sidewalks with their
heads down.

In the lobby of the Hay-Adams Hotel, Peter Balakrishnan was chatting over
yoghurt cups with influencer outreach coordinator Lisa Ward, who’d
recently left a $560,000-a-year partnership at CAA in Los Angeles to care
for her ALS-stricken sister in Silver Spring, Maryland. Ward was distracted,

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Balakrishnan remembers, because a couple dozen celebrities had flown in
from L.A. on redeyes and were being held up at the airport. Emily
Ratajkowski’s people had seen claims on Twitter that the 30-year-old
actress had been arrested by FBI agents getting off her flight, and were
going ballistic because now they couldn’t reach her. Taxi drivers at Dulles
were refusing to take passengers into D.C., and were telling people that the
bridges into the city were being closed. Ward texted influencer-team
volunteers furiously, trying to get people down there to find out what was
happening. Balakrishnan began messaging the security team to see whether
they could confirm anything about the bridge closures—when Evan Vrabec
ran up to them shouting about an altercation happening right outside.

They dropped everything and hurried out the main entrance, where they
saw a fracas underway on the sidewalk in front of the hotel. A group of
about a dozen activists had tried to get inside, demanding a platform change
that would accuse President Trump of staging the Super Bowl ramming as a
false flag attack. A few It’s On Vets and Vote Vets members confronted
them, and pretty soon, fists were flying. Other ex-military guys were rushing
in trying to pull them apart, and Balakrishnan hollered into his radio for
more security. All around the fray, people had their phone cameras up, and
numerous international journalists caught B-roll footage of the brawl. It was
all over in a couple of minutes, but Balakrishnan knew the video would hit
cable news within half an hour. He texted David Litt and the comms team to
come down and try to get control of the narrative.

Litt was on scene in short order, doing damage control with reporters and
messaging media producers trying to downplay the fight and prevent it from
sucking up airtime. But Litt had a busy morning. As the teeming crowds

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surged back into the protest zone with the rising sun, the anti-Trump
demonstrators were liberally interspersed with activists from PETA, Falun
Gong marchers, anti-vaxxers, human-extinction advocates, 9/11 truthers,
and animal suit-fetishists known as “furries.” Fringe groups of all stripes
knew that thousands of news cameras and billions of eyes were focused on
Washington, D.C., and had converged on the capital to grab a piece of the
attention. Each “Suicide is the Only Ethical Choice” sign or theater blood-
soaked cannibalism reenactment posed another threat to derail the national
narrative and hand fresh ammunition to critics trying to portray Trump Out
as a dangerous and unhinged movement.

And that didn’t even include the conservative provocateurs who’d infiltrated
the crowd with inflammatory signs intended to portray the demonstrators
as radical and anti-American. Security team members texted photos back to
headquarters showing several men carrying a banner promoting “LGBTP”
rights—Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, and “Pedosexual.” Contrary to the
Trumpists’ fever dreams, no significant public pedophilia-advocacy
movement exists in the United States, and far-right attempts to conjure one
up in propaganda date back to at least 2017.

So Peter Balakrishnan dispatched volunteers to confront the banner-holders

and call them out on a livestream—while he sent their photos to a team of
volunteers in California who would run facial-recognition searches to find
their identity and publicly expose them (a November 19, 2021 story in The
Intercept quoted anonymous sources that Facebook employees illegally
used private user data for these searches, but the story has not been
corroborated and both Trump Out and Facebook denied this to The
Lodestar in separate statements).

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Another team went around covering up suspicious graffiti that had been
geotagged through the app. On the wall of the National Air and Space
Museum, next to a scrawled “MUSHROOM DICTATOR” and a crude
caricature of Trump as Hitler was a black spray-painted “ISLAM WILL
DEFEAT TRUMP.” They daubed white paint over it, and went on to a
sidewalk nearby, where a similar can had written “RAPE MELANIA,” and
“BARRON IS A TWINK”—a gay innuendo about the president’s underage
son. Even if these weren’t by provocateurs, they were too toxic to leave
visible.

The demonstrators also had to worry about infiltration. Every few hours,
burly security volunteers would bring a suspected undercover cop to
Balakrishnan and ask how to proceed. Usually he was able to satisfy himself
as to their identity after some civil conversation, but a couple of times
Trump Out found proof tying them to law enforcement. He had no power to
detain them, but Balakrishnan gave them two choices: leave the protest
zone voluntarily, or your face gets plastered up on the app, warning
demonstrators to avoid you. Both took the former option, and S-team guys
hustled them up Black Lives Matter Plaza and out through the police line.

As the morning progressed, reports came in from around the country that
more transit workers were joining wildcat strike actions. While Big Labor
dithered, airline mechanics in Dallas and Newark kept hundreds of flights
on the ground, UPS drivers in Seattle walked off the job, and Uber and Lyft
drivers shut off their apps in a dozen large American cities. Trump Out
leadership heralded this as the beginning of a nationwide general strike, and
movement spokespersons on cable news described the strikes as almost

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totally paralyzing transit across the entire country. But these claims, it is
now clear, were greatly exaggerated. Despite strike-induced flight delays
rippling across the system, the FAA was still overseeing relatively normal
operations from coast to coast. Most truckers were still on the job,
America’s ports were still loading and offloading cargo at nearly full
capacity, and ridesharing apps were still functional in most urban areas.
Although one pair of big rigs blockading a San Diego freeway got intensive
media coverage, in reality most streets and highways across the United
States were eerily empty with so many people at home glued to their
televisions.

From a cramped office at Mar-a-Lago, Kayleigh McEnany and acting press

secretary Hogan Gidley were working the phones in coordination with
staffers back in Washington—trying to get half an hour of airtime from the
networks later that morning for a presidential address. There was some
hesitation, especially at ABC, where broadcast executives reportedly broke
into a shouting match over the ethical issues involved in giving Trump a free
platform to make comments that might plausibly incite further violence. But
ultimately, all the major outlets except MSNBC relented, and viewers were
informed that the president would speak to the nation from his Florida
estate at 1:30 p.m. Eastern. At 1:41 p.m., 11 minutes behind the schedule
released by the White House, President Trump appeared at a podium before
the hastily assembled news cameras in Mar-a-Lago’s old ballroom and
began reading off a teleprompter.

The past days’ violence, he told the nation, had been instigated by
“extremely treasonous” activists trying to bring down the U.S. government
“with massive collusion by the Democrat-controlled media.” The Trump Out

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movement—“whose name I will not use”—was, he said, behind the “attacks
and shootings of our very fine police and National Guard, which have left
many, many killed.” He went on to call the media narrative about the
BearCat ramming “a total lie, we have found,” claiming that the killing of
five civilians “never even happened, they’re now admitting … even the
doctors say nobody ever came in hurt.” Promising major revelations still to
come, he vowed imminent disclosure of information that would implicate
the “highest levels of the Democrat party” in “treason, murder, and
rebellion.”

The protesters, Trump continued, “are on video calling for the legalization
of pedophilia, sick stuff like you wouldn’t believe,” in clear reference to the
previous night’s deepfake video (whose origins remain under FBI
investigation as of early 2022). Supporting the movement, he said, meant
supporting “releasing murderers onto our streets … ripping up little babies
born alive and healthy … seizing all land in America for redistribution …
they want to take your houses.” He described the D.C. crowds as “animals,
basically” who had “beaten and raped … attack[ed] anybody who’s a
Christian … some people have been literally torn apart.” In sum, the
president said: “They want death for America. I am your only chance at life.
I am the only one who will enforce our laws and take back our streets. And I
will not let you down.”

Over 850 miles to the north, inside Unified Area Command headquarters at
the D.C. Armory, Tony DiFranco was eating lunch at his desk when he saw
three uniformed Federal Protective Service officers approaching with grave
faces. He was wiping his hands with a paper napkin, still swallowing a
mouthful of Subway, when they looked down and informed him that the

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secretary had relieved him of his role on the UAC and replaced him as
director of the Office of Operations Coordination. He was to promptly
gather his belongings and be escorted out of the building. As dozens of
others in the open bullpen gaped in shock, DiFranco numbly packed spare t-
shirts into a duffel. There was a sudden commotion at the other end of the
command center. Rod Kerry, his chief of staff, came running with two more
FPS officers close behind. “I had no idea!” he gasped. But when shown the
signed order from Secretary Wolf, Kerry couldn’t resist. At Trump’s
insistence, Wolf had dumped DiFranco—who the president saw as too timid
and accommodating—in favor of Brad Hewitt III, the acting director of the
OOC’s National Operations Center. Although a career DHS official like
DiFranco, he was married to Trump fundraiser and former Palm Beach
socialite Carmen Menchaca-Hewitt, and Wolf had been told he would be
more reliable.

Citing civil disorder in Washington D.C. and elsewhere, the president had
declared a state of national emergency, and had now authorized Wolf to
oversee operations to surround and besiege major demonstrations across
the country—as well as to use military personnel and resources to
compensate for striking transportation workers. To that end, Trump was
invoking Title 10 to federalize National Guard units in 17 states to overcome
potential resistance from the governors. “You’re in charge,” he told Wolf.
“Get this thing under control.”

In the capital, Guard units closed down all the Potomac bridges and blocked
entry along all major roads into the District. Humvees and 5-ton trucks
rolled slowly along the edge of the protest zone, as guardsmen unspooled
bales of concertina wire to form a cordon. Outside the cordon, military

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police companies set up movable roadblocks to keep all civilian automotive
traffic at least five blocks away. Meanwhile, armored vehicles kept pouring
in. Across from the street barricades around Lafayette Square, Abrams main
battle tanks rumbled into expectant crouches, belching dark brown exhaust
and swiveling their unloaded main guns menacingly toward the
demonstrators. In neighboring states, DHS officers showed up at NFL and
college football stadiums and began setting up each site to receive tens of
thousands of arrestees.

O
N WALL STREET, markets were in chaos—on the New York Stock

Exchange, trading was halted twice due to selloffs triggering the

automatic circuit breaker rules. With D.C. on lockdown, the
Federal Open Market Committee convened via teleconference to implement
emergency procedures aimed at preventing a collapse of the wider financial
system. Rumors were swirling online of impending runs on banks, and
major institutions were nervous about having enough liquid assets to make
it through the week. While the Federal Reserve assured depository
institutions around the country that it was “available to meet unforeseen
liquidity needs,” the Fed’s New York Trading Desk bought up a massive
$120 billion of U.S. Treasury securities to inject cash into the system ahead
of any worsening crisis.

As footage of tanks in city streets alarmed observers overseas, foreign

airlines including KLM, Air France, and Lufthansa began suspending flights
to some U.S. cities. Emirates announced cancellation of all America-bound
flights starting the next day. Embassies and consulates across the country
began issuing emergency guidance to foreign nationals—warning them to
avoid public demonstrations, refrain from posting about the civil unrest on

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social media, and check online daily for further updates. In Washington,
diplomatic missions were scrambling to assist travelers from abroad in
getting out of D.C. safely, and pressing the State Department for
information on those who had been detained in order to mobilize legal aid
for them. At the Canadian embassy on Pennsylvania Avenue, over a
hundred people were begging staff for help finding loved ones who’d been
arrested or gone missing during clashes with police. In capitals including
Ottawa, London, and Berlin, government officials met to discuss how they
would react if large numbers of U.S. citizens showed up at consular facilities
and demanded asylum.

At 4:30 p.m., Trump Out organizers at the Hay-Adams convened a

teleconference with congressional Democrats, trying to get on the same
page strategically. Although invitations had been extended to every single
elected member from both parties, the president’s propaganda and confused
media coverage had made even the liberals wary of formal engagement with
the protesters. One septuagenarian legislator was being prepped for the
meeting, aides recall, when he raised concerns about the activist who called
for violent revolution, or the one who encouraged assaults on white people.
He had seen that on video, he said. His twentysomething staffers patiently
explained that the video was a deepfake—a sophisticated fraud. But the
impression in his mind was so convincing that he still harbored doubts and
ultimately pulled out of the meeting.

With such doubts pervasive in the caucus, just seven Democratic members
of the House were on the call, most notably Representatives Maxine Waters
and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, while three dozen other members (including
Republican Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania) had staffers participate. In

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the Senate, only Cory Booker and Mazie Hirono joined the call, while 19
others likewise sent staffers in their place. Democratic leadership was
notably absent, although Speaker Ryan’s chief of staff Frank McGregor was
separately exchanging texts with Sarah Turk during the meeting.

The meeting was not productive. The Democratic legislators were trying to
lower Trump Out’s expectations. The most they dared imagine was that—if
the situation continued to worsen—their Republican colleagues might be
willing to pressure Trump to resign in favor of Pence. But with the Speaker
of the House next in the order of succession, the GOP would sooner let
Pence shoot someone on Fifth Avenue than boot him too and hand the
White House to a Democrat. Impeachment faced all those same problems,
with the added complication of time—even if they had the votes, there was
no practical way to conduct a trial and remove the president from office
before street protests would inevitably lose steam. For those reasons,
Waters, Hirono, and the others urged compromise: offer Republicans a deal
to back President Pence as a bipartisan way of defusing the crisis. Once
things had returned to normal, they would have the ability to investigate
Pence carefully, make a case to the American people, and then impeach him
if there was popular support.

But the L-team saw that as a “hard no.” As they’d expressed during the
smaller in-person meeting the day before, they had every reason to believe
that a President Pence would pardon Trump and everyone in his orbit—
irrevocably shielding them from accountability for their crimes. Further,
they feared that Pence would wield government power to persecute those
who had participated in the movement, wreaking vengeance and settling
scores on behalf of his former boss. Most importantly, they said, all major

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platform changes would be put to a popular vote via the mobile app, and
there was no chance a majority of the protesters would approve President
Pence as the outcome of their ordeal. So the call ended inconclusively, with
Trump Out reiterating their demands that both must go, and the
Democrats—although broadly sympathetic—protesting that they simply
didn’t have the leverage to make that happen.

Outside, the carnival atmosphere of the previous evening given way to a

sense of siege that mixed fear, confusion, and defiance. As the sun reddened
over the Potomac, teams of volunteers piled the Lafayette Square barricades
higher. Some were calling loved ones, scribbling wills on scratch paper, or
taking stone-faced selfies captioned with vows to #Resist. Others—at the
urging of Euromaidan activist Valentyn Kravchenko—were writing their
blood types on their skin in permanent marker to assist the medics in case
shooting started. Inside some of the buildings within the cordon, activists
fortified entrances in anticipation of urban warfare. Several taped bags of
bolts, screws, and broken glass to the sides of empty propane tanks to act as
fake bombs that would slow down assaulters.

Rumors that were spreading on the Trump Out app made the jump to real
life, as demonstrators approached strangers around them and asked for
confirmation. According to one account, the National Guard had given
everyone in the protest zone until midnight to leave before treating whoever
stayed inside as subject to shoot-to-kill. Another story (subsequently traced
by The Guardian to the pro-Trump Grenada Research Group) maintained
that witnesses had seen Guard soldiers loading lethal nerve gas for airborne
dispersal over the Mall.

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Trump Out’s digital rapid response team, crowded into a two-room suite at
the Hay-Adams, typed their hands into spasm trying to rein in the wild
speculation, but they saw that they were losing the battle. The team was
headed by Benjamin Block, a former Hill staffer who’d held the same job at
the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee during the 2020
election. Watching the panic crackle across his screens with a sick lurch of
foreboding, Block texted down to David Litt and the comms team: “people
feel on the defensive [right now]. starting to sweat. we need clarity on why
people are still out here and what action steps they can take.”

Protesters had been streaming off the Mall from the first rumors of a
National Guard crackdown, and a crowd that had been around 1.9 million at
midday had thinned to under 900,000 by dinnertime. Trump Out
organizers had acted quickly to stockpile food, water, and other supplies
inside the cordon, but it was soon apparent that their ability to feed and
accommodate a dozen NFL stadiums’ worth of demonstrators—packed into
a few hundred acres—would be quite limited. When people got hungry and
thirsty, their capacity to stay on the streets would fall off sharply. With
approaching taco vans and Sparkletts trucks now being stopped blocks from
the Mall and waved off by M4-wielding guardsmen, time was suddenly on
the president’s side again.

On the rooftop terrace of the Hay-Adams, Evan Vrabec, Peter Balakrishnan,

and legal affairs coordinator Tim Stewart were having a hushed and discreet
meeting with a libertarian activist named Robby Swendseid. Swendseid, a
42-year-old museum proprietor and documentarian who’d run for Congress
in Oregon in 2020, had been an early right-of-center supporter of Trump
Out. He’d exhorted his 16,000+ social media followers to join the D.C.

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protests and had arrived himself Tuesday night after two epic days of
driving in a 1997 GMC Sierra pickup. Inside the camper shell he’d brought
ample supplies to share with fellow demonstrators: beef jerky, batteries,
blankets, water filters. And guns. Swendseid had brought a personal armory
of six pistols and four assault-style rifles, along with several thousand
rounds of ammunition he intended to pass out to others willing to fight if
the government tried to crush the demonstration with lethal force.

As the concertina-wire ring closed around the Mall that afternoon and
armored personnel carriers rumbled into position, Swendseid had been out
near the Washington Monument haranguing a small crowd about the
history of the 1970 Kent State shootings and urging readiness for armed
resistance—when a member of Balakrishnan’s security team had seen him
brandish a Glock and demonstrate proper firing stance. Open carry on the
Mall is strictly illegal, and if police observers spotted this, it could be used as
a pretext for violent intervention. The volunteer posted a geotagged photo to
the team channel, and asked for instructions. Balakrishnan told her to
intervene immediately and suggested a script. As soon as there was a pause
in the demonstration, she pulled Swendseid aside and explained that the
organizers personally implored him to keep his weapon out of public view
due to the risk it would impose on innocent bystanders. Swendseid
answered that he was one of hundreds at the event carrying firearms, that
tactically coordinating their actions was essential, and that he wanted to
make his case in person to whoever was responsible for the movement’s
anti-gun stance.

And so, Vrabec, Balakrishnan, and Stewart were now wrangling with
Swendseid atop the Hay-Adams, trying to make him understand the danger

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of his strategy. Assault rifles might have deterred MPD patrol cops, they
argued, but the National Guard had brought tanks and was spoiling for a
fight. AR-15s were no use against that kind of firepower. Moreover, the
protesters’ unarmed status was their best shield. Administration officials
surely realized that the Guard would refuse orders to massacre civilians,
Vrabec explained, and such brutality would provoke overwhelming and
bipartisan condemnation. On the other hand, if people watching TV in
Peoria and Boise saw images of American soldiers trading fire with masked
gunmen, their sympathy for the protesters would evaporate—their first
impulse would be “make our streets safe again.” More to the point, Stewart
explained, the legality of escalating force by the government would be
largely determined by whether demonstrators were breaking laws, and
carrying long guns near the White House was near the very top of the list of
those triggers.

At last, after half an hour of back-and-forth and lengthy digressions about

Max Weber, cryptocurrency, and the Army-Marine Corps
counterinsurgency field manual, Swendseid relented. He said he would ask
members of his chat group for arms-bearing Trump Out users to keep guns
strictly out of sight—but promised that they would continue planning for the
defense of the protest zone, and spring into action if government forces ran
amok. “Mark my words,” Swendseid said, “before this is all over, we’re going
to need to shoot back.”

Vrabec, Balakrishnan, and Stewart all felt their phones vibrate

simultaneously. They were being summoned back down to the war room for
an urgent meeting. Benjamin Block and members of digital rapid response
had convinced Litt and Turk that demonstrators were quickly realizing that

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they were trapped—and that morale was plummeting. Further, the National
Guard threat had thrown the movement leadership elections into turmoil.
Voting via the app was set to close at midnight, but some candidates still
hadn’t been able to upload their campaign statements, and there were
widespread complaints that WiFi on the Mall was crashing and the app
wasn’t registering votes. And many users said they were too busy preparing
barricades to properly deliberate about the movement’s long-term future.
So the L-team had to do two things: vote on an extension to the election
timeline, and finalize a call to action that could boost apprehensive
protesters’ spirits and restore a clear sense of purpose going forward.
Thanking Swendseid for his cooperation, they headed for the elevator.

A
WORLD AWAY at Mar-a-Lago, it was a balmy evening on the patio

as the sun set over the Lake Worth Lagoon and club members
filed outside for Six Star Seafood Night. With many of the
wealthiest residents away for the summer, those still in town tilted heavily
toward Palm Beach social climbers and Trumpworld hangers-on—wearing a
mixture of black tie and loud lounge suits, nearly half sported MAGA hats.
Gradually, the staid Brooks Brothers and conservative ties of the
Washington crowd filtered out among the diners, and Secret Service with
earpieces began emerging from the president’s private wing. Uniformed
waiters set up buffet tables of appetizers—sushi, smoked salmon, shrimp
cocktail, and king crab legs. A chef in a paper toque presided over an
enormous tray of oysters on ice, splitting them open with a shucking knife.

As a saxophonist started noodling smooth jazz under the lively rumble of

conversation, Harry Katsouros stood on tiptoe and scanned the crowd. Seb
Gorka ranked high enough to score a seat at dinner, but had left his

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personal cell phone in one of the briefing rooms. He texted Katsouros to
find it and bring it to him out on the patio. But where was he? The
Hungarian-born Deputy National Security Advisor was a commanding 6’3”
and his massive, goateed head normally stood out at any gathering. Yet now,
it seemed all Katsouros could see were red caps, toupees, and bottle-blonde
heads.

“Are you one of the president’s men? I just want to thank you for everything
you’re doing.”

Katsouros had almost blundered into the most bronzed little man he’d ever
seen. He was ageless by the cumulative effect of what looked like several
facelifts—he could have been fifty or eighty—and was shaking his hand
vigorously. Katsouros politely nodded thanks and tried to disengage, but
found himself on the receiving end of a tidal wave of vicarious praise for the
commander-in-chief. Trump was the new Lincoln. Trump was the next
Churchill. Trump should get the Congressional Medal of Honor. The man
marveled at the treasonous lies of the media—he’d seen footage from D.C.
himself and there were clearly no more than 100,000 protesters, and why
hadn’t the media said a word about the 200,000 pro-Trump counter-
protesters?—and he told Katsouros he wasn’t being fooled. “Can you believe
how many people bought that hoax about the ramming?” he numbly heard
the man say. Comments about the protesters’ terrorist connections were
peppered with sage references to Soros Dollars, the Deep State, Julian
Assange, and Project Surfrider. “Tell the president,” the man said
insistently, eyes wide and watery. “Don’t be soft. We’re with him, no matter
what.” Katsouros started to stammer a reply.

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A huge paw clapped down on his shoulder. “Harry!” rumbled Gorka’s crisp
Bond-villain baritone from above and behind. “I’ve been looking for you
everywhere.”

Just as Katsouros handed over his boss’s phone, a rapturous cheer went up
on the patio. The crowd rose to its feet. After a few moments, the president’s
distinctive forward-swept hair came into view over the throng, pausing
every few steps as he shook hands with supporters and posed for selfies with
their adoring wives. Striding toward his reserved table, he flashed a
trademark raised fist and sat down with Ivanka, Jared, Stephen Miller,
Wilbur Ross, and Rudy Giuliani.

As Katsouros went back inside for the simpler staff dinner, the VIPs were
tucking into Caesar salad, swordfish, prime rib, and two-pound lobsters.
The mood on the patio was ebullient—everyone seemed to feel that the
situation in Washington was well in hand, and many of the members
appeared virtually unaware of the turmoil gripping the rest of the country.
The Secret Service had closed down the boulevard running around the
resort, and the few thousand protesters demonstrating on the mainland
outside the security barricades couldn’t be heard over the live music—
singalong sax renditions of “God Bless the U.S.A.,” “America the Beautiful,”
and “Sweet Home Alabama.”

By dessert, Trump’s aides were nudging him to head back to his residence to
keep an eye on the news, but the president was simply having too much fun.
He went from table to table, lapping up praise that grew more fawning and
hysterical with each bottle of overpriced champagne. A group of
“Trumpettes”—a club of his socialite boosters—clinked their glasses and

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announced to the patio that they had a special gift to present him with, in
honor of the sixth anniversary of his campaign announcement after coming
down that escalator. After a signal to the waitstaff, two Mar-a-Lago
employees came out onto the patio carrying a huge 80” x 50” painting in a
gilded frame, with a black drape hung over it to preserve the surprise. Lulu
Horowitz—wife of indicted megadonor George Horowitz—cajoled the crowd
into a countdown. “10… 9… 8…” Another Trumpette rapped the table with
her palms as a drumroll. “3… 2… 1…” The drape fell.

Among the D.C. contingent, there were audible gasps. Jaws slackened in
horror. Here, in larger-than-life oils, was Donald Trump depicted as some
mock-heroic cross between George Washington and Napoleon Bonaparte—
tricorne hat, gold epaulettes, puffed-out chest peppered with medals and
ribbons. It was, one White House official recalls, “unimaginably kitschy …
so bad it was funny.” But whether out of genuine appreciation or social
pressure, the club members broke into sustained applause. The politicos
were expecting the president to politely accept the tribute and skedaddle,
but saw with deepening mortification that he seemed not to be embarrassed
at all. Cell phone flashes flickered as Trump posed next to the painting and
gave his signature double thumbs-up—to all appearances, genuinely
beaming. He marveled to the ladies how beautiful it looked, kissing several
on the cheek. “We are going to find a fantastic place to hang this,” he
promised, to more applause.

Harry Katsouros watched from inside as leading Trumpette Aviva

Moskowicz—a former Miss Yugoslavia and prominent Miami philanthropist
who’d previously hailed Trump as “our messiah”—stood with a raised glass
and proposed a toast to the president. In a thick accent recalling Zsa Zsa

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Gabor, Moskowicz extolled the countless virtues of the man scowling out
from the canvas beside her. Massive multicolored baubles rattled all over
her body as she gesticulated each point more vehemently than the last. As
the toast dragged into its fifth minute, she started into a list of who all
Trump should lock up. The Mar-a-Lago crowd hooted and clapped with
each name. Senior staffers shifted in their seats and exchanged awkward
glances as Moskowicz started musing aloud about whether Trump could
serve America even more effectively as a dictator. “Why not 2024? He’s
stronger than ever.”

At that moment, Katsouros felt a push notification buzz in his pocket. He

pulled out his phone and read with mounting unease: “NATIONAL
GENERAL STRIKE (9:30 PM EDT, June 16, 2021): Donald Trump is now
threatening massive use of lethal force against the millions of peaceful
demonstrators in Washington, New York, Los Angeles and hundreds of
other cities around the country. Only an immediate, nonviolent, nationwide
solidarity campaign can restore peace to our streets and the rule of law to
our land. The Trump Out movement urgently demands the resignation of
President Trump and Vice President Pence, and calls on all Americans to
stay home from nonemergency jobs in a national general strike until they
are forced to leave office. We also call on law enforcement officers to refuse
any orders not directly related to public safety, and to remember that their
oaths to the United States Constitution supersede any unlawful orders they
may receive.”

Katsouros looked back and forth between the glowing message on his screen
and the cheering revelers out the window. He knew there was no way
around it. In minutes, or hours, or maybe in the morning, those two

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worlds—those two whole realities—would collide. Looking up again at the
president’s table, he realized with puzzlement that Trump was no longer
sitting there.

The windowpane rattled. An instant later, a shattering boom and the roar of
jet engines overhead. The crowd on the patio scattered screaming. A Secret
Service agent came racing into the room and beckoned everyone outside.
“We’re evacuating the building,” he shouted. “Everybody this way!”

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