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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 | APRIL 2022 ISSUE | _U.S._

This is the third 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, “Rosewater,” covers the reaction to the air catastrophe off the Florida coast, the

administration’s subsequent efforts to suppress the Trump Out demonstrations with military force, and

the president’s growing desperation to restore order.

Part III: Rosewater

W
INDOWS RATTLED AND car alarms wailed across Broward and

Palm Beach counties as a sharp crack of thunder shook the

warm night. Two miles overhead, a pair of F-15 fighter jets
screamed northward on full afterburner, trailing long cones of flame that
stood out white-hot against the blackening sky. In the lead plane, Major Dan
Hepper looked down off his left wing and saw the twinkling lights of West
Palm Beach, the dark ribbon of the Lake Worth Lagoon, and then the thin
strand of glittering mansions and hotels on the barrier island, crowned by
the floodlit pinkish tower of Mar-a-Lago. Beyond that stretched the inky
expanse of the Atlantic all the way to the eastern horizon. But then,
something else. Pinpricks of green and red light coming out of a cloudbank

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about 10 nautical miles away. “Huntress, Gator three-one,” Hepper called
on the radio. “Tally TOI1. Tally TOI1. Gator three-one and three-two turning
to intercept on heading zero-eight-five.” Hepper and Captain Crystal
Thomas in the second plane rolled their sticks right and pulled into a high-G
turn that brought them roaring out to sea.

415 miles to the northwest, at Tyndall Air Force Base in the Florida
Panhandle, the nation’s air defense systems were spinning into alarm. In a
large windowless room filled with screens, the duty officers of the 601st Air
Operations Center were working urgently to identify and intercept a small
aircraft that had violated the restricted airspace around the president’s
estate. At 9:15 p.m., the plane had crossed into the 30-nautical mile ring
around Palm Beach International inside which all air traffic was strictly
required to have an approved flight plan, squawk a special transponder
code, and stay in constant contact with air traffic control. Sector controllers
at Miami Center repeatedly called the intruder by radio, but received no
reply. At 9:17 p.m., they called the AOC at Tyndall to inform them of the
unresponsive flight. At the same time, they alerted the DEN—the FAA’s
Domestic Events Network based in Washington D.C., which immediately
notified a range of other agencies including the Secret Service of the
developing situation. Meanwhile, the operations floor at Tyndall was on the
phone with EADS—the Battle Control Center at the Eastern Air Defense
Sector in Rome, New York. Within one minute, after assessing the available
units for an intercept, EADS sent a scramble order to Homestead Air
Reserve Base south of Miami, where two F-15Cs were kept on alert armed
and fueled with pilots suited up nearby.

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As Maj. Hepper and Capt. Thomas climbed into their cockpits, a Secret
Service liaison officer called Mike Monaghan at Mar-a-Lago, informing the
head of President Trump’s detail that they may need to activate a
contingency plan. Monaghan asked for frequent updates, but decided that
because the aircraft was heading southeast—farther out over the ocean—as
it passed through the 30-mile ring, he wouldn’t evacuate POTUS as long as
it didn’t turn toward Mar-a-Lago or breach the 10-nautical mile “Inner
Core” exclusion zone. There were usually several such violations on each of
the president’s visits to the estate, and they’d mostly been resolved without
incident. Still, Monaghan ordered agents to pull up the armored limousine
nicknamed the Beast and be ready for a quick exit.

By 9:26 p.m., Gator 31 and Gator 32 appeared on the live radar map in the
AOC, streaking up the coast. Twitter users immediately started reporting
the shattering thunderclap as the F-15s went supersonic. Some recognized it
as a sonic boom. Others thought a bomb had gone off, or that the Port
Everglades Power Plant had exploded. Someone posted shaky video of the
fighters taking off with afterburners howling.

At Tyndall, the operations center throbbed with status reports as the well-
rehearsed procedure unfolded. Then at 9:31 p.m., a master sergeant
tracking the threat—designated Track of Interest 1—called out an urgent
update: “TOI1 has turned! Heading now two-six-four!” Straight at Mar-a-
Lago. At its present speed, it would reach the estate in just six minutes. That
jolted the event to a new level of severity. If the plane couldn’t be diverted,
they would need authority to shoot it down before it could threaten the
president. From the ops floor of the AOC, Chief of Combat Operations

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Colonel Tyson Rickey picked up the direct line reserved for just such an
emergency.

That night at NORAD headquarters near Colorado Springs, the senior

officer on duty was Air Force Brigadier General Brian Torrey. It was Torrey
who would notify the president in the event of an incoming nuclear attack,
and as the past three days’ chaos in Washington had roiled the country and
the world, Torrey had found himself unusually tense each time one of the
alert phones rang. When the call came in from Tyndall, Torrey’s gut
clenched. He would have just a few minutes to get POTUS on the phone and
get approval to shoot down a civilian aircraft. If he couldn’t reach Trump—
and realistically, there might not be time to reach the Secretary of Defense
in his stead—Brig. Gen. Torrey was authorized to give the order himself.

On the patio at Mar-a-Lago, President Trump was basking in the afterglow

of the club’s signature Six Star Seafood Night, taking selfies with wealthy
supporters and glad-handing old cronies. As senior White House staff
shifted awkwardly in their seats, a former Miss Yugoslavia named Aviva
Moskowicz was giving a fawning and excruciatingly long toast to the man
she’d referred to as “our messiah.” Watching at a discreet distance, Mike
Monaghan got an update in his ear. The plane had turned. Within
moments, Secret Service agents swooped in—tearing Trump off his chair
with only a few words’ explanation and half-carrying him toward the
circular driveway where the Beast was idling. Seconds later, the sonic boom
hit. The diners, some of whom had scarcely registered the president’s
rushed exit, scattered amidst screams and tipsy shouts of confusion. Other
Secret Service agents with flashlights barked that the building was being
evacuated and directed the crowd to an assembly point on the lawn.

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Now, as Gator 31 and Gator 32 raced out to intercept the inbound plane, the
EADS controllers in New York—callsign Huntress—gave the fighters
additional information. The aircraft, according to its transponder a single-
engine Commander 114, tail number N114AD, was owned by a man named
Ralph Moore and had taken off from Columbus, Georgia without a flight
plan just after 6:00 p.m. He was not on any watchlist. “Not on watchlist,
roger,” Hepper called. The tiny aircraft ahead was rapidly growing in his
windscreen as the distance closed at almost 1,100 miles per hour. Normally,
these intercepts—like one Hepper had done a few months before—involved
a gradual escalation of urgency as pilots tried more dramatic measures to
get an intruder’s attention. But because time was so short here, EADS
ordered extremely aggressive maneuvers from the get-go. “Gator three-
one,” Hepper called, “TOI1 intercepted.”

Hepper flashed his landing lights and brought the F-15 screaming straight
across the Commander’s path barely 500 feet away, dropping flares. Two
seconds later, Thomas did the same. Their combined wakes would violently
buffet the small propeller-driven plane, and would be guaranteed to get Mr.
Moore’s attention. Hepper radioed him on the guard frequency: “This is a
United States Air Force armed air defense fighter. You have been
intercepted… You are ordered to turn north immediately. Please
acknowledge on 121.5 or rock your wings. If you do not follow these
instructions, you may be fired upon.”

Gator 31 and 32 pulled crushing G-forces in tight turns as they came around
behind the aircraft and bled off speed. After tearing northward at Mach 1.2,
now their challenge was to stay close to an aircraft so slow that their F-15s

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would almost be in danger of stalling. TOI1 still hadn’t replied or rocked its
wings. Hepper radioed again: “Ralph Moore, Ralph Moore, if you can hear
me, rock your wings immediately. You are in violation of restricted
airspace.” No answer, but the Commander was nosing down now and
yawing slightly to the left as it lost altitude.

While Thomas kept the plane in her sights from behind, Hepper pulled up
over its left wing and tried to get a look up close. Maybe the pilot was sick or
dead—if he was slumped at the controls, that could explain what was
happening. It was very dark in the cockpit, but as Hepper looked inside, the
pilot—whether Moore or someone else—was not slumped. It appeared to be
an older male, sitting up with open eyes looking straight ahead, with no
passengers visible. The tail number was the same as Huntress believed.
“Gator three-one, TOI1 not responding,” he said, and radioed his
observations to EADS. As the information was being relayed to the 601st
AOC and NORAD, Hepper tried again on the radio. “Commander one one
four alfa delta, this is U.S. F-15 off your left wing. You are violating
restricted airspace. If you do not turn 90 degrees to your right immediately,
you will be fired on.” Silence. The lights of Palm Beach were getting closer
every second. N114AD had crossed into the Inner Core—and could now
impact Mar-a-Lago in less than three minutes.

Down on the ground, the Beast made a right onto Route 98 and gunned it
across the bridge toward the mainland, screened by just two Secret Service
SUVs without their flashers. They were headed for the Trump International
Golf Club several minutes away, where an underground bunker could keep
the president safe from any airborne threats. Back on the lawn at Mar-a-
Lago, senior staffers who’d been left behind were frantically trying to figure

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out who was with POTUS, and whether the so-called Nuclear Football was
safe. Not far away, a Humvee-mounted surface-to-air missile system was
coming online as a last resort and receiving targeting data.

At Secretary of Defense J.J. Jack’s Washington home, a phone rang

unanswered. The Pentagon dispatched someone to wake him, but there
would never be enough time. In NORAD’s command center, an aide told
Brig. Gen. Torrey that SecDef was unreachable. That meant that if he
couldn’t get President Trump on the line in about 30 seconds, he would
have to make the shootdown decision himself. On the one hand, the aircraft
was violating absolutely forbidden airspace, losing altitude, and the pilot
didn’t seem to be disabled. On the other, N114AD was flying with its lights
and transponder on, and making no attempt to evade the interceptors, who
reported its course as gradually yawing southward. Intel hadn’t uncovered
any extremist ties with the owner. Torrey stayed on hold as Deputy National
Security Advisor Sebastian Gorka raced to find a number for someone
physically with the president.

In the crowded backseat of the Beast, Major Tom Hizer felt his secure phone
ringing as the limousine roared toward the Trump International. The
president’s military aide answered and promptly put it on speaker. “Mr.
President, this is Gen. Torrey at NORAD. We have a light civilian aircraft
headed straight toward Mar-a-Lago right now... No indication of hostile
intent, but it is unresponsive and … about two minutes out.” Before Torrey
could discuss tactical options, he heard a decisive answer: “Shoot it down,
shoot it down, shoot it down.” Torrey asked to verify his intent. Trump
confirmed the order.

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As Gator 31 repeated his radio calls in vain, Huntress authorized one final
“headbutt” maneuver. Gator 32 flew right below the Commander and then
pulled sharply up across its path, firing more flares and blasting the
afterburners. Nothing. Without bright tracer rounds loaded in their 20-mm
cannons, warning shots would be useless. They were nearly out of options.
The lights of the barrier island were now close enough to make out details
on the mansions.

Hepper’s voice, now tinged with frustration on the audio recording: “Gator
three-one, he’s still not reacting.”

Fifteen seconds later, a new order, calmly and clinically delivered: “Gator
three-one, Huntress. Stand by to engage TOI1.”

The reality of the situation was setting in. Hepper proposed attempting one
more daring maneuver—bringing his wingtip under TOI1’s and physically
nudging the lighter aircraft onto a different course. But the EADS
controllers felt that was far too risky. “Negative, Gator three-one.”

Hepper pulled into a counterclockwise turn to come around behind the

Commander at a far enough distance for a safe air-to-air missile shot.
“Gator three-one, Huntress. [The president] has authorized shootdown. You
are cleared to engage with AIM-9s. Repeat, you are cleared to engage with
AIM-9s at this time.”

As the lights along the coast rushed up closer and closer, Hepper went
through the final authentication procedure—which remains classified—and
confirmed that the order was valid. “Gator three-one, engaging.”

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Gator 31 lined up three quarters of a mile astern of the Commander and
locked on target with his helmet-mounted aiming system. Over the radio:
“Fox-two.” An AIM-9X Sidewinder missile streaked toward the target and
blew N114AD apart in midair at approximately 9:36:15 p.m.

Burning wreckage tumbled from the sky and splashed down in a small patch
of ocean about a mile and a half off Mar-a-Lago.

I
N THE ROOFTOP room of the Hay-Adams Hotel, just across Lafayette

Square from the White House, the lead organizing team of the Trump
Out movement was having its final meeting of an incredibly long and
wearing day. Following the Trump administration’s decision to surround
the protest zone with tanks and thousands of armed National Guard troops,
they had tried to seize back the initiative, releasing an urgent call for a
nationwide general strike. Americans were urged to stay home from all
nonemergency jobs until President Trump and Vice President Pence
resigned. Additionally, their statement had called on law enforcement
officers to refuse participation in suppressing peaceful protests, and
reminded them of their obligation to disobey any unlawful orders they may
receive. By 9:38 p.m., the message had been sent out via all channels—
protest app push notification, social media, press release, and cable news
hits—and the L-team was preparing to adjourn. They knew they’d need to be
rested for morning. Many had only gotten a few hours’ sleep in the three
days since a police BearCat had rammed a crowd on Pennsylvania Avenue,
sparking coast-to-coast demonstrations.

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Partway into going over the overnight emergency notification procedures,
security coordinator Peter Balakrishnan felt his phone do the syncopated
triple-buzz that indicated an urgent message from the war room downstairs.
He opened the text: “a missile just hit near maralago.” The others must have
seen the surprise on his face, because they started asking what was up. He
read the message aloud. In seconds, they were all scrolling Twitter. Nothing
about it was even trending yet. But the search results were a welter of
confusing reports. Someone listening to a police radio scanner tweeted that
there had been an explosion at Mar-a-Lago itself. Hundreds of people had
heard a loud boom. Some had seen fire in the sky. A user claiming to have
watched the incident from a rooftop said an incoming missile had been shot
down offshore. Shaky video appeared of flaming debris falling from high in
the air. Protesters camped out across the waterway from the estate had seen
a motorcade race across to the mainland with its lights off. Others
thousands of miles away speculated with insistent certitude.

As the L-team packed into the improvised war room downstairs, CNN was
just breaking initial reports of a possible aircraft shootdown. As more
information tumbled in, it became clear that fighter jets had been scrambled
to protect the airspace around the president—and that they were likely
responsible for shooting down some kind of plane. After brief suggestions
on air that it may have been a small commercial flight, analysts shifted to
the idea that it had been a hostile drone. But the truth was already starting
to emerge online. A Phoenix-based aviation blogger known as BaltoWest
had analyzed the transponder data publicly available on flightradar24.com,
and determined that a Commander 114 with tail number N114AD had
stopped squawking at around 9:37 p.m. just east of Mar-a-Lago. Records on
the site indicated that the owner was a Ralph Moore, who an FAA database

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showed was an instrument-rated pilot licensed on single-engine aircraft
since 1988. Internet sleuths jumped on those scraps of information and
soon discovered that Moore was a 66-year-old lawyer living near Atlanta,
and an active member of the Democratic party, whose Fulton County
committee he had served as an officer of during the 1990s and 2000s. In
2019, he’d written a letter to the editor of the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer
criticizing Trump’s racist attacks against minority congresswomen, and in
2020, had been photographed shaking hands with Kamala Harris at a
campaign event. On some corners of the web, the pattern was all too clear.

David Litt, Trump Out’s communications coordinator, huddled key

organizers in a hallway outside the war room to strategize responses. Of
course things were still very hazy, he said, but they’d have to be prepared for
the possibility that Moore had attempted some kind of kamikaze attack on
Mar-a-Lago. The comms team got to work on a statement of condemnation
and disavowal, just in case. But solid information was still extremely scarce.
Hours passed, with still no confirmation from the White House of the
president’s whereabouts. Journalists asking through official channels went
ignored, and those pumping sources in Trump’s entourage couldn’t get a
straight answer.

In fact, by midnight on Thursday, June 17, President Trump himself knew

little more than the average CNN viewer. Holed up without cell reception in
the Cold War-era bunker under his golf course, he received periodic updates
from Mike Monaghan, as NORAD and the Secret Service worked to ensure
that the incident wasn’t part of a larger coordinated attack. When he finally
emerged sometime after midnight, he saw the claims on Twitter that it had
been a missile attack or a drone, and insisted on querying Brig. Gen. Torrey,

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the Pentagon, and the FAA to see if they were investigating. This, as it
turned out, only introduced more confusion, as the FAA misinterpreted the
questions from the president’s staff as being based on solid military
information—leading one of its officials to confirm anonymously to Fox
News around 12:45 a.m. that there had indeed been a missile.

Shortly after 1:00 a.m.—just as Trump’s motorcade was racing back across
the bridge toward Mar-a-Lago—CNN started reporting that Ralph Moore
had posted a manifesto online affirming support for Trump Out, and
promising to “sacrifice my life to free America from a tyrant.” Although the
manifesto was later determined to be a hoax by unknown actors, as the
Trump Out L-team prepared to call it a night with still no statement from
the president forthcoming, they considered CNN’s story credible and issued
a statement disavowing Moore’s actions and condemning the “act of an
individual … totally contrary to Trump Out’s unwavering commitment to
legal, nonviolent protest.”

Yet while many Americans on both sides believed the kamikaze story at
first, subsequent investigations have come to a range of contradictory
conclusions. The official incident review released by NORAD and the
Pentagon supported the military’s initial assessment: that N114AD was
making an aggressive move toward Mar-a-Lago consistent with an attempt
to crash into the building. In their testimony to the Romney-Porter
Committee, Brig. Gen. Torrey and Col. Rickey emphasized that even if
Trump had been unreachable, they would have concurred in giving the
shootdown order based on the facts known in the heat of the moment. Yet
the committee also heard circumstantial evidence from Secret Service
investigators that was more consistent with a high-altitude version of

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suicide-by-cop—Moore was taking antidepressants and had once spoken
with a former F-16 pilot about the conditions under which a civilian aircraft
might be shot down. Meanwhile, the FBI’s extensive investigation closed
last month without finding any clear motive. The NTSB’s own report is not
expected to be released until this summer, but will be focused on ruling out
mechanical or environmental causes.

In the meanwhile, journalists have advanced a raft of alternative theories. In

December, the New Yorker published a 6,000-word piece by investigative
writer Seymour Hersh, citing anonymous government sources in claiming
that the shootdown was a false flag operation, wherein an NSA cyberattack
seized control of Moore’s plane and made a doomed attack run at Mar-a-
Lago as a pretext for the subsequent security crackdown by the
administration. Perhaps the most intriguing speculation comes from
William Langewiesche’s exhaustive 14,500-word analysis in February’s
Vanity Fair, in which he infers a medical cause. Based in part on subtle
details of the transponder data, a moan on an unidentified radio
transmission over Florida earlier that evening, and autopsy findings of a
large undiagnosed pancreatic tumor—Langewiesche believes that Moore
intended to land in Orlando to see a sex worker he’d previously hired, but
lapsed into a hypoglycemic stupor and overshot the airport. He would have
briefly come to after nightfall offshore, disoriented and in the dark, and
made a sharp turn back toward the only lights he could see before going
unresponsive again. Each of these explanations has its shortcomings,
though, and the shootdown of N114AD is likely to remain one of the
enduring mysteries of June 2021.

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Of course, none of that was known to the L-team as they drifted out of the
Hay-Adams war room after 2:00 a.m.—they’d been sure that President
Trump was still awake somewhere and that a tweetstorm was imminent, but
with still no official word from Mar-a-Lago they had little choice but to head
upstairs for some sleep. On the streets outside, protesters bedded down
fitfully, crammed together in a carpet of tents and sleeping bags—hundreds
of faces standing out momentarily in the darkness by the light of their
phone screens as they checked the news. Whatever had happened in
Florida, they knew it would mean trouble in the morning.

T
HE WASHINGTON MONUMENT was already casting a long shadow

out onto the Tidal Basin as Columbia University adjunct professor

Jasper Rice Sullivan turned off the portable cookstove and started
ladling out breakfast noodles to hungry protesters. Many of them were still
bundled under coats and parkas after sleeping outside, but were now
shedding layers into heaping piles as the sun climbed over the Anacostia
River and heated the muggy air. They looked tired and apprehensive as they
gathered around the F-150 that Sullivan and a group of fellow New York
activists had turned into a field kitchen and morale-boost station. “Where
you in from?” he’d ask as they reached up to take the steaming cupfuls.
Cleveland. Raleigh. Ann Arbor. Seattle. People had driven in from
everywhere. Some stopped next to the tailgate to chat. There was a retired
doctor. A protestant seminary student. A Gulf War veteran and his adult
son. Three or four rising high school seniors who’d flown out together from
somewhere in Wisconsin right after their final exams. Several of them
looked out apprehensively across the Mall to where the National Guard’s
armored vehicles sat parked along the cordon with soldiers in the turrets.
You think they’re going to attack us? But Sullivan tried to allay their fears.

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“No,” he’d say. “They just want us scared. Don’t let them into your head,
brother!” What about these shoot-to-kill rumors? “Bullshit all the way,”
he’d say. A college-age kid asked him whether they would all be arrested.
“Listen,” Sullivan said. “I’ve already been arrested twice since I got here. It’s
no fun, but you’ll be okay.”

Just then, a lady standing in line let out a sharp f-bomb. Everyone stopped
and looked at her. She held up her phone: “Here it is!” Sullivan couldn’t
make out the words on the screen, but could recognize the Twitter interface
and knew immediately what it was. He asked her to read it. The president
was awake and tweeting: “AMERICA IS AT WAR! The Rebels in
Washington tried to ASSASSINATE your President. Very sick man wanted
to do a ‘9/11’ on Mar-a-Lago, but we stopped him. Now, must deal with
vicious rapeing, looting, and killing in our nation’s beautiful capitol. No
mercy! — @realdonaldtrump, 6:22 AM - 17 Jun 2021.”

Two thirds of a mile away, D.C. National Guard captain Brian Davis was
huddling with his platoon leaders at a forward command post in the
National Academy of Sciences parking lot. A couple sipped coffee, but the
heavy air stank from truck exhaust and old tear gas and nobody’s stomach
felt quite settled. They were coming back on duty to relieve a unit of
Maryland guardsmen along Constitution Avenue, and Davis—a 37-year-old
high school history teacher—was briefing them on their Rules for the Use of
Force (RUF) and what to expect. Lethal weapons were only to be used in
self-defense against imminent threats to life, he reminded them, and
civilians could be allowed out of the protest zone but not in. If they needed
to arrest people, they would flex-cuff them and hold them until a police van
making periodic rounds could collect them for processing. One of the

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lieutenants asked about the rumors they’d been hearing on the radio about
armed Antifa in the protest crowds. Raising his voice to be heard over the
idling diesels and echoing siren whoops, Davis stressed that for now, they
were just rumors. “Keep your eyes on what’s in front of you,” he said.

A minor league umpire’s voice boomed out behind them. Major Reed
Harrison, the 372nd Military Police Battalion’s commanding officer, called
everyone together around a map of the District that had been spread out on
the hood of a Humvee. New orders over the radio, Harrison announced.
Unified Area Command down at the D.C. Armory was going to issue the
protesters an ultimatum at 9:00 a.m.—those still inside the protest zone
would be ordered to leave by one of five checkpoints around the Mall and
submit to screening for weapons or terrorist affiliations. Anyone who didn’t
leave within 12 hours would be subject to arrest. Homeland Security was
taking seriously the rumors of gunmen, and didn’t want armed agitators
slipping out onto the streets.

So the battalion was being sent to man the checkpoints at Braddock’s Rock
near the Theodore Roosevelt Bridge and at the John Ericsson Memorial
near the Arlington Memorial Bridge. That meant setting up metal detectors
and stations to scan IDs and take photographs to check against E-IDENT,
DHS’s Enhanced Automated Biometric Identification System. After
processing, the guardsmen would direct crowds across the bridges and into
Virginia, where Homeland Security would have chartered buses ready to
take out-of-towners away from the D.C. metro area. “How many protesters
do they think are in there still?” Davis asked. Intel from the MPD helicopter
and was estimating 400,000-550,000 as of sunrise. Maj. Harrison’s tone
sounded like he believed it was an undercount. “And how long does each

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scan take?” The Armory was saying 90 seconds. Davis did the arithmetic in
his head. “Sir…” But the major cut him off with a raised eyebrow. Those
were the orders.

Two and a half hours later in the rooftop room at the Hay-Adams, the
Trump Out L-team was convening for its 9:00 a.m. check-in meeting when a
whooping klaxon sounded loudly outside the window. It was different from
anything they’d heard so far during the demonstrations. Seconds later, a
woman’s voice echoed down from above. “By order of the Department of
Homeland Security, due to acts of violence against law enforcement officers,
this has been declared an unlawful demonstration…” Some of the organizers
ran out onto the terrace, and saw a quad-rotor drone hovering over
Lafayette Square with a loudspeaker. “You have until 9:00 p.m. tonight to
leave the area,” the voice continued, slightly distorted as it reverberated off
the surrounding buildings. “Anyone remaining on the National Mall or
Lafayette Park after that time is subject to arrest.” In the distance, they
could hear other drones playing the same message out over the Mall.

Sarah Turk, the former DNC staffer who’d emerged as Trump Out’s de facto
chairwoman, leaned over the railing and saw fear on the faces of the crowd
eight stories below. Some were pointing up at the drone in alarm. The voice
continued: “Checkpoints have been set up at either end of the National Mall
for your safety. Bring your government-issued ID as you exit. You will be
photographed to screen for known terrorists.” The drone paced back and
forth like some horror out of a Black Mirror episode. Turk came back inside
and started giving rapid-fire instructions: they would need a comms
meeting right away to decide how to reassure the demonstrators, they’d
need a statement from legal on the privacy implications of the ultimatum,

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and they’d have to find a way to reestablish contact with Unified Area
Command since the Armory had suddenly broken off negotiations the day
before. Outside, the klaxon sounded again and the message started over.

To those outside Washington, the administration was aggressively making

its case that the demonstrations needed to be suppressed—finally breaking
its official silence for the first time since the Commander shootdown. On
Fox News, Acting White House Press Secretary Hogan Gidley told America’s
Newsroom host Sandra Smith that “this is a violent, radical uprising
attempting to overthrow the lawful government of the United States of
America.” Appearing on video from the grounds of Mar-a-Lago, Gidley
decried “numerous women being raped … children have gone missing …
looting, to the level that the president is afraid for the priceless treasures in
the Smithsonian.”

Smith’s face was skeptical, and she started to challenge Gidley, but the press
secretary shot back that “the Mainstream Media is perpetrating a conspiracy
of silence … they are suppressing the pictures, the evidence.” And so, he
said, the president was committed to action to protect American lives. The
administration even believed, Gidley added, that there were “dozens, maybe
hundreds of known or suspected terrorists in that crowd.”

Although there were three sexual assaults reported to police in the first four
days of the protest—not unusual for a gathering of that size—the rest of this
was stem-to-stern falsehoods. But Gidley and other administration
surrogates hammered those talking points all morning, and even more left-
leaning outlets like CNN and MSNBC repeated them ceaselessly to viewers
in the course of trying to debunk them.

20
Meanwhile, at workplaces around the country, employers were waiting to
see what would come of Trump Out’s calls for a national general strike. As
the business day began on the East Coast, most major cities saw significant
disruption, despite organized labor’s limited buy-in. In New York City, mass
transit workers stayed home in large numbers, bringing the morning
commute to a virtual standstill—while airline maintenance crews were so
depleted at JFK and Newark that waves of flight cancellations began
rippling through the system. But although the networks looped dramatic
footage of subway stations in chaos and gridlock on the Queensboro Bridge,
the shutdown was far less complete than Trump Out had hoped. Although
Greenwich Village and Morningside Heights were almost deserted, even in
Midtown Manhattan, a majority of restaurants and retail stores were open
for business.

In more conservative cities like Jacksonville and Charleston, municipal

authorities threatened strikers with termination, and by calling emergency
workers onto duty largely managed to keep civic government in operation.
As morning shifts started at factories in the Midwest and small-town offices
across the Great Plains, sometimes the absenteeism was barely noticeable.
Even among Heartland Democrats who fervently desired Trump’s
resignation, it just wasn’t clear what sacrificing a day’s paycheck and
inconveniencing a boss—who might also be a longtime friend and
neighbor—would do to hasten that.

While part of the Trump Out leadership pored over app analytics and news
reports trying to make sense of how much impact the strike was having, the
rest of the L-team was scrambling to prevent the 12-hour ultimatum from

21
scaring demonstrators out of the protest zone. “DON’T BELIEVE THE
THREATS!” said one push notification that went out on the app at 11:20
a.m. “1) They can’t arrest all of us. The Trump administration does NOT
have the transportation or facilities to take over 3 MILLION Trump Out
participants into custody. 2) If you leave the demonstration via the
government checkpoints, your photograph will be added to a government
database and may be used to unjustly prosecute you.”

With Unified Area Command breaking the informal truce with protesters
the day before, the Trump Out organizers had lost their leverage for keeping
more violent elements in check, and now skirmishes between police and
black bloc groups were renewing in earnest across the District. Others laid
down in the streets to hinder National Guard redeployment or blockade the
entrances to government buildings. Just before 11:00 a.m., the Secret
Service had determined that the two White House vehicle exits it had
managed to keep clear throughout the protests no longer had safe outlets to
stable areas of the city. So now, HMX-1—Marine Helicopter Squadron
One—was staging to arrange air transportation in and out of the besieged
complex for those still working on site.

Down on Pennsylvania Avenue opposite the North Lawn, the situation was
getting dicey again. A string of waist-high bike racks had been erected at the
edge of Lafayette Square to keep the protesters from spilling out onto the
avenue itself. Park Police with riot shields and lowered visors patrolled the
space between that barrier and another identical one on the wide sidewalk
in front of the White House itself. Beyond that was a line of parked BearCats
and SWAT trucks, along with two Humvee-mounted Active Denial
Systems—the satellite dish-looking pain rays that would be used to drive

22
back any major incursion across the first set of barriers. About 30 feet inside
that second barrier was the main 13-foot ornamented fence. On the other
side of that, Uniformed Division officers with tactical armor and
submachine guns or assault rifles warily paced the grounds. Atop the roof,
black-clad snipers watched the crowd with binoculars. Every now and then,
someone would vault across the first barricades and have to be tackled
before they could make it to the second. Several had hurled objects onto the
lawn, including one that was treated as a potential explosive. It had been
pretty peaceful first thing in the morning, but now the riot officers were
getting regularly pelted with water balloons, glitter bombs, and pieces of
trash. In at least one instance, someone threw a vial of blood that might
have been infected. As commanders tried to maintain discipline, Secret
Service agents with ladders strung bales of razor wire atop the fence, just in
case.

I
N A PRIVATE dining room at the Hay-Adams, much of the L-team was
gathering for a joint videoconference with protest organizers in New
York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and about a dozen other cities. Although
they were using the encrypted communications program Wire, they had
arranged ground rules in advance prohibiting sensitive tactical discussions,
on the assumption that government agencies would be spying on them. As
organizers hurried in with trays of microwaved food, the new faces around
the country introduced themselves and gave status reports on how their
local demonstrations were going. Several cities were feeling bullish and
wanted to expand the movement’s list of demands—from abolishing ICE or
Homeland Security, to repealing the Agents of Foreign Extremist
Organizations (AFEO) Act, to a constitutional amendment eliminating the

23
presidential pardon power. The San Francisco organizers got considerable
support for demanding a brand-new special presidential election.

But over about 90 minutes of persuasion and wrangling, Sarah Turk and
D.C. nationwide organizing coordinator Eliana Glass made the case that
those goals—while perhaps worthy and laudable—would muddle the
movement’s message, and ultimately managed to forge a consensus around
keeping the focus on Trump and Pence resigning. They ended with an
agreement to share resources, web platforms, and a brand—but to keep the
various demonstrations independently organized. So Trump Out New York
would remain autonomous, and Phoenix Against Tyranny would emphasize
its status as a recognized Trump Out affiliate. The big challenge now would
be building broader support for the general strike.

At Braddock’s Rock on the far northwestern corner of the Mall, Capt. Brian
Davis was passing out water bottles to his guardsmen in the early afternoon
heat. It was edging over 88 degrees Fahrenheit, but with the humidity felt
like 95. As the June sun beat down on their visored helmets and Kevlar, they
were drenched with sweat, and Davis monitored their glistening red faces
for signs of heatstroke. At the checkpoint, DHS officers were wanding
protesters, scanning IDs, and photographing people for the E-IDENT
database. Once cleared, they were directed up a ramp and onto the
Theodore Roosevelt Bridge, where troops from the 372nd were stationed at
intervals to keep everybody moving. Davis circulated around his company’s
area giving directions with a bullhorn.

But hardly anyone was leaving. Davis had braced his unit for a flood. He’d
envisioned a chaotic scene with lines backing up all the way to the

24
Washington monument. Instead, the checkpoint was never at capacity, and
the trickle of families and senior citizens making their way out had time for
pleasant chit-chat with the officers. Credentialed photojournalists loitered
around snapping photos through their large ungainly lenses. One flak
jacket-wearing reporter who identified herself as a correspondent for
Russia’s Sputnik news agency approached Davis and in excellent English
asked his thoughts on what was evidently most demonstrators’ decision to
defy the dispersal order. “I don’t know anything about that, ma’am,” he said.
“We’re just screening people to make sure everyone gets out safely.” After
four hours, the five checkpoints had only processed 15,158 protesters.

Just after 2:30 p.m., demonstrators around the Mall heard the whine of
helicopter blades and looked up to see two tilt-rotor Ospreys passing low
over the capital. Each carried a platoon of armed Marines to reinforce the
White House, and was slated to take a load of trapped nonessential
personnel back out of harm’s way. As the first one pulled up to a hover over
the South Lawn and began descending, the pilot noticed a dark shape
buzzing up toward him. A drone. At the last second, he pulled back up and
avoided a collision. But it was zooming all around the big helicopter, making
aggressive passes that came dangerously close to the rotors. The pilot
radioed to the Secret Service on the ground and both Ospreys retreated to a
holding pattern over the Potomac.

By the time a Secret Service officer got to the right angle on the roof with a
drone-disabling electronic weapon, the offending craft had disappeared.
After 15 minutes or so with no sign of it, the Ospreys were summoned back.
Just as the first one was descending, though, the dark octorotor shape
reappeared—veering up from below and menacing the cockpit. The pilot

25
aborted, and the drone was out of sight again before the officer on the roof
could get a bead on it.

And so the dance continued—two, three, four attempts. On the fourth pass,
the anti-drone weapon managed to knock it out of the sky, but just as
officers were racing to retrieve it from the lawn, a second drone came out of
nowhere and charged right at the landing helicopter. The pilot had no
choice but to get back to a safe distance. Eventually, with the new drone still
unaccounted for and the Ospreys running low on fuel, HMX-1 ordered them
back to base.

That put extra pressure on those besieged inside the White House
compound. Not only were they defending the executive mansion itself and
its two wings, but also were supporting the huge adjacent federal office
buildings: the Treasury headquarters to the east, and the Eisenhower
Executive Office Building to the West. Both structures directly faced protest
crowds, and Federal Protective Service officers had barricaded the entrances
from within and used tear gas to repulse intruders. After a pair of arson
attempts at the EEOB, the Secret Service used an undisclosed tunnel to send
reinforcements without being visible from Pennsylvania Avenue. Without
the extra Marines and nonlethal weapons from the Ospreys, it would be
harder to keep control over the whole complex.

And those weren’t the only buildings under threat. Although Trump Out
leadership had bought out all the hotels in the protest zone and discouraged
demonstrators from illegally occupying private property, rising tensions
with the government had weakened discipline. Restaurant refrigerators had
been raided for food, and some businesses had been taken over for sleeping

26
quarters by people desperate to get indoors. Several institutions inside the
cordon attracted outright hostility from more radical activists. Anti-
capitalist graffiti was sprayed on U.S. Chamber of Commerce headquarters
next to the Hay-Adams, and it might have been stormed if Peter
Balakrishnan hadn’t detailed security volunteers to clean it up and guard
the entrances. At the offices of defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton,
ground-floor windows were smashed and furniture vandalized. The
Department of Veterans Affairs had been evacuated Wednesday night, but
Evan Vrabec made contact with the VA to let them know that he had ex-
military guys standing watch to make sure no one broke in.

Perhaps most precarious was the block of government buildings

immediately west of Lafayette Square, which were cut off from the White
House and completely surrounded by the demonstrations. Opposite the
square was a line of historic row houses converted for federal use, most
notably Blair House, the official guest residence for visiting heads of state.
These enclosed a sheltered courtyard, over which loomed the 10-story New
Executive Office Building, a towering modern redbrick that housed the
Office of Management and Budget. Inside, a hodgepodge of about three
dozen Secret Service, FPS, and Diplomatic Security Service agents worked
to fortify the doors and windows. Every so often they had to expend
precious rubber bullets and smoke grenades staving off attempts to breach
the compound. Without provisions or a means of resupply, sweaty operators
with body armor and long guns gobbled up caviar-and-egg canapes that had
been left behind in the Blair House kitchens by the Romanian president.

In truth, though, this was a siege-within-a-siege. For the protesters still in

Lafayette Square and on the Mall, the National Guard blockade was starting

27
to impose hardships, too. The Armory hadn’t allowed any new food or
beverages into the protest zone for more than 24 hours, and supplies were
running low. Gone were the fresh banh mi sliders and Korean BBQ tacos,
replaced with saran-wrapped sandwiches, cups of ramen, granola bars, and
bags of Lay’s. Porta-potties were getting full and dirty, as soap dispensers
coughed out their last feeble pumps of bluish liquid. In anticipation that the
authorities might shut off municipal water, the L-team had arranged to fill
every clean container they could find with tap water. Even the bathtubs at
the Hay-Adams were filled with fresh water for emergency use. To keep
morale up, organizers went through the crowd trying to get people singing
and chanting as much as possible.

A couple blocks outside the cordon, Capt. Brian Davis and the rest of the
274th Military Police Company had come off the line and were waiting in a
small grassy park for the buses that would take them back to the Armory.
Davis leaned against a tree and took it all in. The Federal City was turning
into a giant bivouac as more and more security forces poured into the
capital from across the region. While D.C. cops mostly looked exhausted,
charter buses were bringing thousands more fresh police from outside the
District. They trudged down the sidewalks in platoon-sized columns toward
temporary accommodations in schools and government buildings,
shouldering duffels or athletic bags and carrying their riot helmets loosely.
Some seemed aggressive and eager, but most looked sullen as they sweated
in the sticky heat. Likewise, neighboring states’ National Guardsmen rolling
into Washington in endless columns of Humvees and Army trucks showed
little thirst for battle. They stared drowsily out at the surrounding streets,
not saying much. Spilling out of their vehicles in agency parking lots, they

28
heaved rucksacks onto their backs and set off in untidy formations for high
school football field staging areas, keeping their gazes on the pavement.

But some small units looked totally different. Every so often, Davis would
see a squad of special forces types go by, hanging onto the outside of a
BearCat or MRAP. Most were absolutely jacked, with short sleeves and
bulging biceps. Instead of riot gear, they wore heavy ballistic vests and high-
cut hockey-style helmets with microphone headsets. Their assault rifles
were heavily customized with scopes and laser sights, and spare magazines
bulged from chest rigs, pockets, and ammo pouches. Pistols and combat
knives were strapped anywhere there was room. Some were dressed in all
black, while others were in olive drab, desert tan, or dappled MultiCam
camouflage. Dark sunglasses were standard, but several units also had
expensive four-tube night vision goggles on, flipped up and ready for use
when darkness fell. In addition to prominent tabs with each operator's
blood type, many wore patches with aggressive images—tomahawks, Jolly
Rogers, or Punisher skulls. A few wore no visible insignia at all. They looked
like extras out of Zero Dark Thirty. While Davis doubted any of them were
actually Navy SEALs, with the exception of one group with “FBI” on the
back of their body armor, he couldn't tell what they were. One thing about
their identity stuck out, though. While the cops and guardsmen had a
significant minority of women and plenty of black and brown faces—indeed,
an outright majority of the D.C. Guard was soldiers of color—the teams
cockily riding around town outside armored vehicles were almost
exclusively white guys. Davis said a prayer that they would not bring further
violence to his city.

29
Shortly after 4:00 p.m., an unmarked Suburban raced down Constitution
Avenue with its internal red-and-blue flashers on. Inside was Senate
Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, traveling from his office in the Russell
Senate Office Building to the D.C. Armory to meet with Capitol Police chief
Steven Sund and the rest of Unified Area Command. As the burly black SUV
sped through a leafy residential neighborhood between 9th and 10th Streets,
a group of masked protesters ran out into the roadway ahead—linking arms
to block the vehicle’s way. The Capitol Police driver slammed on the brakes,
stopping just feet from the shouting gaggle. The Suburban flew into reverse,
tires screeching as it spun into a J-turn to face the opposite direction. But
just as it started to accelerate away from trouble, more masked figures
swarmed across the intersection to block its retreat. The driver tried
reversing again, but was completely surrounded in seconds. Activists dove
under the front and rear tires of the car, essentially daring the loathed
majority leader to run them over. Others linked hands in a human chain all
around from bumper to bumper, shouting abuse at the senator they knew
was within.

The assailants were a mix of Maryland Antifa, Solidarity Action Collective,

and Smash Racism DC—and as court documents later showed, had
coordinated their ambush via the Trump Out app after a journalist
livestreamed McConnell getting into the SUV outside his office. In the
background, an aide could be heard talking about going to the Armory, so
the black bloc had known where to lie in wait. As McConnell’s security detail
urgently radioed for assistance, some of the chanting figures outside kicked
at the armored Suburban. Inside the tinted windows, a Capitol Police officer
pressed the 79-year-old majority leader flat against a back seat, shielding
him with his body in case someone had a bomb or a high-powered rifle.

30
But rescuing McConnell—which would have ordinarily merited a
multiagency citywide emergency response—wouldn’t be easy. Hundreds of
thousands of Trump Out participants outside the cordoned-off protest zone
were congregating wherever they could and choking off the streets. MPD
precincts themselves were mobbed, and department leadership was barely
able to keep their own driveways clear. Charter bus drivers had begun to
walk off the job to join the general strike, and prisoner transportation
slowed to a crawl while National Guard trucks were pressed into temporary
service—and willing civilian drivers were found and bused up from South
Carolina. Police made arrests as fast as possible, herding truckload after
truckload of flex-cuffed protesters into the sweltering Capital One Arena, yet
more always took their place. Civil disorder spread as far north as Howard
University, and law enforcement was having an extremely difficult time
redeploying its units around the city in response to new flareups.

Even with thousands of extra personnel in the city, it was all Unified Area
Command could do to scrape together a few MPD squad cars to drop
everything and race to the majority leader’s beleaguered Suburban. They’d
dispatched an assault unit from CERT—essentially, the Capitol Police SWAT
team—but it had gotten blocked by more protesters. And while finding an
alternate route, it had been sent in the opposite direction chasing what
turned out to be a spurious report of an active shooter near the Rayburn
House Office Building.

As chaos gripped Washington with no sign of abatement, government

agencies were activating contingency plans for carrying on operations from
backup facilities outside the District. With tear gas seeping into FEMA’s

31
National Response Coordination Center just off the Mall, coughing and
wheezing employees stayed in the office just long enough to hand off their
responsibilities to the Regional Response Coordination Center in
Philadelphia before evacuating. At State Department headquarters five
blocks west of the White House, Foreign Service officers and Kevlar-wearing
Diplomatic Security Service teams carried banker boxes of sensitive papers
out to a convoy of waiting National Guard trucks—on which they were
transported under armed guard to secure locations in Virginia. Similar
scenes played out at Interior, Energy, and Justice, as secret documents and
electronics were spirited out of the city to prevent their loss in case mobs
stormed government buildings.

As the executive departments shifted their operations out of the capital,

overstretched Federal Protective Service agents were reinforced by heavily-
armed private security. Operators from half a dozen firms unknown to the
public—including Hyperion, Jotnar, MVM, and Z-Strat—showed up on
government property to keep out looters and protesters. Men with baseball
caps, long guns, and binoculars could soon be seen patrolling rooflines with
no visible insignia. Others in black tactical helmets—assessed by Bellingcat
to be law enforcement, but also wearing no identification—sighted
automatic weapons and sniper rifles on the crowd.

Meanwhile, the MPD officers trying to rescue Mitch McConnell were at an

impasse. They’d arrived to find the crowd of 23 rocking the Suburban back
and forth, banging on the windows and shouting at the occupants inside. On
seeing the squad cars pulling up, they promptly sat down, linking arms
around the vehicle in a tight circle. The police had ordered them at gunpoint
to get out from under the SUV’s tires, but received—per the body-worn

32
camera recordings—only a screamed taunt of “Pull the trigger, you gutless
pig!” In minutes, news cameras had arrived, and the Antifas were clearly
trying to provoke them into removing them with excessive force.

Finally, over an hour after the majority leader had been first waylaid, the
Capitol Police CERT unit arrived, boiling out of their own SUV with full
tactical gear and long guns. One by one, they pried the protesters away from
McConnell’s vehicle—tasing them when necessary—and carried them
flailing and thrashing to the sidewalk, where they were flex-cuffed facedown
until a prisoner transport van could collect them. Crucially, the images
going out to cable news showed only these pained postures of civil
disobedience—video of the Suburban being kicked and rocked wouldn’t
emerge until long after. Sen. McConnell wasn’t safely on his way until about
5:45 p.m.

Yet even as such clashes unfolded across the city, there were bright spots of
peace and understanding. Photos appeared on Twitter and on the newswires
of protesters and National Guard soldiers chatting casually at the Lafayette
Square barricades. In one much-played video, a 15-year-old DACA recipient
named Maria Sotelo stands on tiptoe to drape a homemade flower garland
around a Pennsylvania guardsman’s neck. In another viral clip, a girl of 12
or 13 crosses the barricades to give an Abrams tank crew Coca-Colas in a
moment instantly compared to Kendall Jenner’s infamous 2017 Pepsi
commercial. And perhaps the most publicized shots were of protesters
giving first aid to a riot police officer suffering heart trouble.

33
I
N HIS PERSONAL living room at Mar-a-Lago, President Trump flung

every profanity he could muster at the television. These images made

him look weak. When people saw his majority leader held hostage by
a band of masked thugs, Trump raged, that showed that the president
couldn’t protect his own people. But what incensed him even more than the
ongoing disorder was his own government’s helpless response to it. He’d
ordered swift justice for the people terrorizing America’s capital city. He’d
promised no mercy. So to see riot police palling around with the rioters was
galling—and reinforced his belief that civilian law enforcement was simply
not tough enough, and thus fundamentally incapable of restoring order.
“Why are they going easy on them?” witnesses recall the president fuming to
no one in particular as he stalked his private wing of the estate.

When Sebastian Gorka and White House Principal Deputy Chief of Staff
Stephen Miller came in for a pre-dinner situation update briefing, Trump’s
frustration came to a head. “I want to declare martial law,” the president
said, according to Maj. Tom Hizer’s subsequent testimony to the Romney-
Porter Committee. According to Hizer, both Miller and Gorka seemed open
to the idea, although vague on the specifics of how it might be implemented.
So they called National Security Council legal advisor Andy Rosenberg in
Washington and asked for an opinion. Rosenberg explained that while there
was no national martial law mechanism as such, and as long as civilian
courts were still functioning, the closest equivalent would be to issue a
formal declaration about the emergency and then direct the Pentagon to
activate CONPLAN 3502—the military plan for suppressing civil
disturbances, whose execution was known internally by the code name
Operation ROSEWATER (sometimes given as ROSE WATER).

34
As Trump summoned aides to begin drafting a declaration, other senior
staffers caught wind of what was afoot and hurried in to make their case.
White House Communications Director Kayleigh McEnany, social media
director Dan Scavino, and Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross cornered
Trump while he was back scowling at the TV with his feet up. Martial law,
they argued, would cause immense economic disruption and frighten
Freedom Caucus Republicans suspicious of government power. Moreover, it
would signal to the world that America was so weak it needed the Army to
handle a bunch of basement-dwelling snowflakes and pussy hat-wearing
social justice warriors with purple hair. Let the police and National Guard
deal with this, they argued, and you’ll be the hero.

But the president felt betrayed. He believed he’d been promised that the
new dispersal order on the Mall would swiftly bring the District under
control, but instead saw federal government departments packing up and
evacuating. From the blog printouts speechwriter Peter Bartos was showing
him, it seemed like every major city in America was being terrorized as
armed leftist thugs roamed the streets. As Ross later testified, he, McEnany,
and Scavino tried to convince Trump that whatever he was seeing online
was exaggerated. But they couldn’t change his mind, and left only with his
agreement not to do anything until after dinner. His daughter Ivanka and
her husband Jared Kushner arrived shortly after the others left, and as
reported in Ben Smith’s The Endgame, appear to have made much the same
arguments. The general strike was fizzling, Ivanka later told confidantes
she’d said. We’re winning, so why not just ride this out? Yet even as the
couple pleaded with the Donald, his eyes remained fixed on the television,
and the images of chanting protesters defying the dispersal order. His mind
was made up.

35
While Trump and most of his inner circle went out to the dining room for
another lavish meal, Sebastian Gorka and a group of National Security
Council staffers went to work drafting the proclamation and executive order
that Andy Rosenberg advised would be necessary to allow the execution of
Operation ROSEWATER. At around 7:45 p.m., an aide approached the
president during his meal and handed him the proclamation’s text for his
approval. He signed off, and 17 minutes later, the White House officially
promulgated the document.

The proclamation, shared on the administration’s social media and read

aloud by Homeland Security drones hovering over the Mall, read:
“WHEREAS; the Mayor of the District of Columbia has informed me that
conditions of domestic violence and disorder exist in and about the City of
Washington, endangering life and property and obstructing execution of the
laws, and that the law enforcement resources available to the District,
including the National Guard, are unable to suppress such acts of violence
and to restore law and order… NOW, THEREFORE, I, Donald J. Trump,
President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested
in me by the Constitution and laws of the United States, including Chapters
13 and 15 of Title 10 of the United States Code, do command all persons
engaged in such acts of violence to cease and desist therefrom and to
disperse and retire peaceably forthwith.”

Around 9:20 p.m., Trump returned to his private wing, where Gorka and
Miller gave him another briefing. The overwhelming majority of the
protesters were still defying the dispersal order, and Homeland Security
reported that just 68,625 persons had been screened and processed out of

36
the protest zone when the checkpoints had been closed. It was time. Andy
Rosenberg gave one last edit to the executive order text, and emailed it back
to Mar-a-Lago for final acceptance by POTUS. Trump immediately okayed
it, but there was a brief delay while an official copy was printed and
prepared. A polished oak table was cleared and brought in, and Dan Scavino
snapped photographs for posterity as DHS Secretary Chad Wolf handed
Trump a marker pen and he scrawled his jagged seismograph signature
onto the most historic order of his presidency.

Executive Order 14022: “WHEREAS; I have today issued Proclamation No.

10188 pursuant in part to the provisions of Chapter 13 of Title 10 of the
United States Code: and WHEREAS; the conditions of domestic violence
and disorder described therein continue, and the persons engaging in such
acts of violence have not dispersed; NOW, THEREFORE, by virtue of the
authority vested in me as President of the United States and Commander in
Chief of the Armed Forces by the the [sic] Constitution and laws of the
United States, including Chapters 13 and 15 of Title 10 of the United States
Code, it is hereby ordered as follows… Units and members of the Armed
Forces of the United States will be used to suppress the violence described
in the proclamation and to restore law and order in and about the District of
Columbia.”

Nobody bothered to warn the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General
Mark Milley. He was coming out of a Pentagon bathroom when an aide-de-
camp held up his phone—Milley saw the news on Twitter. And it was only
after E.O. 14022 had been promulgated that someone around Trump
thought to call the Secretary of Defense. General Jack was at home watching
the news on television with his wife when the phone rang from Mar-a-Lago.

37
Trump had invoked the Insurrection Act and declared martial law, Jack
later testified the president told him. He needed Jack to set ROSEWATER
in motion and restore order in Washington.

Jack said he’d schedule a meeting at the Pentagon first thing in the morning
to go over options—they could probably get significant active military units
into the capital by Saturday or Sunday. That wasn’t soon enough, Trump
said. According to the news, the protesters were planning a massive rally on
Saturday, and if the Army wasn’t already in place, it would surely turn
violent. NSC official Todd Sexton had reminded him that the 82nd Airborne
Division had been used to suppress riots in D.C. in 1968, and that today the
elite paratroopers could be deployed anywhere in the world in a matter of
hours—so that’s what the commander-in-chief wanted.

Jack patiently tried to explain why that wasn’t the best choice. The 82nd
Airborne’s Division Ready Brigade was held on standby as part of an
Immediate Response Force that could respond to international crises and
put boots on the ground anywhere in the world within 18 hours. If an anti-
American dictator suddenly threatened U.S. interests in some far-flung spot
on the globe, the 82nd was ready to, according to its unofficial mantra, “fight
tonight.” But if Trump dispatched all those 4,000 troops to police the
streets of Washington, Vladimir Putin would know that his tanks could
overrun Estonia and reach the Baltic before American conventional forces
could stop them. Likewise, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong Un, Ali Khamenei, and
every other strongman on earth would know that they had at least a day or
two free pass to cause whatever mischief they wanted and achieve a fait
accompli that Uncle Sam would be hard-pressed to reverse. Instead of
creating such an invitation unnecessarily, Secretary Jack suggested, why not

38
send troops that weekend from the 3rd Infantry Division, the 10th Mountain
Division, the 101st Airborne, or some combination of the three?

No, Trump said. They needed boots on the ground by morning. So Jack
suggested at least sending a smaller force, so the 82nd could hold combat
power in reserve. The DoD had an existing plan to send one battalion-sized
force to D.C. called Task Force Red Falcon, much as it had done in 2020’s
Operation Themis. Why not start with that?

But Trump wasn’t having it. Rattled by what he believed was an

assassination attempt the night before, he was single-mindedly fixated on
crushing the D.C. demonstrations at once, and with “overwhelming,
dominating power and strength.” It had to be the whole brigade. Jack was
troubled by what he perceived as the president’s agitated mental state, and
told his wife he would consider resigning—but ultimately, the former United
States Army Europe commander decided that his resignation itself would be
provocative to America’s enemies, and that it was better to stay on the job
and try to steer Trump away from even worse decisions. Secretary Jack
agreed to dispatch the 82nd Airborne from Fort Bragg, and called the
Pentagon to put the commander-in-chief’s wishes into effect immediately.

P
RIVATE FIRST CLASS Kevin Diaz mashed the controls of his

PlayStation 5, howling curses as the Soviet commando onscreen

cornered his CIA operative avatar and stabbed him to death with a
combat knife. The killer, PFC Jaxon Trimble, reached across the couch and
slugged Diaz in the arm as hard as he could. That was the victim’s penalty.
On bean bag chairs nearby, Corporal Adam Babick and PFC Jacob Lynch
hooted taunts. They were all soldiers in Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 325th

39
Infantry Regiment, 2nd Brigade Combat Team in the 82nd Airborne
Division—spending a typical Thursday night hanging out at Babick’s off-
base apartment, washing Flamin’ Hot Cheetos down with Mountain Dew,
and playing Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War. Diaz, 19 and acne-speckled,
was still often mistaken for a high schooler when out of uniform back home
in Houston, but here in North Carolina fit right in with thousands of barely
post-adolescent young men caught between two worlds—video games and
junk food in one, and jumping out of airplanes in the other.

Even as the nation’s partisan divides deepened around them, the rigors and
camaraderie of Army life normally pushed politics to the back of everyone’s
minds. Diaz was from a family of Democrats but hadn’t voted in 2020, and
while Trimble, Babick, and Lynch all seemed to like Trump, they hardly
made a big deal out of it. They hadn’t paid much attention to the protests in
D.C.—other than ghoulishly rewatching the gory clip of the BearCat
ramming—but from the snatches of Fox News they saw on base and the
chatter they heard around the unit, it sounded like a large mob of Antifa had
occupied a park near the White House and started rioting. That meant the
protesters hated cops, hated the military, and probably burned any
American flags they could get their hands on. Hearsay wafted around during
physical training—one sergeant was sure he’d read a statement calling for a
communist revolution, and a specialist from another company claimed to
have seen a video where the Trump Out organizers demand legalization of
pedophilia. One of the cooks in the dining facility said he’d heard they were
trying to start a race war, but the guys dismissed that as too far-fetched.

Now, controllers in hand, their only talk was trash talk—punctuated by

occasional rounds of “who would you rather?” questions about Instagram

40
models or porn stars. “Bailey Bae or Raven Lyn?” one of the guys asked in
the midst of the firefight. Raven, they agreed. “Okay, Autumn Falls or Jen
Selter?” Diaz bucked the trend and said Selter. Babick scoffed. “Are you
retarded, dude? Autumn Falls is perrr-fect.” They all felt their phones buzz
within a second or so of each other. Diaz, waiting for the next match,
checked his first.

He scanned the screen and shouted to the others to stop the game. It was an
urgent text message alert. Everyone in the unit was recalled back to base
immediately and had to be in formation within two hours. According to the
code words, it was a real-world no-notice deployment. As Babick packed his
gear and they all piled into his truck, they speculated—now deadly serious—
about where they were going. Would they be jumping into the Baltics?
Ukraine? Was it a realistic drill? Or was a shooting war about to start
somewhere? As they sped down the quiet streets of Fayetteville, none of
them had seen the news about the president’s order.

By just after midnight on Friday the 18th in Washington, it appeared that no

more executive orders were imminent, so after helping draft a statement
condemning E.O. 14022, senior Trump Out organizer Lucía Campos-
Herrera went up to her room at the Hay-Adams and crashed.

She awoke before dawn to see strange bright lights lancing into her room. At
first she thought she was still half-asleep, and struggled to make sense of the
intense blue and green beams that burned on the wall opposite her bed
every few seconds. Slipping out her earplugs, she heard wailing klaxons
echoing outside in the indigo morning. And amplified voices in the distance.
Padding across the room to the window, she looked down onto the square

41
below and clamped her eyes shut as her whole world went brilliant, painful
red. It took some seconds for the ragged greenish afterimage to clear from
her retina, and when she gingerly opened her eyes, she realized what was
going on. A drone with a floodlight was hovering low over H Street, and
people in the crowd were aiming lasers at it—borrowing a technique
pioneered by Hong Kong protesters in 2019 to defeat government facial
recognition technology.

Campos-Herrera stopped to think of the implications. The leaps AI and big

data had made over the last five years made it terrifyingly easy for domestic
intelligence services to identify the faces of citizens in public places.
Sometimes even when they were wearing facemasks. Footage from
Homeland Security drones could be used to track down and prosecute
protesters—and potentially subject them to harassment by the
administration. It hardly seemed implausible. After all, Trump himself had
reportedly told Xi Jinping after the virtual G20 summit in November that
China’s dystopian social credit system was “such a smart idea … we should
maybe look into something like that.” Further, as January’s JournoLeaks
disclosures showed, rogue pro-Trump loners inside those agencies could
easily abuse that data to doxx and threaten people they saw as enemies.

For the first time, she wondered seriously what personal risks she was
facing. Campos-Herrera, 27, was no stranger to activism. She had been
heavily involved in the Women’s March movement starting in 2017, and had
intended to focus on political organizing over the summer after leaving her
job at the Center for American Progress in preparation to move up to Boston
in the fall to start a master’s at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of
Government. But this was different. Now there were tanks, and guns, and a

42
president who said that the demonstrators were killers and promised no
mercy.

It was bizarre to contemplate, but mostly by chance she had become one of
the top few dozen opposition leaders in America—there was no way there
wasn’t a file card on her taped up in a government headquarters somewhere
under a printout of her LinkedIn portrait. Her thoughts turned homeward
to Los Angeles. Was she putting her mother and sisters in danger? Would
some nutjob find their address on 8kun and show up with a gun? Or would
he make a false 9-1-1 call and have a SWAT team do it for him? On the way
down to breakfast, she texted her mom and told her to pack a bag and stay
with her cousins in Orange County until this was all over.

Although law enforcement knew that Leah Greenberg, Vanessa Wruble,

Sarah Turk, Daniela Saez, David Litt, and Evan Vrabec were prominent
Trump Out organizers, they actually had a very shaky idea of who else was
leading the movement—and Lucía Campos-Herrera wasn’t even on their
radar. Indeed, the government nerve center she envisioned was at that
moment being packed up at the Armory and loaded into 5-ton trucks to be
set up again 2.5 miles to the southwest at Fort Lesley J. McNair.

At the same time, a column of 22 Blackhawk helicopters was flying low over
Northern Virginia, following I-95 toward the capital. They turned sharply
over the Potomac and crossed into Maryland. At 7:15 a.m., the lead
Blackhawk touched down at Joint Base Andrews carrying Brigadier General
Galen Wood and the nucleus of what was to become the airborne-
component headquarters of Joint Task Force National Capital Region, or
JTF-NCR. After the Secretary of Defense ordered Operation ROSEWATER

43
activated, the Pentagon had sent an urgent notification to four-star general
Glen VanHerck, head of U.S. Northern Command (USNORTHCOM) and
responsible for all internal defense operations in the homeland. Following
the ROSEWATER plan, VanHerck immediately began establishing a joint
task force to coordinate the many units and agencies working to restore
order. Its pre-designated commander was Major General Milford Beagle Jr.,
a combat-tested Iraq and Afghanistan veteran who had just taken over the
week before as head of Joint Force Headquarters National Capital Region at
Fort McNair. Its deputy commander normally would have been Rear
Admiral James Costa, commandant of Naval District Washington, but Costa
had been sacked on June 11 after a statement to his command blasting the
“dangerous and dishonorable incitement by the Commander-in-Chief.” So
instead, VanHerck tapped Brig. Gen. Wood—the 82nd Airborne’s number
two man—and gave him orders to fly out of Fort Bragg first thing in the
morning to oversee setup of a secondary HQ at Andrews to coordinate the
incoming forces.

Now, Wood strode across the tarmac in his camouflage combat uniform and
maroon beret, weightlifter’s frame puffing out the single star on his chest.
With close-cropped hair and bright veneers since losing his front teeth in a
training accident, Wood bears a passing resemblance to Bob Odenkirk and
speaks with a courtly Charleston accent that’s a bit anachronistic for a man
his age. He won a Bronze Star for valor as a company commander in Iraq in
2003, and was highly regarded in the airborne community as a hardworking
and relentless warfighter. The soldiers of the 82nd knew he had no tolerance
for dithering or inaction.

44
Waiting to greet him as the Blackhawk spun down were Maj. Gen. Beagle,
3rd Infantry Regiment Commander Col. Frank Castagnaro, Brad Hewitt of
DHS, and Peter Zeller—the newly appointed Senior Civilian Representative
of the Attorney General, or SCRAG, who was the top overall federal official
on scene. Zeller, 41, had been a White House lawyer before serving as Bill
Barr’s deputy chief of staff, and Acting Attorney General Ian Gallup selected
him for his loyalty to Trump and extremely expansive view of presidential
power. At Yale Law School in 2003, he’d written in favor of punitive killings
of terrorists’ families, and in 2020 had argued pseudonymously on the
right-wing opinion site American Greatness that Trump should “declare
martial law via the Insurrection Act … to stop the Democrat coup.” He was a
key architect of the PAP detentions on Johnston Island, and his only
significant public appearance had been as the unfamiliar bald man with
thick glasses standing near the president as he signed Executive Order
14004.

The five men shook hands and did introductions on the move, as Wood
pressed to see the aircraft hangar being emptied out and hastily outfitted to
serve as his headquarters. Outside, JFHQ-NCR’s 41-foot Mobile Command
Center truck was parked with its antenna up to provide secure
communications. 3rd Infantry soldiers were carrying boxes of comms gear
back and forth. As they entered the yawning hangar bay, there were dozens
of Army, Air Force, and Homeland Security personnel erecting cubicles,
setting up tables and folding chairs, running extension cords, and standing
up projector screens. Wood sized the place up, and pronounced himself
pleased with the progress.

45
So Beagle, Castagnaro, and Hewitt were taken aback when Wood asked
them quite gravely if they had taken any KIA during the night. “Killed in
action?” Hewitt asked. The paratrooper general nodded. Hewitt said they
hadn’t. What about the terror threats—had they apprehended any would-be
suicide bombers? Again, Hewitt said, no. Snipers? Once more, no. From his
face, both men got the sense Wood took this as a sign they hadn’t been
doing their jobs. When the strutting one-star had seen everything he wanted
to see in the hangar, Beagle, Wood, Hewitt, and the SCRAG crowded into an
unmarked black DHS Suburban and headed across the river for a joint
reconnaissance of their area of operations.

Back in the Hay-Adams war room, the L-team was urgently trying to build
more momentum for the general strike. Mark Matulis and the labor
outreach organizers were working the phones with Big Labor leaders,
heatedly making the case that their buy-in could be decisive. David Litt and
the comms group were booking more cable news hits to press the narrative
that the strike was biting deep and rapidly gaining size. They’d just made a
huge $3.5 million ad buy across social media platforms, and were trying to
lock in more funding, but had hit a snag. A couple wealthy backers wanted
to each make seven-figure donations, but because Trump Out’s 501(c)(4)
tax-exempt status hadn’t yet been approved, they were concerned about the
financial implications. Their fundraising coordinator, a white-maned Silicon
Valley venture capital exec aptly named John Angel, was pacing the hallway
on his cell—barely containing his fury at the venality in a time like this.
“Screw your taxes,” he raged at one liberal billionaire, “just be a fucking
patriot here.”

46
Angel wasn’t alone in being snippy. The DHS drones had been blaring their
klaxons all night across the protest zone, and those forced to bed down
outside without noise-cancelling headphones had gotten almost no sleep.
Veterans outreach coordinator Evan Vrabec was out near the H Street
barricades late in the morning when he saw a man in camo fatigues, a red
kerchief, and a balaclava strolling down the sidewalk with a scoped AR-15.
“Hey!” Vrabec pointed at him and hollered for his attention. He demanded
that the guy get that thing off the street—gesturing emphatically toward the
Abrams tanks just out of view. “Do you want to get us all killed?” Pretty
soon, they were jawing at each other, almost physically butting heads as the
man refused to stand down.

Before it could come to blows, more It’s On Vets members showed up and
pulled them apart. Despite the pleas from those around him, the masked
man went armed on his merry way. Vrabec texted Peter Balakrishnan,
warning that for all they knew pro-Trump provocateurs had slipped into the
crowd with guns expressly for the purpose of provoking a crushing
response. “A no masks rule wouldn’t fly. Virus, also face recognition,”
Balakrishnan answered. Unsatisfied, Vrabec phoned Kerry Adams, an
organizer with a left-wing militia called Redneck Revolt, guessing that the
guy might have been one of them—but Adams assured him that while some
of their members were carrying at the Virginia demonstrations, they were
honoring the gun ban on the Mall. Maybe he was one of the survivalist
types, then. So Vrabec called Robby Swendseid, the Oregon libertarian
activist who had encouraged his followers to bring weapons to the
demonstration. He begged him to at least ask people to keep their firearms
out of sight. But Swendseid wouldn’t budge now. “Martial law,” he said as

47
though Vrabec was high. “Tiananmen Square, bro. Freaking Moscow. That’s
not gonna be me.”

B
Y LUNCHTIME, THE mood in the war room had brightened to

cautious optimism, as a round of good news came in about strike

actions on the West Coast. L.A. was effectively shut down from the
ocean to the 405. Workers in Seattle were pouring onto the streets by the
hundreds of thousands, and Sea-Tac airport was at a standstill without
baggage handlers or aircraft maintenance workers. In San Francisco, two
truck drivers had caused chaos on the Bay Bridge by parking their semis
across traffic and bailing on foot.

Still, it was hard to estimate precisely how serious an economic impact all
the disruption was having. That morning in response to Trump’s executive
order and with the DOW south of 15,000, the Securities and Exchange
Commission had taken an emergency vote to—in an unprecedented step—
preemptively suspend all trading across the United States until Monday.
The uncertainty had bred fear. Many worried that strikes would disrupt
their access to food and medicine. And while most main streets around the
country still looked essentially normal, social media speculation was giving
people visions of tanks soon rumbling through their hometowns.
Americans, still traumatized by the 2020 coronavirus shortages, had rushed
to stock up on groceries, toilet paper, and other essentials. Gas stations were
jammed as drivers filled up their tanks for whatever was to come. Amazon
customers were warned that “Inventory and delivery may be temporarily
unavailable due to increased demand.”

48
Now, it was all hands on deck planning for the massive protests slated for
the next day—Saturday. The nationwide call to action was urgent:
#EverybodyIntoTheStreets and #IntoStreetsNow topped the trending
charts as celebrities and pundits warned on Twitter that E.O. 14022 put
America on the brink of militarized dictatorship. Millions of people around
the country had indicated on the Trump Out app that they were traveling to
D.C. for the June 19 demonstrations, but with the blockade around the Mall
and institution of martial law across the capital, the original plan would no
longer be feasible.

For this reason, the L-team selected alternate occupation sites for the new
arrivals, including Rock Creek Park and the grounds of the Old Soldiers’
Home to the north, the National Arboretum to the northeast, and two Army
Navy Country Club sites across the Potomac in Virginia with their more
than 500 acres of golf courses. Attendees were strongly urged to bring as
much food and water as possible, along with a published list of other
necessities including portable dry toilets, hand sanitizer, and batteries.
Anyone with a mobile WiFi hotspot was implored to bring it and make it
available to fellow participants. On Saturday night after a full day of
demonstrations, the crowds were to mass outside Arlington National
Cemetery and along the borders of the police lines—wherever those might
be by then—for a phone-and-candlelight vigil. And if Trump was still in
office on the 26th, they’d do it all again a week later.

Around 1315 hours, an Air Force C-17 transport banked low over suburban
Maryland and came to a short landing at Joint Base Andrews. The ramp
lowered, and PFC Kevin Diaz and over 130 paratroopers from the 82nd
Airborne emerged blinking onto the sun-drenched runway. Due to brigade

49
rotation, none of them had been part of the 82nd’s 2020 deployment, so
nobody knew what to expect. As the Globemaster’s jets idled behind them,
officers formed them up into their units and marched them to color-coded
staging areas just off the tarmac. The area was crowded but orderly. Several
planes had already landed and decanted other companies from the 2nd
BCT—Falcon Brigade—but Alpha Company was still close to the tip of the
spear. More C-17s would be coming in from Fort Bragg any minute, and the
sorties would continue well into the evening as the nearly 4,000 soldiers
and all their equipment was airlifted over. After depositing their gear in one
of the hangars, they were each issued 10 live 5.56 mm rounds for their M4s.
As they were loading their magazines, an order came down from above:
keep your gas masks and bayonets with you. The JAG briefing on Rules for
the Use of Force would be given once they were in the city. With that, Diaz
and the rest of his platoon were loaded onto a bus bound for RFK Stadium
across from the Armory.

As the first 82nd Airborne soldiers arrived in Washington, foreign embassies

were frantically working to evacuate their citizens. The Taipei Economic and
Cultural Representative Office sent diplomatic minivans around the city to
pick up distressed Taiwanese nationals and get them away from the
demonstrations. Colombian embassy workers were driving stranded
travelers in their personal cars to motels in Frederick, Maryland. Germany’s
ambassador sent out an alert to German citizens registered with the
embassy, and posted on social media offering assistance to any E.U.
passport holders unable to get out of D.C.—only to find herself unable to
secure transportation either. Virtually no charter buses were available
anywhere on the East Coast, public transportation was shut down, and Uber
and Lyft were overwhelmed to the point of unusability. At last, they

50
managed to locate a hodgepodge of stretch limousines from across
Pennsylvania, including a 42-passenger party bus from Philadelphia. So
there were absurd scenes like Siemens executives in business suits packing
into a neon pink Hummer limo for a somber ride up to the accommodations
their embassy had arranged four hours up I-95 in northern New Jersey. The
Ivorian community was not so lucky—when a crowd formed around Cote
D’Ivoire’s limestone-and-brick embassy off Sheridan Circle, staff locked the
doors and the ambassador fled in a black Mercedes. Dark smoke could be
seen wafting from the chimneys of several other missions around
Washington, which U.S. intelligence officials believe was likely diplomatic
staff destroying secret papers.

With the influx of active-duty military starting to take pressure off the police
and Guard, SCRAG Pete Zeller had ordered federal law enforcement units to
gear up for more proactive missions. There was a fear that rioters could
break into stores and steal propane or fireworks for terroristic purposes. So
DHS and Border Patrol agents were dispatched to all known retailers to
secure and impound sensitive materials. Acting under the expansive and
flexible powers of the Insurrection Act, Zeller sent ATF teams to gun stores
in neighboring Maryland—with orders to seize all firearms, issue
storeowners receipts for them, and then truck them for safekeeping to a
depot at Fort Belvoir. Other forces, including National Guard, ICE agents,
and U.S. Marshals, were sent to take control of critical infrastructure in and
around the District—from power substations to water treatment plants,
communications towers, and hospitals. With many utility workers staying
home from work, an engineering brigade of West Virginia Guard was being
pressed into service to keep the lights on.

51
Just after 4:00 p.m. back at the Armory, Captain Brian Davis’s unit of D.C.
guardsmen was gearing up for another foray back into the city. As they
donned gas masks and loaded nonlethal rounds into their Humvees, they
could see a line of buses emerging from RFK Stadium where the 82nd
Airborne was staging. It was time for their first joint operation. About 750
demonstrators had congregated in Columbus Circle across from Union
Station, and were blocking traffic along Massachusetts Avenue. They had
already refused multiple dispersal orders and some were throwing bottles at
police, so JTF-NCR had ordered mass arrests. While the Guard secured the
surrounding intersections and prevented anyone from escaping, civil
disturbance-trained formations from Falcon Brigade would assault the
demonstration and begin detaining people for transport to FedExField half
an hour away in Maryland.

Davis stood in the open commander’s hatch of the company’s lead M1117
Guardian armored personnel carrier, listening to the thuds and sirens
drifting on the air from deeper downtown. As beads of sweat ran down his
face, he took off his helmet and poured water through his short sandy hair
to cool off. God, it felt good. Major Harrison’s voice came over the radio:
“Seahawk, Seahawk, Seahawk.” That was the code word for jumping off.
Davis strapped the helmet back on and relayed the order down through the
hatch. The driver revved the engine and led the company’s long column of
Guardians and Humvees out of the parking lot and into the westbound lane
of Independence Avenue.

Georgetown law student Caleb Broadlie, who had been involved in the
protests since the night of Michael Glazer’s shooting, was part of the crowd
in Columbus Circle that afternoon—after seeing a live action alert on the

52
Trump Out app that there was a spontaneous demonstration forming there.
There were now a few dozen riot police on hand, but they were preoccupied
guarding the barricades outside Lower Senate Park, and not present in
sufficient numbers to suppress the new action. The crowd had drummed
and chanted for over two hours. Some tried to make small talk with the
cops, but these were from a unit bused in from Delaware and acted
standoffish. When a BearCat rolled up and started blaring dispersal orders
through its LRAD acoustic system, the crowd raised their V-signs and
roared back “I am not afraid!” chants until they were hoarse. Broadlie didn’t
see any of the bottle-throwing.

Broadlie and one of his old Morehouse classmates were chatting with a man
who said he was a D.C. councilmember. They were all having a good laugh
about something when the first shield walls of riot-armored paratroopers
came into view. At almost the same moment, those in the circle who were
able to get cell reception got push notifications on the Trump Out app
warning them that large anti-demonstration forces were approaching.
“Scatter!” someone shouted. That had been the M.O. ever since the
Wednesday crackdown: converge suddenly, block traffic, and then melt
away down surrounding streets before the authorities could mass enough
force to round everybody up. Broadlie turned to the councilmember and
pointed down E Street. They took off running.

Broadlie could hear an officer on the LRAD ordering the crowd to stop.
Flashbang grenades went off behind them. E Street angled rightward as it
exited the plaza around Columbus Circle, with two midrise offices
preventing the crowd from seeing around the corner. As he made the turn,
Broadlie’s heart sank. Three Humvees were parked crosswise blocking the

53
roadway, and National Guard soldiers had erected crowd control netting
across the entire width of the street and sidewalks. White clouds of tear gas
bloomed in front of them. They were trapped.

At an identical roadblock one block over on F Street, Brian Davis watched

from his M1117 hatch as one of his platoons forced back the onrushing
crowd. The tear gas and flashbangs halted just about everyone, but a few
dozen slammed into the crowd control netting and tried to get through.
There was a momentary crush as they tried to push by or climb over, but the
nets held. One man brandished a pocket knife and was halfway through
cutting a hole for himself when two guardsmen yanked it out of his hands,
pulled him through the hole and body-slammed him to the sidewalk. Davis
shouted at them not to use excessive force, and a sergeant came running to
keep things under control.

Within about ten minutes, the demonstrators had all been forced back
toward Columbus Circle and Davis paced down a line of about half a dozen
flex-cuffed detainees sitting with their heads back against the sliding door of
a parking garage. A few of them were bleeding. Two of them had been
apprehended after breaking into a locked cafe trying to evade arrest. Davis
opened a bottle of water and offered each a mouthful. He poured the rest
onto the eyes of a woman who was suffering badly from the tear gas. They
all muttered thanks. Davis noticed that one of them had a large bruise on
one cheek where the skin had been torn. He asked the man what had
happened. Shot in the face by a rubber bullet, he said. Davis asked which
side of the street he was on when it happened. The far side, he said. Davis
marched over and found the shooter responsible. When no satisfactory
excuse was forthcoming, he balled him out in front of the rest of the squad.

54
Back on Columbus Circle, the 82nd Airborne had surrounded most of the
demonstrators with a kettle maneuver and was prying them apart one by
one. Flex-cuffed, they were loaded onto a long line of flatbed trucks that
showed up from the Armory to haul them off to the stadium in Maryland. By
5:45 p.m., commanders reported back to JTF-NCR that 739 demonstrators
had been arrested.

But while mass arrests and street fighting convulsed parts of the District
that evening, there was still no sign of an all-out assault on the heart of the
protest zone. At the Lafayette Square barricades, protesters and police had
forged an informal truce to allow ambulances into the protest zone for bona
fide medical emergencies—a measure that probably saved several lives on
Friday alone.

Inside the Trump Out war room, organizers were under pressure to figure
out a solution for the movement’s long-delayed leadership elections.
Activists had pressured the leadership team into adding to their own
number via an open ballot hosted on the app. But severe connectivity
problems and the militarized onslaught of the last 50+ hours had prevented
many demonstration participants from voting, so the L-team had repeatedly
extended the voting deadline. As a result, they were caught between one
group of angry people hounding them for delaying a democratic election,
and another group of angry people raising hell that they were being
disenfranchised. There were no easy answers. Paper ballots were too much
of a logistical challenge, but they did manage to create a simplified online
voting page that could load more quickly for those with weak service. There

55
would be one final extension: the apps polls would close at 11:59 p.m. on
Saturday night after the day’s enormous demonstrations had concluded.

Just down the hall, Evan Vrabec was making his case to David Litt and the
communications team as they prepared for their prime time media blitz.
The coverage so far, he said, still didn’t make the Trump Out movement
look patriotic enough for conservatives and moderates—groups they’d need
to turn against the president in the coming days if he was going to resign.
The comms folks were all coastal liberals, and about half of them had gone
to Yale or Harvard. None had worked for Republicans or served in the
military. No judgment, Vrabec said, but you’ve got blinders on. A couple
years before, one remembers, they wouldn’t have listened. But stung by the
2020 loss and impressed with Vrabec’s personal character, they took heed.

“Hand out more American flags for every live [television shot],” Litt’s notes
from the meeting read. “Put wounded warriors on camera… More families…
More kids (maybe from outside mall?)… Seniors, Vietnam vets.” They had
to make it harder for Trump to define their image, Vrabec said. A lot of the
middle-of-the-road types he’d been talking to bought some of the lies
because they were seeing too radical a picture on TV. Even though many of
the demonstrators were wearing masks, he suggested getting those still
willing to show their faces in front of cameras at every opportunity—it was
humanizing, and emphasized that they weren’t Antifa. If Trump Out didn’t
have a deliberate strategy to do that, news crews would find whoever looked
most interesting, and every television clip of a septum-pierced socialist with
turquoise armpit hair actively hurt the movement’s ability to achieve critical
mass support around the country. A few comms volunteers bristled, but
most realized Vrabec was right.

56
T
HE SETTING SUN had given way to deep blue twilight by the time

PFC Kevin Diaz and his platoon deployed onto the streets around
Dupont Circle to enforce the new dusk-to-dawn curfew declared by
JTF-NCR across most of the District. Patrolling on foot between deserted
storefronts just before 2130 hours, they didn’t see a soul. The asphalt was
littered with trash and debris—broken glass, empty water bottles, discarded
clothing, earplugs, goggles, spent tear gas grenades, and trampled protest
signs. None of the windows around them appeared broken, and there were
no signs of looting. Lights were on in some upper-story windows. They
appeared to have the upper hand.

A shout from a balcony overhead got the soldiers’ attention. A nonlethal

gunner trained his weapon at the source of the sound, but the squad leader
signaled him to hold fire. Then another shout from across the street. Diaz
instinctively felt for the loaded magazine in his back pocket, but the
lieutenant yelled for everyone to stay calm. More people were making noise
now on upper floors—all around them, it seemed. Clapping. Cheering.
Pounding on apartment windows. Ringing bells. Banging pots and pans. In
the distance, it sounded like someone was crashing cymbals together.
Gradually, Diaz could make out chants of “Trump out!” amidst the
cacophony. But they couldn’t see anyone. A few heads silhouetted by lit
rooms, but that was it. Air horns added to the din. The platoon kept moving.
Then, after two minutes, the noise ended as suddenly as it started, and
silence fell back over the empty street.

As the 82nd Airborne methodically cleared the core of the city, block by
block and intersection by intersection, National Guard units erected more

57
crowd control netting along the sidewalks to block off pedestrian access to
the streets. During daylight hours, crossing at intersections would be tightly
controlled by the police and Guard, and motor vehicles would be forbidden
within a wide radius of the protest zone. Cops were setting up more Jersey
barriers overnight to keep them out. Off to the south, Diaz could hear the
echoing klaxons of the DHS drones as they began their nightly runs to deny
the demonstrators sleep. He thought they were burglar alarms.

On all sides of Washington, Americans were still arriving in overwhelming

numbers for Saturday’s protest. They included doctors, teachers, retirees,
and stay-at-home parents—but a greatly disproportionate number were
students who’d recently gotten out on summer break. In Arlington, police
arrested a high school junior who rammed through the gates of the Army
Navy Country Club with his truck, but while they were questioning him, a
flood of other vehicles roared through the open entrance and onto the golf
course. Hopelessly outnumbered and without available backup, the officers
retreated. Soon, hundreds of RVs, camper-shell pickups, and unassuming
sedans were cruelly mauling the manicured greens as they staked out spots
to occupy. And they kept coming. Despite National Guard roadblocks on the
highways, motorists with navigation apps easily found detours. News
helicopters showed an unbroken river of red taillights snaking into
Northern Virginia halfway back to Richmond. Across the Potomac, the
white ribbon of bumper-to-bumper headlights stretched clear up to
Baltimore.

As they arrived, some erected festive protest camps and started cookouts.
One couple from Michigan pulled their motorhome off to the side of the
highway and set up a brats-and-lemonade stand under a “Resignation

58
Party” banner. Another man at the roadside was hawking “Trump declared
Martial Law and all I got was this lousy t-shirt” tees for $20 each. But up in
Rock Creek Park, wary young activists were busy doling out gas masks and
fortifying their positions with chains strung between parked cars.

Partly buoyed by the influx of newcomers, resistance continued around the

outskirts of the city late into the night. Outside the largely secured areas
north and east of the Mall, chanting crowds repeatedly formed and
dispersed before approaching troops could corner them—with no concrete
goal other than defying the curfew. At the iconic Busboys and Poets cafe, a
demonstration started near midnight that included human microphone
performances and speeches by celebrities including Hamilton composer
Lin-Manuel Miranda. By the time Virginia National Guard units arrived to
break it up an hour later, police spotters estimated to JTF-NCR that more
than 5,000 people had spilled out onto surrounding streets. Within
minutes, a new demonstration was flaring up near the Arboretum.
Commanders reported to Wood and Beagle that it was like playing whack-a-
mole.

At the Homewood Suites hotel on Thomas Circle just north of the protest
zone, National Guard troops from the 20th Special Forces Group were
settling down for the night on down pillows and king beds. But activists
outside soon became aware of their presence and started blaring air horns
to keep them awake. Police arrested a few, but then employees started
pulling the fire alarms. When Maryland state troopers were dispatched to
the scene, black bloc members put up fiery roadblocks to slow their
response.

59
Watching television in his Mar-a-Lago living room after one in the morning,
Trump saw aerial footage of burning tires in an intersection and seemed on
the brink of throwing things. “We declared martial law, didn’t we? Why is
this still happening?” witnesses recall him asking the room again and again.
As networks replayed Maj. Gen. Beagle’s morning press conference, Trump
looked sourly at the screen. “He doesn’t look very smart,” the president said.
The statement hung awkwardly in the air—Beagle is African-American, and
no one wanted to ask Trump what he meant by that assessment.

Even the hyper-conservative One America News Network was reporting

now on worsening disorder in numerous urban areas in response to the D.C.
crackdown. In Portland, Oregon State Police had been forced to retreat from
the Pearl District as rioting intensified. On the campus of UC Berkeley, an
administration building had been vandalized and set on fire. To the south,
the federalized California National Guard was out in force on the streets of
L.A.—over Governor Gavin Newsom’s objections—but still hadn’t managed
to restore order across the vast freeway-cut metropolis. Although not as
violent as the city’s 1992 riots, the sheer size of the demonstrations dwarfed
anything law enforcement had ever seen. Indeed, not a single governor had
been able to call Mar-a-Lago and announce that the emergency in their state
had been brought totally under control. Six more people had been killed
across the country, and Secretary Wolf reported that several dozen police
had been injured during the day’s clashes.

So for his last act before retiring to bed for a long night of tweeting and
haranguing aides by phone, Trump called General VanHerck at
USNORTHCOM and demanded more active military deployments. The
conversation only lasted several minutes, and ended with the president

60
 approving VanHerck’s suggested options. The 10th Mountain Division’s 1st
Brigade Combat Team at Fort Drum, New York would be dispatched to
Manhattan. The 101st Airborne’s 1st BCT would fly from Fort Campbell,
Kentucky to restore order in Chicago. The 3rd Infantry’s 2nd Armored BCT
would drive inland from Fort Stewart, Georgia to suppress the growing riots
in Atlanta. And the 1st Marine Expeditionary Brigade would head up the
coast from Camp Pendleton to reinforce the overwhelmed National Guard
troops in Los Angeles. The requisite proclamations and executive orders
would be signed first thing in the morning.

B
UZZFEED INVESTIGATIVE REPORTER Noah Feldstein awoke to a

thunderous crash in his Santa Monica apartment. He sat up and

was reaching for the light when he heard heavy footsteps outside
his bedroom door. “FBI!” bellowed a voice, and in one fluid movement,
helmeted figures burst in through the darkness and yanked him out of bed.
He was frog-marched into his kitchen, barefoot and disoriented, and
handcuffed at gunpoint as officers patted him down and placed him under
arrest for felony criminal threats and making threats across state lines. An
agent shouted at him to tell them where the guns were in the residence.
Feldstein said there weren’t any, but he could tell they didn’t believe it.

Men in Bureau windbreakers went from room to room with evidence bags,
sweeping up papers and all his electronics—MacBook Pro, iPhone 12, eight
burner flip phones, digital camera, and dozens of external hard drives,
microSD cards, flash memory sticks, DVDs, and chargers. Feldstein thought
of the USB drive he’d secretly picked up from Julia Glazer in a hotel room 12
days earlier—the only extant copy of the full source notes behind her
husband Michael Glazer’s bombshell Washington Post exposé. The one that

61
outed paid provocateurs inciting violence on behalf of the President of the
United States, and that got him killed five days later. Feldstein knew the
threats charges were bogus—they could only be here now for Glazer’s data.
The investigators dug into laundry, emptied cabinets, pawed around in the
refrigerator, and rifled through drawers. One dismantled the DVR over his
television while another tore apart the sofa.

Over and over, they asked him about his firearms, making reference to
threats he’d made against police. But he knew his rights, and refused to
answer further questions until he had a lawyer present. One of the agents
held out the iPhone to him: “Gimme your thumb. Unlock this.” Feldstein
refused. He’d disabled Touch ID anticipating precisely such a situation, and
reminded them that he was not legally obligated to provide the password.
They showed him the warrant—computers and phones were explicitly
included, along with their access keys—and reminded Feldstein that he was
adding contempt to the deep legal hole he was in. A decade or more in
prison. Besides, they said, the FBI had advanced new decryption technology
and could crack the phone as soon as they got back to the field office. If he
just told them the passwords, they’d try to get him less aggressive
prosecution. When they saw that he still wasn’t talking, they let him put
shoes on while the team hauled evidence out to waiting SUVs. As they led
him out the door, Feldstein saw the coffee mug full of pens sitting
undisturbed on the counter, including the black ballpoint that concealed
Glazer’s USB drive.

Three hours ahead in Washington, Saturday the 19th was a cooler morning
than the previous two days—the sun climbed into a clear blue sky as more
than two million demonstrators made their way toward the Mall. In the

62
African-American community, June 19 is celebrated as Juneteenth—after the
day in 1865 when the last of Confederate slavery was abolished. As such, the
date had special significance for the hundreds of thousands of Black people
joining the protests, mostly D.C. natives. On the campus of Gallaudet
University, Harvard professor Cornel West and a group of local ministers led
a morning rally unmolested by police. People of all races joined the gathering
on foot, and by the time they started marching south toward the National
Guard roadblocks around 10:30 a.m., a police drone suggested that there
were almost 250,000. Several similar marches were swelling all around the
capital region.

At JTF-NCR headquarters at Fort McNair, Maj. Gen. Beagle and Pete Zeller
were meeting with a range of civilian agency heads in the JOC—the modern
Joint Operations Center built in the wake of 9/11 to coordinate complex
interservice responses across the D.C. area. Nerves in the JOC were fraying.
In response to Trump’s invocation of the Insurrection Act, Washington
mayor Muriel Bowser had denounced the move as “dictatorial” and
withdrawn most of the city’s logistical support for civil disturbance
operations. But by law, the president could use the Metropolitan Police at his
discretion for up to 30 days. So Chief Peter Newsham was now basically
running a conscript department—torn between the demands of local and
federal officials. With the Unified Area Command now effectively neutered,
most of the UAC principals and police chiefs from three surrounding states
were petitioning the general and the SCRAG for support.

Law enforcement was being stretched beyond its limits, and friction with the
mayor’s office was making the situation untenable. Cops on the line were
overtaxed by almost a week of 12-hour shifts in “war zone” conditions, they

63
said. As a result, public safety was being compromised. There had been
scattered—and, it would turn out, greatly exaggerated—reports of looting
around the metropolitan area, as small numbers of opportunists raided
electronics stores and bodegas, secure in the knowledge that police had
bigger fish to fry. Baltimore cops, stuck patrolling unfamiliar streets, were
frustrated to hear of a spike in gang shootings back home as fewer officers
walked the beat. If the administration was going to insist on martial law, the
chiefs argued, they needed enough troops in the city to let their departments
actually respond to ordinary 9-1-1 calls, which had hardly gone away just
because protests were going on. Beagle and Zeller were sympathetic, but said
there probably wasn’t anything they could do at least for the next few days.

Over the lunch hour, there was a brief lull as both sides ate and rested. But
soon, massive crowds—the biggest ever—were trying to converge on the
Washington Monument, which the Trump Out app suggested as a widely-
visible sighting point. In Arlington, half a million people crowded the
western bank of the Potomac at rock-concert density

Among them was Noor Shah, carrying her 6-year-old daughter Annie on her
shoulders. This was their first protest since the 2017 Women’s March in New
York, when Annie had been just a nursing baby. Shah’s Twitter bio read
“Cheerio consumption coaxer,” but under the playful modesty, she was
almost intimidatingly accomplished. After graduating from Princeton and
then Oxford as a Marshall Scholar, she earned her J.D. at Columbia Law,
where she met former Obama policy advisor Raj Khosla. He took a job at
Latham & Watkins, and she worked in human rights law for the U.N. They
were overjoyed as new parents, watching their young child grow. But in April
2020, Raj contracted COVID-19 and died alone in a Manhattan hospital at

64
age 43. Noor moved back in with her parents in Alexandria to help with
Annie. The following year was a blur of grief. She’d wanted to protest after
the November election, or at the inauguration, or following Alyson Kopp’s
abduction. But the demonstrations had seemed too dangerous. She felt guilty
about it. She wanted to set a good example for her daughter. She even got
dressed to join the protests after the BearCat ramming, but the morbid
thought of leaving Annie an orphan stopped her from walking out the door.

Somehow the Insurrection Act declaration had flipped a switch in her mind.
Her own parents had lived through martial law in Pakistan, and she’d been
raised to abhor military domination. In some moments, her father had
taught her, ordinary people had to risk even their lives to stand up for justice.
And it was now inescapable: this was such a moment, this was the time to be
counted. Seeing peaceful demonstrations in Arlington on television, she
packed Annie’s backpack for a long day, and had her mom drive them as
close as they could get to the protest.

Now, they were in a sea of people, cheering their lungs out. Noor couldn’t see
over the heads of taller men around her, but from her shoulder perch, Annie
said she could see the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial ahead
across the river. Here in Potomac Park, it was an intergenerational
atmosphere—newborns to ancient folks in wheelchairs. Lots of families, and
lots of little kid voices joining the chants. Volunteers were going through the
crowd handing out water bottles, sanitizer, and masks for those who’d
forgotten Trump Out’s recommendation to wear them. Most everyone was in
t-shirts, and there were few goggles or helmets to be seen. Gradually, Noor
pushed forward toward the front. She could see that someone had sprayed
“RBG” in big letters on one of the stone pylons at the entrance to the

65
Arlington Memorial Bridge. As Annie munched a granola bar overhead, Noor
admired the forest of colorful and humorous signs around her. At one point
there was a big burst of applause off to the side. She asked someone what was
going on. Apparently some TikTok star she’d never heard of had arrived to
join the demonstration.

Eventually, they were near the front of the crowd. Opposite the protesters
was a double line of Arlington County riot police in all black body armor.
They had batons and clear round shields. Some people were livestreaming
them, asking them who they were. Although their helmets said ACPD, their
black facemasks obscured officers’ identity, and most had covered their
names and badge numbers with black tape after doxxing attempts by
activists. At one point, things got heated as some young white guy started
taunting an African-American cop—using racial slurs and seemingly trying to
provoke a violent response. Other demonstrators quickly stepped in and
hustled the guy away before things could escalate. But there were persistent
chants for the police to drop their batons and join the demonstration. They
stared back from behind their visors with professional calm. A young woman
with long blonde hair was walking back and forth in front of the shield wall
in skimpy booty shorts, holding aloft a large cardboard sign. “Don’t fuck the
police,” said one side. “I’ll fuck any cop that quits right now,” promised the
other. While at least a dozen Virginia officers handed in their badges during
the protests, it is unknown whether any took her up on the offer.

Annie pointed at the water, where a pair of bright orange Coast Guard boats
were patrolling the Potomac to keep protester boats from crossing. The
crowd along the banks shouted at them that they wanted to cross. Then
started chanting the same thing at the ACPD and the National Guard behind

66
them blocking the Memorial and Roosevelt bridges: “Let us cross!” A
volunteer came around with a bullhorn: “Wall of Vets off to the left, Wall of
Moms up and to the right… Any moms? Moms, moms, come on up front.”
Noor hesitated, but came forward as people urged her on. As she linked arms
with other mothers, the chant grew to a roar of tens of thousands: “Let us
cross! Let us cross!”

Maj. Gen. Beagle, watching from a drone feed in the JOC, ordered the
guardsmen not to use tear gas or pyrotechnics. There were several layers of
concertina wire and Jersey barriers across the bridge entrances, and if the
crowd stormed across, he wanted them kept back with the ADS pain rays so
as not to create violent scenes for the news cameras. It was a wrenching
position to be in as a commander.

Similar confrontations were unfolding all along the 82nd Airborne’s

perimeter about half a mile north of the Mall. According to subsequent MPD
analysis, by 3:00 p.m., the streets beyond Logan Circle were choked with 1.2-
1.5 million people. Tens of thousands more packed outside the fence around
Observatory Circle, which contains the vice president’s residence, and beat
drums taunting Mike Pence to come out and face them. On the Mall itself
and around Lafayette Square, tired and hungry demonstrators summoned up
reserves of energy to renew their chants of “We stay! He goes!” and “I am not
afraid!” under the watchful eyes of the snipers on the White House roof.

Comms team volunteers worked their way through the crowd picking out the
most normal-looking families and seniors they could find, snapping photos
and sharing their stories on Trump Out’s social media. Wounded warriors
got push notifications to come to a roped-off area near the Lincoln Memorial

67
Reflecting Pool where cable news cameras were waiting. The L-team sent
around a flag squad to make sure the backgrounds of as many shots as
possible were generously stocked with the Stars and Stripes. Evan Vrabec
posted selfies with people carrying “Republicans 4 Trump Out,” “Martial Law
is Un-American,” and “Trump Dishonors Our Military” signs. People of all
persuasions were posing with a gaggle of young seminarians in clerical
collars carrying a banner that read “Catholics Demand Justice – Trump Out
Now.” Protesters carried enlarged photographs of the June 13 ramming
victims—Melissa Mack, Sharon Olson, Parker Lewis, Claire Lavoie, and Sean
Ralston. One girl held up a sign showing Reggie Myles in his Vietnam-era Air
Force uniform next to a photo of a grievously wounded Myles flashing a
thumbs up from a hospital bed.

On the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, overflow crowds listened to a

succession of fiery speeches by activists and celebrities. Vanessa Wruble
spoke about the need for everyday Americans to hold Trump and his
enablers accountable where the politicians had all failed. Daniela Saez spoke
of this moment as the “greatest opportunity in our history … for peaceful
demonstration to bring about fundamental political change.” Documentarian
Michael Moore looked out over the sea of demonstrators and openly wept to
see such an empowering spectacle—“the people of this country will not be
silenced.” Others outside the cordon called in by phone and addressed the
crowd over the loudspeakers—including actors Jamie Foxx and Meryl Streep,
Sen. Cory Booker, and Rep. Ayanna Pressley. Their styles and emphases
varied, but all in their own ways they came back to the same urgent,
inescapable demand: Donald Trump and Mike Pence must resign.

68
Through telephoto lenses, news helicopters captured panoramic shots of the
seemingly infinite crowds. In Arlington and on the north side of Washington,
the streets were invisible under a living carpet of protesters. Meanwhile,
CNN was showing footage it had obtained from inside Capital One Arena—
thousands of demonstrators packed together on the floor with their hands
still flex-cuffed behind their backs. According to lawsuits subsequently filed
against the city, many went more than 12 hours without water, and some
urinated on themselves because officers refused to let them use the bathroom
in a timely manner. Other aerial shots showed thousands more activists
herded together under guard around the western end zone at FedExField.
According to a Politico/Morning Consult poll released that afternoon, 72
percent of Americans said that the government had used excessive force
against the protests, and 67 percent believed that Trump should resign.

At 5:00 p.m., several dozen journalists gathered at Fort McNair for a

televised press conference with Maj. Gen. Beagle. In his opening remarks,
the calm and unassuming South Carolinian emphasized his goals of reducing
violence, de-escalating tensions, and achieving a peaceful resolution to the
demonstrations. The Joint Task Force, he said, was “here to protect the
people of Washington D.C. and restore order,” adding that he hoped for the
protesters’ “cooperation … in minimizing the use of force that’s needed.”
ABC’s Jonathan Karl asked: “The president tweeted again this afternoon that
there are ‘terrorists’ is the crowd. Do you believe there are terrorists on the
National Mall right now?” Beagle answered crisply and diplomatically: “We
have not received any specific intelligence about any terrorist activity.”

At Mar-a-Lago, the commander-in-chief had been parked in front of the

television all day, and aides got the sense he was treating the crisis as a big-

69
budget cable drama to binge-watch. He seems to have seen Beagle’s press
conference live, because the JTF-NCR commander was still taking questions
from reporters when Trump’s staff put a call through to Secretary Jack in
Washington. “This Beagle guy is no good … weak guy … hasn’t done
anything,” the president said. “Get rid of him right now.” Jack tried to defend
the general’s conduct, but Trump repeatedly interrupted him. Firing Beagle
was a direct order. Reluctantly, Jack acquiesced—calling Gen. VanHerck at
USNORTHCOM in Colorado to inform him of the president’s decision.

Beagle was back in the JOC on a conference call with federal officials when
his aide-de-camp approached and handed him the written orders. He was
relieved of command, effective immediately. Brig. Gen. Wood was appointed
to lead JTF-NCR in his place. Wood was at RFK Stadium meeting with the
2nd BCT commander, Col. P.J. Bower, when he got the call. He hustled over
to his waiting Humvee and was shuttled to Fort McNair to take charge.

A
LONG VIRGINIA AVENUE around 5:50 p.m., an extremely dense

crowd was pressing up against Virginia National Guard barricades

outside the Watergate Hotel. The captain on scene radioed for an
ADS unit to push back the demonstrators, but it was slow in arriving. About
1,000 feet back, protesters began scuffling with a different group of
guardsmen and one of them threw a cluster of fireworks onto a Humvee. The
sharp cracks sounded to those ahead of them like gunfire, and people started
screaming about an active shooter. Panicked protesters began surging up the
street trying to escape. There was nowhere to go. Those at the front were
crushed together so tightly that they couldn’t breathe, and several tumbled
off an overpass trying to escape suffocation. Miraculously, no one was
killed—but by the time Guard realized what was happening and opened

70
barricades to relieve the pressure, hundreds had been injured, 47 seriously
enough to be transported to area hospitals.

Up in Rock Creek Park, there was another dangerously thick crowd at around
the same time—this one caused by the hundreds of thousands of young
demonstrators who’d been streaming into the wooded preserve all afternoon.
Among them, Arianna Marcus and her older sister Gianna had driven in
from Columbus with a couple friends. Arianna was a month shy of 18, and
getting ready to start her freshman year at Brown. Gianna, 19, was a rising
sophomore at the Ohio State University. Close didn’t begin to describe their
relationship—when apart, they FaceTimed at least three times a day.
Arianna, a volleyball star with a megawatt smile, had been student body
president. Gianna, graceful and serious, had always been a musical prodigy.
They both posted #TrumpOut resources to their Snapchat stories, urging
people to come to the protests in D.C. After a seven-hour drive, they parked
on the rural Maryland farm of a man who’d offered his property to out-of-
staters via the protest app. A volunteer driver with a van shuttled them to a
drop-off point near the District border.

Arianna had wondered what to wear—she’d seen that in Miami, the

demonstrators were wearing blue, and in Denver they were in all white. But
the footage from D.C. didn’t suggest any coherent color revolution, so she
just went in her new Brown Bears 2025 tee. As Ari and Gi lugged their
sleeping bags and bulky backpacks down a dirt path into the forest, a young
guy with a honey voice asked if they needed help. They gratefully accepted.
He introduced himself as Dante. He had dimples, a short afro, and the
kindest eyes Arianna had ever seen. On the way to their app-assigned
camping spot, they got to chatting. He was from Philadelphia, hated social

71
media, and they both loved 50 States of Fright. It was slow going through the
heavily forested park—1,754 acres of oak and beech where the canopy was
sometimes too dense to see the sky. Soon, they were stepping over people
lounging on bedrolls, and weaving between tents, as the woods filled with
protesters. Some had strung up hammocks between neighboring trunks, and
canvas yurts seemed to have sprouted like mushrooms all around. Any
nature sounds had been drowned out by the rumble of voices in every
direction.

At last, they’d found their sector and set their things down in a nook
overlooking the creek. Arianna thought it was sort of a Woodstock vibe—
some were splashing in the water, others were noodling on guitars. The app
had warned against destroying plants or starting fires, but the place still felt
pretty trashed. The atmosphere was electric, though. Everyone was mingling
freely with strangers, introducing themselves and asking each other’s stories.
They got to know kids from Alabama, California, Colorado, even
Saskatchewan. Arianna met one of her future Brown classmates when he saw
her shirt and said hi. Another boy still in high school had been down on the
Mall days earlier—he was telling an awed group stories about tear gas and
BearCats. It was his first time in Washington, but he said he’d played a video
game set in a post-pandemic D.C. and thanks to its recreation of the capital,
could find his way around even when he didn’t have cell data. Almost
everyone seemed to be between 14 and 25—“quaranteenagers,” they called
themselves.

Virtually nobody had bars on their phones there in the crowded park, but
before arriving they’d been instructed to download a secure peer-to-peer app
called JadeBridge, which allows users to mesh their smartphones together

72
directly into offline Bluetooth networks. Some were sharing the latest footage
of protesters clashing with the National Guard in Kansas City, St. Louis,
Fresno, and Indianapolis. Others were crowding around screens and
cheering the desecration of the fallen Andrew Jackson statue in Lafayette
Square. Apparently it was tradition now for those inside the cordon—you had
to vent a little anger on Old Hickory just because Trump loved him so much.
According to videos from TikTok, Zazzy, and Ovio, Jackson was now covered
with trash, splatttered with red paint, and had giant googly eyes glued on.

At one point, Arianna heard a commotion, and saw a group of teen boys just
wailing on a fortysomething guy who was down on the ground, shielding his
face from the kicks and punches raining onto him. One girl said he was a
plainclothes cop. In moments, a Conan-armed man appeared out of nowhere
and flung the assailants bodily off him—Pittsburgh Steelers lineman Eric
Stubbe. Stubbe, who was there with his brother and girlfriend, shielded the
bloodied victim until some Trump Out volunteers could escort him to safety.
It turned out he was just a civilian listening to police calls on a scanner, and
when one paranoid kid flipped out a bunch of others had joined.

Dante caught back up with them. Everyone was going to the park’s golf
course for an impromptu concert, he said. They all made their way toward
the sound. A Sidwell Friends School senior had parked his Mercedes G-
Wagen on the green and set up a practically Coachella-grade speaker system
on the roof. Before long, there were almost 300,000 quaranteenagers
jumping up and down as one, singing along to Billie Eilish’s “Twisted.” They
were packed so closely it was hard to even turn around. D.C. police, watching
helplessly at a distance, were ordered not to intervene for fear of causing a
fatal crush. Somehow a ripple started through the crowd, and Arianna felt a

73
bolt of fear as bodies surged around her. She grabbed Dante’s hand and held
tight.

I
N A SMALL, overlit office overlooking the open bay of the JOC, Galen

Wood was on the phone with the president. Trump had insisted on
calling the new commander to personally convey his instructions. He
had seen footage of machine gun-toting Black Panthers and of savagely
beaten counter-protesters, the commander-in-chief told his brigadier
general, and wanted the main protest zone on the Mall assaulted and cleared
that night. Trump promised whatever federal resources he needed to make
that happen. The president expressed the view, Wood subsequently told
investigators, that the demonstrators should be regarded an enemy force
trying to overthrow the government. “You’re the guy who’s going to save this
country,” Trump said. “Take charge.”

While the surrounded protesters managed lean dinners of ramen and energy
bars, Wood and SCRAG Zeller met with Guard commanders and civilian
agency heads to plan an operation to dislodge them. Although the general
shared Trump’s belief that there were violent and dangerous revolutionaries
within the crowd, that only reinforced his view that clearing them would be
difficult and risky. So he wanted to put more pressure on the demonstrators
before an assault, inducing the more peaceful ones to leave and sapping the
rest’s will to resist. At Zeller’s suggestion, they would begin by shutting off
utilities to the buildings within the protest zone. Without power to charge
their phones or water for basic hygiene, some of the administration officials
felt, the overindulged Millennials and latte-sipping liberals would quickly
pack it up and leave. Better to just let them go and make it easier to arrest the
hardliners.

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They also discussed the role social media was playing in organizing the
demonstrations. Undercover police officers on the Mall had downloaded the
Trump Out app, and reported firsthand on its effectiveness. Meanwhile,
Homeland Security was building a database of protesters designed to aid
both current national security operations and future prosecutions. Using the
pretext of crimes including assaults on law enforcement personnel and the
White House drone intrusions, Department of Justice officials had filed
requests under the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act and
obtained court orders for a series of “tower dumps.” Presented with tower
dump requests, telecom companies turned over the phone numbers of all
devices that had connected to cell towers around the Mall during the periods
in question. DHS then checked those numbers against a range of public and
private databases, and compiled a list of—as of late Saturday—386,880 real
names of persons strongly suspected to have attended the protests.

In addition to gathering telecom data, since early in the week law

enforcement had also been using van-mounted devices called Stingrays that
mimic cell towers to gather intelligence and disrupt service in violent areas of
the demonstrations. The FBI then cross-referenced timestamps and
geolocation from the Stingray data with photographic facial recognition and
the names on the DHS list to identify 51 individuals likely involved in serious
criminal activity. These identities were matched against the proceeds of an
NSA intelligence program called GEYSER, which linked several of them to
foreign extremist organizations (though the specifics and nature of these
connections have still not been declassified). All this formed the basis for an
urgent application to FISC, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court,
where in an emergency hearing on Friday—as the drums of protesters less

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than a block away echoed through the courthouse—Judge Rudolph Contreras
authorized surveillance of all 51 suspects. Based on this warrant, The
Intercept subsequently reported, the NSA began using a tool code-named
SHADOWJUMP to read targets’ communications on encrypted messaging
apps previously thought secure. These messages included deliberations
among senior demonstration organizers.

Based on that surveillance, the SCRAG argued, the number one priority
should be taking stronger action to disrupt use of the Trump Out app. Brig.
Gen. Wood agreed that they would deploy new drone-mounted Stingrays to
cause broader cell outages, and cut off cable internet access around the Mall
to disable WiFi routers using those connections. So far, Acting AG Gallup
and Secretary Wolf had resisted the idea of turning off D.C. cell towers
altogether, due to fears that this would endanger federal workers’ 9-1-1
service and make violent activists harder to track. But if the drones weren’t
effective, Zeller would appeal to them again. In the meantime, they would
launch an assault against Senate Park to show the president that JTF-NCR
was proactively shrinking the demonstrations.

At the Hay-Adams, the L-team joined in the nightly two-minute cheer across
the city after the curfew took effect. Known as cacerolazo or casserole, the
banging of pots and pans as protest became popular in the 20th century as a
way for people to show solidarity against Latin American dictatorships from
the safety of their homes. During the June 2020 protests in D.C., there had
been scattered evening casseroles in several neighborhoods, and thanks to
the app, Trump Out had now synchronized them on a massive scale over the
whole District. They’d announced a contest for the best casserole video each

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night, and movement leadership was judging entries on a laptop in the
hotel’s rooftop room when the power went out.

It was 9:48 p.m.—delayed until nightfall by the authorities in order to

maximize the disruption. Peter Balakrishnan turned on a large emergency
floodlight he had ready and led some of the other organizers onto the terrace.
The lights were still on at the White House, but for blocks all around
everything had gone dark. Immediately, flashlights and phone screens
winked to life down in Lafayette Square and on the streets below.
Balakrishnan texted the security team group chat to let everybody know what
was happening, but the message popped up grayed-out with a red “failed to
send” message. Seeing that the WiFi was down, he switched to cellular. No
bars. They had anticipated this, but it was still a strangely alarming feeling.
Balakrishnan pulled the reserve satellite phone from a pouch in his Boston
Dynamics backpack and started making calls.

Over at the Washington Monument, the organizer in charge of backup

generators—a Hollywood production manager named Todd Beake—
answered his satphone and gave Balakrishnan the status report. All told,
Trump Out had about 7500 kilowatts of generators on the Mall and nearby
squares, but barely 6,000 gallons of fuel left, which would last around 10
hours at full capacity. They would have to start making some tough choices—
how much would be used for lighting, for sound systems, and for phone
charging stations. The L-team would have to decide how tightly they were
going to ration the power. Burn diesel too fast, and they’d run out with
Trump still in office, and the occupation would collapse. But leave people in
the dark with dead batteries, and morale would plummet, and the occupation
would collapse.

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With the Stingray-equipped drones knocking out cell service for about half
the Trump Out app users on the Mall, Balakrishnan and the L-team quickly
composed a push notification for everyone who could still receive it. “The
Trump Administration has cut off electricity inside the protest zone and is
jamming cell service for many users,” the alert said. “If you receive this, put
your phone in power conserve mode NOW. Share the attached instructions
with others around you who may not have service.” The organizers advised
demonstrators to form groups of 12 people, and keep 11 phones powered
down while rotating one person responsible for monitoring the app.
Designated volunteers with satellite phones and bullhorns would be deployed
to areas hardest hit by the service interruptions to keep the crowds informed
of urgent developments.

North of the roadblocks in Washington and across the Potomac in Arlington,

the planned vigil was proceeding as scheduled. At 9:54 p.m., the exact time of
Michael Glazer’s shooting one week earlier, hundreds of thousands of
Americans lit candles or held their phone flashlights aloft in silent protest
against the president who had incited his slaying. After a minute of quiet
reflection, organizers with megaphones read aloud the names of the dead.
Not just Glazer, the ramming victims, and self-immolator Jake Hecht, but
also 14 others—from nurse Alaina Garcia who was run over by a motorist at
the Houston protests, to Alvin Ma who died after being hit by an Oakland
Police “nonlethal” round, to, crucially, the five LAPD cops killed on Monday
night. Cable news aired the demonstration live, both with cameras on the
ground capturing intimate views of pained, determined faces, and shots from
the air showing the vast seas of lights glittering in the darkness. Despite the
utility cut, a looser carpet twinkled all across the Mall and in Lafayette

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Square opposite the White House. Viewers watching at home saw similar
vigils unfolding in Central Park and on Boston Common.

At their Alexandria home, Michael Glazer’s wife Julia and daughter Gabby
were watching the protests on television. Half a dozen family friends and a
team of Amazon private security were with them in the house, taking shifts to
make sure they were okay. News reports had revealed earlier in the day that
Michael’s killer had found Gabby’s Instagram and stalked her posts to
identify her high school—apparently showing up at her graduation on the
guess that her father would be there. She’d seen the story before Julia could
do anything to shield her. Gabby blamed herself. Said she should have made
the account private. It was emotionally shredding for both of them. They’d
been sobbing all day. But now, seeing the lights for Michael—twinkling
beyond counting all across the capital—they felt an almost supernatural
sense of peace.

By 10:15 p.m., the demonstrations began breaking up as attendees made

their way back to nighttime accommodations. For many, that was sleeping
bags in parks or on golf courses. Others headed back to parked campers.
Likely the highest number went back to homes and apartments around the
area—their own, staying with friends, or crashing with total strangers
matched via the app. Yet many were also leaving altogether. According to a
subsequent New York Times analysis, as many as 3.5 million people
participated in demonstrations at some point that day in the D.C.
metropolitan area. That was only possible because so many attendees had
traveled from around the country to protest on a weekend. Hundreds of
thousands streamed back home now, many with the intention of returning
on June 26 if need be.

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For those that remained, the middle of the night brought renewed clashes
with the police and military. In Senate Park across from Union Station, about
40,000 people were gathered when a government drone with a klaxon took
to the air blasting warnings to disperse or be arrested. Most retreated,
especially those older or less physically able, but several thousand still held
out—geared up with masks, goggles, and umbrellas, and determined to resist.
Some shackled themselves together in great tangled knots with padlocks and
bicycle chains. Others lanced lasers into the eyes of the 82nd Airborne shield
wall massing opposite the park. But the tear gas they were expecting never
came. At a signal from Col. Bower, an ADS-equipped Humvee bathed them
in 95 GHz pain rays. They fared no better resisting the intense burning
sensation than previous demonstrators, and soon anyone who could flee on
foot was pulling back onto the Mall. The shield wall advanced, followed by
cut teams to saw chains apart and take the holdouts into custody. When they
reached the Marine-defended grounds of the Capitol, the paratroopers
erected new barricades and radioed back to the JOC that Senate Park had
been secured.

Actions elsewhere were less decisive. Police in Arlington and Alexandria

cleared streets with tear gas and arrested hundreds of people camping out on
private property—but failed to dislodge the largest blocks of demonstrators
from the golf courses, or from outside the cemetery. Inside its wrought-iron
fences, dress-uniformed sentinels still maintained their unceasing watch over
the Tomb of the Unknowns, although two other companies of the Old Guard
had been deployed to the grounds in tactical gear should they need
protection. Maryland state troopers with assault rifles had been sent to the
District’s affluent Kalorama neighborhood, following online rumors that

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Antifa was coming to lynch Republicans living there. But they’d found the
tree-lined streets quiet and peaceful. Northeast of Logan Circle, running
battles carried on for hours, as activists—outside the zone targeted by the
Stingrays—coordinated via the app to surprise and harass units trying to
enforce the curfew. Combat sometimes devolved to rocks and bats versus
clubs and shields. Sirens howled and flashbangs thundered down the urban
canyons hour after hour.

A
T ONE SUCH skirmish near Howard University Hospital, an ICE

Special Response Team fired a close-range volley of shotgun

Stinger rounds into a knot of violent demonstrators as they were
running away. Several were bleeding heavily, but there were police lurking by
the ER, waiting to arrest those who sought treatment. So they put out a call
for street medics.

One of the medics who answered the call was Johns Hopkins medical student
Margaret Chen. She’d been in D.C. since Thursday morning, when she’d
driven from Baltimore with two classmates to stay with a mutual friend in
Logan Circle who was part of an established street medic group. The friend—
who prefers to be identified only as Maya—had given them basic riot
medicine training and advised them on how to dress and what to bring. So
Chen had thrown a high-vis vest over her scrubs and made crosses on front
and back with red electrical tape to signify her protected status. She put on a
clean surgical mask, layered shop goggles over her prescription glasses, and
taped more red crosses to a borrowed BMX helmet that swam loosely over
her pixie cut hair. At Maya’s suggestion, she’d swapped the CPR mask and
tourniquets out of her first aid bag in favor of extra saline for eyewash. A
shade under 5’0” and with the frame of a mathlete, she’d felt out of place

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among the tanned, sinewy punk-types who seemed to predominate among
the other street medics. But hours of lugging sick or injured demonstrators
around had shown her a new strength. Several fellow volunteers had
commented on her surprising muscle power. An NFL-buff guy she helped
move an unconscious man had slapped her approvingly on the helmet and
told her she was “a total stud.”

Chen had no experience with street protests. She’d posted anti-racism

resources to her Instagram stories in 2020, but was quarantining with her
Republican parents in Orange County and never marched. What changed
things for her was the self-immolation. The image of Jake Hecht staring
down the Robocops was burned into her mind, and she felt an obligation to
use her skills to help those confronting such frightening odds. When she first
arrived, though, it had been anticlimactic. The Thursday protests were
largely peaceful family events, and she’d spent most of her time treating
blisters, dehydration, and heatstroke. But Friday there’d been several tear
gassings nearby, and she’d learned to flush people’s eyes while talking them
down from the panic of airways swelling shut. She’d been caught out on the
street as the new curfew fell, and got separated from her friends as people
scattered. A Muslim man named Hasan took her and several others in for the
night. During the big Saturday afternoon protests, the neighborhood was
policed by Green Berets. When word of their identity spread, the protesters
had been scared by their elite reputation—but they turned out to be much
more disciplined than the cops, and they were careful to de-escalate instead
of just beating people. That evening, Margaret had sheltered with a pair of
gay theology students named Tim and Josh, who were offering their
townhouse as a haven via the app. She’d planned to stay the night and head
back to Logan Circle when the curfew lifted at 5:00 a.m.

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But now, Chen saw the flashing map beacons of the medic requests, and
knew people were hurt nearby. If she went out to help them, she risked
arrest. If she got kettled with rioters, she could lose her spot in med school.
Yet cowardice, she felt, would be worse. Cinching her helmet strap, she
bolted out the door with her bag and jogged several blocks toward the
casualties. The residential neighborhood was deserted. Dull thuds ahead
guided her way. Then she turned a corner and found herself in a movie.

A man and a woman were down on the sidewalk, receiving first aid as a
crowd looked on. Chen asked the street medics already on scene what they
needed, and she was told to help put pressure on the man’s scalp wound.
Under a flashlight, she was shocked by the amount of blood—his whole face
was dipped in red like Halloween gore. There was a dark pool under his head,
too. A couple of foreign journalists appeared with cameramen in tow and
started asking questions. Somewhere, sirens were wailing. The crowd had
grown to hundreds. They got the man’s bleeding under control, and a car
arrived to take him to a safer hospital on the other side of the city.

Then Chen was blind, her ears painfully ringing. She felt herself leaning
against a parked vehicle to stay on her feet. Gradually, her vision swam back
into focus as a line of troops in camouflage advanced on them from down the
street. Car alarms were warbling. More explosions were going off all around
her. She hadn’t realized how bright and loud flashbangs are. On YouTube,
they seemed like basically just loud fireworks. In person, her retinas were
seared with splotches of purple and she could feel each grenade in her lungs.

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The advancing men wore battle armor and gas masks that covered their
whole faces. Their vests said “POLICE” but they looked like soldiers. They
were, in fact, partly both—from the Border Patrol tactical team known as
BORTAC. Sent to D.C. on Chad Wolf’s orders. Now, they were firing tear gas
canisters into the crowd. Acrid white clouds billowed up all around. People
were running, screaming, falling back. BORTAC agents rushed forward,
swinging with collapsible batons at anyone who didn’t get out of the way fast
enough. Some were pinned to the ground and hauled off in flex cuffs. A
German cameraman was backpedaling up the street, getting it all on video.
One of the agents charged him and knocked him backward onto the
sidewalk. His partner, Deutsche Welle reporter Vanessa Wolf, was struck
several times with batons, then shot in the face with a beanbag round as she
tried to protect him. Another agent picked the camera up off the ground and
casually flung it into a wall, smashing it to pieces. To date, no BORTAC
personnel have been prosecuted in connection with the incident.

Margaret Chen was running to escape the tear gas and couldn’t see the
attack. Her throat and nostrils were on fire. The crowd got to a T-intersection
and saw more Border Patrol penning them in on both sides. Someone
pointed up a twisting alley, and they sprinted headlong down it, flashbangs
echoing behind them. They emerged, disoriented, onto another street. There
were more sirens approaching. Red-and-blue flashers screaming down the
road toward them. Margaret and some others took off across a darkened
playground, panting. It felt like the cops were coming from every direction.
Someone got cell service and shouted that she’d found a safe house via the
app. About a dozen of them legged it, gasping and sniffling, one more block
to the marked address. An elderly Black woman threw open the door of a
two-story rowhouse and waved them up: “Hurry! Get in!”

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They tromped inside and found the home packed with 40 or 50
demonstrators. People were choking and coughing, pouring milk into each
other’s eyes to flush out the tear gas. There were another two medics there
already, and Margaret joined them in going from person to person bandaging
cuts and scrapes. They gathered people’s contaminated outer clothes and
stuffed them in a closet. After about an hour, the overwhelming odor faded,
and noses stopped running. Their host, who asked The Lodestar not to
identify her, got four pots cooking at once and started serving the protesters
macaroni as fast as the water would boil. “You all can stay here as long as you
need,” she told them. Her teenage granddaughter had registered them as a
crash pad on the app, and was now doling out every snack, drink, and toiletry
in the house.

Those who could get driblets of cell data were posting about the ordeal on
social media, reporting the attack on the journalists and trying to get more
information. But a veteran activist stood up and warned that they might
attract law enforcement via geotags or metadata, so told everyone to just sit
tight and pass the time until morning.

Strangers opened up to each other, and were bonding in hushed tones as

sirens raced by outside the shaded windows. They shared their thoughts on
the movement, debated its tactics, and argued over its future. Margaret
found herself getting defensive with a young woman from Ghana who vented
frustration with Asians for not doing enough to support marginalized Black
and Indigenous communities. June 2020 was the dress rehearsal that made
all this possible, the woman said, but she only saw more privileged minorities
coming onto the streets after more vulnerable groups had done the heavy

85
lifting. “Why is all this finally happening now over a white journalist, and five
white people who got rammed, and a white guy who burned himself to
death?” she asked. “Why not after Freddie, or Elijah, or Breonna, or George,
or Rolando, or Isaac?” Margaret wanted to say something to explain herself,
but she couldn’t find the words.

Sprawled out around the floor, they all tried to get snatches of sleep. As the
hours passed, a few more lone protesters came inside and joined them.
Periodically, more sirens would come tearing down the street. Flashbangs
started going off again somewhere in the distance. Gradually, they got closer.
Then the deep rumble of a BearCat’s engines coming slowly up the block.
People snapped suddenly awake, feeling the danger. Someone turned out all
the lights in the house. The engines got closer, then the hiss of an air brake.
The sound of heavy boots on the asphalt. Those inside pressed themselves
flat to the floor, trying not to even breathe. There were barked orders over an
LRAD, clatters, clanks—Margaret tried to picture what was going on out
there. A few doors down, they heard pounding fists and shouts of “Police!”—
then the boom of breaching, screams, scuffling. And then it all repeated at
another house, and another. Finally, the BearCat drove away, and silence.

All through the night, they waited in dread for it to return. It never did. But
the sounds of distant battle raged around them until morning. By first light
on Sunday the 20th, at least 250 protesters and 33 police and guardsmen and
been injured across JTF-NCR’s area of operations.

H
OMELAND SECURITY OFFICIALS were still wolfing down breakfast

Chick-fil-A and coffee at the JOC when Trump’s morning call

came in for Brig. Gen. Wood. With the din of more than 50 staff

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coming in and out of the ops bay, the general plugged one ear with a finger to
hear better. Others around the table saw him shake his head several times.
“No, Mr. President… No, sir… We didn’t, sir…” Wood looked over a stack of
laser-printed pages on the table. They were color drone photographs showing
what appeared to be two different masked men carrying AR-style rifles on
the Mall. Wood informed the president that they now had proof of heavily
armed Antifa near the White House. He said he would send his staff high-
resolution copies. But it sounded like Trump was still unhappy with the Joint
Task Force’s modest gains overnight. Wood explained that protesters were
using a mobile app to coordinate their actions—which allowed their
enormous numbers to overwhelm the more than 32,000 military and civilian
security personnel trying to restore order in the city. Witnesses heard a
pause. “It’s just called Trump Out, sir.”

About 45 minutes later, just after 9:00 a.m., Trump and key officials
gathered in Mar-a-Lago’s secure room for a videoconference with National
Security Council members still in Washington. Participants noticed that
Trump seemed to have already had a discussion with Director of National
Intelligence Jim Jordan and Sebastian Gorka—now elevated to National
Security Advisor on Phillip Genovese’s resignation—concerning a new
strategy. Trump had been reminded about an option at his disposal called
Standard Operating Procedure 303, which enabled the president to shut
down private wireless networks during an emergency. Since other measures
to disrupt protesters’ cell service had been insufficient, that’s what he wanted
to use for all the cities still in the grip of major demonstrations.

SecDef Jack pushed back on this vigorously, arguing that invoking SOP 303
would blind ongoing NSA and FBI operations that use phone data to track

87
“real” terror suspects. The president seemed insulted at the suggestion,
brandishing printed photos of armed men in Washington and rudely
dismissing Jack’s objection. Besides, he said, Homeland Security had
confirmed the presence of many terrorists in the crowd. If Secretary Wolf
found this characterization inaccurate, he apparently raised no objection,
and everyone on the conference ultimately assented to Trump’s wishes. To
reduce confusion and disruption caused by the shutdowns, the
administration would first notify all Americans via IPAWS, the nationwide
text message system that FEMA maintains to alert the public of major
emergencies. Gorka started working on a draft.

Across the East Coast and early-rising communities in the Midwest,

Americans were filing into church pews for the first weekly services since the
crisis began in earnest. At the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Manhattan,
white-wearing Episcopalians offered up public prayers for the victims of
government violence. At the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal
Church just three blocks north of the protest zone in Washington,
parishioners endured roadblocks and police pat-downs to attend an overflow
worship service that turned into a passionate expression of communal grief
and anger. In evangelical congregations, the timbre of the morning was
almost the opposite. At the First Baptist Dallas megachurch, Pastor Robert
Jeffress assured an assembly of over 3,000 that President Trump was “on the
side of Christ” and that the protesters were “the armies of Satan” made flesh.
At Emmaus Gospel Center near Nashville, Reverend Wayne Duggan led his
flock in prayer that the president would crush the “communist revolution”
poised to destroy the country—and at Calvary Bible Fellowship in a
Pensacola strip mall, minister Joshua Gholson laid hands on a framed
portrait of Trump and warned the faithful to stock up on guns and

88
ammunition in anticipation of a great war foretold in Revelation. In more
politically divided denominations, there was anxiety and tension. Catholics at
St. Patrick Parish in Wichita audibly clucked during a sermon expressing
solidarity with general strikers, and over a dozen got up and walked out of
mass when a visiting priest at St. Joseph Church in Dayton, Ohio denounced
the protesters in Washington as godless supporters of pedophilia.

But regardless of their theology, their style of worship, or their political

leanings, all these services were interrupted at 10:16 a.m. Eastern when cell
phones began simultaneously blaring a shrill emergency tone. Beeeep. Beep.
Beep… Beeeep. Beep. Beep. Alarmed worshippers slipped the buzzing devices
from pockets and purses to find text messages captioned “Presidential Alert.”
Not only in churches, but in parks, diners, and grocery stores, startled
Americans heard the tones sounding all around them and opened the
message: “Violent extremist revolutionaries in Washington DC and other
cities are attempting to overthrow the lawfully elected U.S. government.
Cellular service will be indefinitely suspended in many major cities at 12:00
noon EDT today to hinder ongoing criminal activity. Check local radio and
TV news for more updates.”

FEMA Associate Administrator Kathryn Hook had resigned in protest of

what she felt was the excessive politicization of the message, and the fact that
Mar-a-Lago insisted on sending it nationwide instead of providing tailored
information to the affected metro areas. But her deputy promptly took her
place, and the agency provided no substantive resistance—even though
numerous employees would later tell investigators they felt the alert was an
abuse of the system.

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At 10:21 a.m., @realdonaldtrump posted a follow-up tweet likely composed
by Gorka or speechwriter Peter Bartos: “The Department of Homeland
Security has confirmed that the organization calling itself the Sisterhood
Without Banners is affiliated with Foreign Extremist Organizations as
defined under the AFEO Act. It is therefore illegal for Americans to support
their protest activities in any way.” The implication was clear and deliberate:
members of the Sisterhood and anyone who associated with them at the
protests could face imprisonment on Johnston Island. But as the minutes
ticked down to the SOP 303 activation, uncowed Americans pushed
#ISupportTheSisterhood to a record 91 million tweets—each one an
ostensibly criminal act—in a sort of “I’m Spartacus” display of collective
defiance.

Once Secretary Wolf’s signed order invoking SOP 303 was transmitted to the
National Coordinating Center for Communications in Arlington, Virginia,
watch personnel at the 24/7 operations facility validated the legitimacy of the
request and began notifying carriers in 29 metropolitan areas to shut off all
their cell towers according to the classified operating procedure. Again,
despite NCC personnel later maintaining concern about what was happening,
there was no substantive resistance to a facially lawful order—and the
telecom companies were legally obligated to comply.

All around the country, signal strength bars disappeared and blinked to “No
Service.” Uber drivers ignoring the general strike for massively inflated fares
suddenly noticed that their apps stopped working. In San Francisco, players
of the Trump Out-affiliated augmented reality game saw the cartoonish
bigot-monsters overlaid over city streets freeze up on their phone screens
and then disappear. In Arlington, Texas, self-driving vans pulled safely to the

90
side of the road as they lost their signals—stranding passengers in unfamiliar
neighborhoods. Emergency response systems were thrown into disorder as
well. 9-1-1 dispatchers on the line with critically ill or injured callers heard
their connections go dead. Acoustic gunfire locators that pinpoint shootings
in urban areas were suddenly unable to automatically alert police and get
EMTs to victims in time.

At the Hay-Adams in Washington, antennas had already been run up to the

roof to feed Inmarsat satellite WiFi, so aside from slower speed, the
transition was seamless. But reports soon came in via satphone that the
Trump Out app was inaccessible to wireless users across the entire D.C.
metropolitan area. The hotel was operating in low power mode to conserve
fuel for its backup generator, and interior hallways were dimly lit by
emergency lighting as electricity was rationed to keep refrigerating insulin
for diabetics and milk for tear gas victims. Without the HVAC system
running, the old building was getting sweltering as temperatures rose—
windows were thrown open for ventilation, but a mass of muggy air had
settled motionless over the District and organizers in the war room were slick
with sweat. A week earlier, D.C. powerbrokers had been sipping Trumpy
Sour cocktails at Off the Record, the hotel’s tony below-street-level bar
decorated in crimson and rich mahogany. Now, with the liquor supplies
exhausted and the water turned off, the elegant space had been converted to
a clinic where volunteer medics tended to injured or ill demonstrators. There
was only slightly fresher air up on the rooftop terrace, where the L-team was
gathering to figure out a response.

With the app, protest participants had acted as a coordinated whole—a

densely interconnected hive mind that shared information in real time. But

91
without it, protesters were disoriented individuals. They wouldn’t get key
news updates, wouldn’t know where to mobilize for civil disobedience
actions, and couldn’t take part in collective decision-making. They wouldn’t
get warnings about law enforcement movements or tips for conserving
supplies. Local residents offering their homes via the app’s host feature
wouldn’t be paired with out-of-towners needing a place to crash at night.
With cable broadband and cellular service both down, that left satellite
internet as the only way to keep demonstrators connected to the outside
world.

Their Inmarsat wireless hubs around the Mall were still working, but despite
the new 12-person phone sharing scheme, available capacity was pitifully
overwhelmed. For the larger number of demonstrators on the north side of
the city and in Arlington, even that wasn’t available. Better organization was
the only solution. Coding team members around the country rewrote the app
in hours to optimize it for low-bandwidth satellite connections. More
volunteers with satphones and bullhorns were deployed, spread out across
all the major protest venues with instructions to keep crowds informed and
reassured. Because there weren’t enough satphones inside the cordoned-off
protest zone, organizers in Northern Virginia resolved to smuggle some in.
They’d received a newly-purchased shipment of Explorer 510s—$2,145
devices that allow regular smartphones to go online via satellite. Unlimited
data was an extra $4,555 each, but the war room had plenty of cash and too
little internet—it wasn’t even a tough call. A pair of $16,000 heavy lift
drones, hacked to disable the systems that prevent flight near D.C., were
loaded with 10 Explorers at a time, and flown out at low altitude across the
Potomac.

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On the first mission, they caught the Maryland National Guard along
Parkway Drive by surprise and made it over the cordon to waiting Trump
Out organizers near the Lincoln Memorial. The drones sprinted back over
the river before the guardsmen could react, and were hurriedly reloaded. The
controllers—a team of largely MIT-trained engineers—realized that the
soldiers in that area would be ready the next time, so sent the next flight out
about a mile downriver. Again, both drones buzzed past unprepared Guard
units along the Potomac waterfront and delivered their payloads near the
FDR Memorial before darting back to the Virginia side.

By this point, commanders in the field were panicking. All they’d heard from
radio reports was that two to four big quad-rotor aircraft had carried bulky
packages into the protest zone. For all they knew, the boxes could be carrying
weapons, explosives, or radioactive material intended for the White House.
Park Police with anti-drone weapons were being urgently redeployed to the
western side of the Mall, but they hadn’t arrived yet when activists launched
a third pair of sorties. The Maryland guardsmen saw them coming and,
before they could get definitive orders from JTF headquarters, opened fire
with their assault rifles. The first drone wobbled, hit, and plunged like a
wounded duck into the river. The second started to retreat, but lost part of a
rotor and limped back to Arlington too badly damaged to fly again.

When word reached Brig. Gen. Wood at the JOC, he went ballistic—not
chiefly because the unexpected sounds of gunfire caused widespread alarm
and stray bullets could have hit protesters on the opposite bank, but because
his subordinates had not already deployed electronic anti-drone weapons
along the river, as he had previously ordered. He did not want to lose
dominance over the air. Following the Osprey incident on Thursday, two

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DHS drones had been rammed and disabled by illegal drones on Friday and
Saturday, and the protesters seemed to be gaining confidence. So Wood sent
requests to USNORTHCOM and Homeland Security for more DroneShield
jammer guns, and issued a warning to civilians around D.C. that any private
drones would be shot down on sight.

But the latest drone mission had served its purpose. The Explorer 510s were
pumping data onto and off the Mall, and the protesters were using
JadeBridge to stay interlinked with each other. In this way, information from
the app could even reach users hundreds of yards from the nearest access
point. By midafternoon, that improvised system had restored functioning
communications from Arlington to the National Arboretum, and
demonstrators were again coordinating actions to disrupt law enforcement
and disperse before they could be rounded up.

Because the satellite WiFi in the Hay-Adams was slow, the mobile app team
handed most of the development functions off to volunteer programmer
groups in Palo Alto, Austin, and Vancouver. They were working feverishly to
further streamline the interface for low-speed connections, and to modify it
for groups of protesters sharing a single phone. The L-team even felt
confident to announce one more extension to the election deadline—11:59
p.m. Monday—with some of the Inmarsat hotspots serving as dedicated
polling places. The movement was acting as a connected whole again.

I
NSIDE THE HEAVILY air-conditioned headquarters of USNORTHCOM

at Peterson Air Force Base near Colorado Springs, Gen. Glen

VanHerck was holed up with his staff in a conference room off the
main command center, monitoring developing unrest across the country.

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VanHerck, a calm and understated North Dakotan, had originally made his
bones as an F-15 pilot at the end of the Cold War, and went on to fly
operationally in a wide range of aircraft as he climbed the ranks. After 9/11,
he directed operations on the first B-2 stealth bomber missions against
Taliban and al-Qaeda targets in Afghanistan. By the time of the air campaign
against ISIS, VanHerck was in command of the whole stealth bomber force,
but stayed close to the cockpit—continuing to fly F-35s even as a major
general. Slightly built with large ears and a sideswept flop of gray hair,
VanHerck doesn’t boast the natural charisma of a glamorous fighter jock, but
his personal kindness and quiet competence earned the respect of the men
and women serving under him. He didn’t need to scream or shout. Keeping
$2 billion nuclear-armed aircraft in perfect readiness required everyone
working unselfishly as a team. Everyone, from the mechanics to the pilots,
had to trust each other when the stakes were at their highest. That
experience had driven a lesson deep into the general’s brain: leadership
makes the difference. Good leaders inspire people to excel in tough
situations, while bad leaders poison their commands. He never took that
responsibility lightly.

VanHerck had been deeply troubled by President Trump’s flirtation with

martial law in 2020. He’d seen the mess up close that summer as the lead
planning staff officer at the Pentagon. But now in his current role, he found
himself responsible for implementing just such an order. It was a sickening
prospect. Yet although he’d been personally horrified by the news out of
Washington, the general understood that as the “combatant commander”
responsible for North America, he was the most senior military officer in the
chain of command between POTUS and the troops in the streets. If he
resigned in protest, he would only throw NORTHCOM into chaos at a moment

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of dangerous volatility, and the president would just find a less principled
leader to replace him. So VanHerck had resolved to stay, acting as a buffer
against any unlawful orders and ensuring that the military would be a force for
good in defusing the crisis. In practice, that meant getting boots on the ground
quickly enough and in sufficient numbers to avert further violence.

As quarterback of the Pentagon’s Operation ROSEWATER plan, VanHerck

was responsible for weighing the competing operational needs of the regional
joint task forces. Yes, Brig. Gen. Wood at JTF-NCR wanted more anti-drone
weapons, but so did JTF-LA, JTF-CHI, and JTF-NYC. By Sunday afternoon,
VanHerck saw that the disorder was worst in Washington, Los Angeles, and
Atlanta, where rioting had escalated sharply overnight following the police
shooting of a 21-year-old Emory student named Jasmine Burke. So those cities
would get highest priority. But as he scanned the incoming reports, two
smaller demonstrations caught his attention.

After organizing via Twitter and the Trump Out app, about 300 activists had
descended on Memphis International Airport early that morning, cut
through the razor wire-topped fence, and stormed the runways. In minutes,
all traffic into and out of the nation’s busiest cargo airport was halted. With
the FedEx global hub at a standstill, priority commercial shipments across
the United States were paralyzed, with ripples of disruption spanning the
globe. Almost simultaneous with the Memphis action, about 150 masked
demonstrators flooded the tarmac at Louisville Muhammad Ali
International, home of UPS Worldport, bringing its 416,000 package-per-
hour capacity to a grinding stop. Inspired by the Alyson Kopp riots at LAX
three months before, they commandeered maintenance vehicles, clambered
onto aircraft, and chained themselves together in sleeping dragon

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formations. Most wore gas masks, goggles, and layers of aluminum foil to
block ADS pain rays. As Gen. VanHerck looked over photos taken from the
control tower, the bulky metallic figures below looked like an army of robots.

Local law enforcement was already stressed by small downtown

demonstrations, and the police and SWAT teams mobilized to the airports
were badly outnumbered. Some of the activists were threatening to wreck the
planes or set themselves on fire if they were assaulted, and the on-scene
commanders wanted more force before attempting to take the airports back.
As long as those planes were grounded, VanHerck knew, the U.S. economy
would lose billions of dollars a day—nationwide chaos worse than any riot.
The Tennessee National Guard had already sent both of its military police
battalions to Atlanta, and the Kentucky National Guard had its MPs rolling
up I-65 at that very moment toward Chicago. VanHerck and his staff
reviewed positions and strengths of other available forces, but there weren’t
any good alternatives. He sent out the orders: the guard was coming home
with a new mission.

At 3:15 p.m., a brand-new twitter account called @atlanta_antifa posted a

picture of a bulky metal cylinder and claimed that a “radiological device” had
been planted in Atlanta and would be detonated unless the police officer who
killed Jasmine Burke was arrested. It was an amateurish hoax, but someone
tagged pro-Trump propagandist Benny Johnson, who promptly retweeted it
to his over 375,000 followers. Right-wing pundit Dinesh D’Souza retweeted
Johnson’s retweet at 3:31 p.m., calling on the president to investigate. But
most of the country took no notice. Then, two minutes later,
@realdonaldtrump dropped a bomb on America’s newsfeeds: “DIRTY BOMB
in Atlanta. Get out!”

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That was it. Trump didn’t make clear whether he was referring to the Twitter
post, or some new threat that had been discovered by law enforcement. He
didn’t offer people any useful information—what area was in danger, where to
go, or what route to take. At any rate, leaving safe shelter is the exact opposite
of what experts say citizens should do after a radiological attack.

Despite the president’s track record of lying, area residents could look out
their own windows and see black smoke rising from downtown. Within
minutes, thousands of cars were choking major roads leading out of the
Atlanta metropolitan area—and the fleeing citizens had no working cell
service. Without guidance from above, local law enforcement reacted coolly
and decisively to restore order. Coordinating on the fly, officers redirected
traffic to allow contraflow lane reversal—flipping the inbound lanes of bi-
directional highways to allow all traffic to flow outbound.

The FAA, after getting erroneous confirmation of the report from a junior
Homeland Security official, shut down all flights to and from Hartsfield-
Jackson International Airport, the world’s busiest. Much like on 9/11,
arriving flights had to be redirected in a delicate ballet that took into account
fuel levels, approach corridors, and runway availability at surrounding
airports. Hazmat teams in the city donned protective gear but received no
orders.

Requests for clarification from Mar-a-Lago got no satisfactory reply. Staffers

only said that the president was “monitoring the situation” from the estate—
none could offer any insight on what information he had been acting on in
posting the tweet. Finally, at 4:39 p.m., the official Department of Homeland

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Security account tweeted: “We have received NO information indicating any
credible threat of a radiological (dirty bomb) attack in #Atlanta. Keep roads
clear for emergency services.” But without working phones, it took many
residents several hours to get the all-clear. Investigators never conclusively
determined whether Trump believed the initial hoax, but there is no record of
his staff at Mar-a-Lago following the national security protocols that would
be expected if he did, and DHS call logs indicate no effort by the president or
his advisors to contact them about incident response.

Across the Washington D.C. area, though, crowds were defiant and high
spirited again. On the Mall, tens of thousands chanted “Donald Mubarak!
Donald Duterte!”—comparing Trump to strongmen infamous for shutting
down cell service in the face of protests. On CNN and MSNBC, the pundits
were unanimous: between the dirty bomb panic and the SOP 303 order, the
president had just signed his own political death warrant.

At the Joint Operations Center, Brig. Gen. Wood had just approved an order
banning all non-residents from entering the District except on government,
diplomatic, or medical business. He was deploying 1,300 more National
Guard to the suburbs to shut down the Maryland border more tightly. They
had to somehow turn the tide. Then, an FBI liaison entered the JOC and
reported to SCRAG Zeller with a bombshell. Based on the latest
SHADOWJUMP intercepts, the Memphis and Louisville actions had been
conducted with the prior knowledge and encouragement of known Trump
Out organizers Turk, Saez, and Vrabec. That was dead-to-rights terrorist
conspiracy. With this ample justification, Zeller directed law enforcement to
find a way to arrest them and decapitate the movement.

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With the demonstration headquarters behind heavy barricades and
surrounded by swarms of angry protesters, there were no easy options. Late
in the afternoon, officials came back to the SCRAG with a concept for a
daring operation. According to the plan, DHS agents disguised as paramedics
would be sent through the protest lines that night in an ambulance, then
enter the Hay-Adams, locate the rooms being used by the targets, and set off
the hotel’s fire alarms as a distraction. They would then draw their guns,
arrest the leaders, and hustle them up to the roof, where a waiting helicopter
would whisk everyone to safety in a dangling Heli-Basket. Zeller liked the
idea, but it was ultimately nixed as too risky—combining a low hover over
urban buildings with the prospect of unauthorized drones and the threat of
intervention by armed demonstrators. Moreover, D.C. authorities strongly
objected to using an ambulance in a ruse, because doing so would shatter the
truce that allowed real EMTs to reach critically ill people from either side
unmolested. So pending a better solution, the SCRAG directed operators
from a secret military intelligence unit known as “Omega Knight” to infiltrate
the Trump Out JadeBridge network and try to track movement leadership
via their phones. Then he set aside a Homeland Security Investigations SRT
unit—an elite federal SWAT team—and put them on standby along with air
assets to swoop in and arrest the organizers if the JOC received actionable
intelligence that they ventured outside the hotel to a more accessible
location.

As the day wore on across the country, the economic impact of SOP 303 was
becoming clear—far greater than the general strike, or even the cargo hub
shutdowns. In all the nation’s largest markets, consumers couldn’t shop
online like they wanted, couldn’t generate ad revenue with their clicks and
views, and couldn’t get around via ridesharing. Without mobile banking—

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used by a majority of Americans—people were cut off from on-the-go access
to their money, and even low-tech businesses like restaurants were forced to
close because without cell phones, employees wouldn’t leave young children
or elderly parents behind all day amidst all the unrest and uncertainty.

While corporations pressed members of Congress to oppose Trump’s

extreme action, some of the country’s most prominent business leaders were
speaking out in one place they knew the president was paying attention—
Twitter. Apple CEO Tim Cook blasted Trump for “taking the path of
dictators … when faced by peaceful protests,” demanding that he
#TurnTheTowersBackOn. Former Goldman Sachs chief Lloyd Blankfein said
that the crackdowns were “hurting all Americans, even [Trump’s]
supporters” and called on him to “resign today.” SpaceX founder Elon Musk
simply tweeted “#TrumpOut.”

Meanwhile, another titan of industry was trying to broker a grand bargain

across the political spectrum: Ultimate Fighting Championship president
and frequent keyboard pugilist Dana White. What started as a challenge to
Musk for a mixed martial arts match on behalf of their respective sides—“u
and me scumbag”—attracted millions of retweets and morphed into White’s
attempt to convince Trump and protest leaders to accept a compromise deal
to get the country moving again. If only the president would offer the
demonstrators pardons and promise a $100 billion investment in low-
income communities, White suggested, Trump Out would surely see reason
and go home. “Obvsly this isnt about poverty then jerkoff,” he snapped at
Bryan Cranston when the six-time Emmy winner called the idea “dead on
arrival.” As users housebound by the lack of mobile internet briefly turned
the free-for-all into the top trending topic, Trump saw the proposal and

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replied to a tweet for the first time since before Michael Glazer’s shooting:
“No can do. We cannot (will not) compromise with terrorists! Sorry!”

But the commander-in-chief didn’t get too embroiled in the debate.

Throughout that afternoon, witnesses say he called Pete Zeller at least three
times exhorting him to more aggressive action on the Mall. “Your authority is
basically unlimited,” Trump told him. “You’re in charge up there.” The
SCRAG, in turn, instructed Brig. Gen. Wood to push up the planned after-
dark assault to early evening. JTF headquarters sent out deployment orders,
and by 1830 hours, almost a full battalion from Falcon Brigade was forming
up near the Kennedy Center for a move in force to the Lincoln Memorial.
With them were four ADS systems, two bulldozers, and a dozen eight-
wheeled armored personnel carriers.

Homeland Security sent its drones back over the western side of the Mall,
warning protesters that anyone still around the Lincoln Memorial in five
minutes would be subject to arrest. But instead of clearing out, the crowd
swelled as people surged from all around the protest zone. They’d seen via
satellite internet that protesters blocking the 405 in L.A. were defeating the
pain rays with layers of aluminum foil, and now volunteers went from group
to group asking for any that people had to spare. Demonstrators passed
boxes of Reynolds Wrap westward from hand to hand, as masked activists on
the front line taped the foil over umbrellas to act as improvised shields.
Organizers had set up distribution points handing out goggles and earplugs
to those who didn’t have them.

At a command from Brig. Gen. Wood at Fort McNair, all four Active Denial
System units silently switched on and started sweeping the crowd. However

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gallant the foil umbrellas, there were not enough, and hundreds of protesters
turned and ran. Vice News’s Todd Zwillich was near the front wearing a
helmet and flak jacket marked “PRESS” when the pain rays hit him. “Fuck!”
he screams on the video, joining a thick mass of yelping demonstrators
scrambling backward. “Back-back-back-back-back. Fuck, that’s hot. Fuck.”

Wood and Zeller were watching it all from the JOC via a drone feed projected
onto one of the giant screens at the front of the ops bay. As most of the
demonstrators retreated, the shield wall of paratroopers advanced—covered
by snipers on the Institute of Peace rooftop scanning the crowd for gunmen.
There was a brief melee as a few dozen hardcore activists charged back in
with clubs and baseball bats after the ADS units had been turned off, but
bright flashes and white puffs bloomed on the video as they were swiftly
driven back with stun grenades. Snatch squads slipped out of the shield wall
to nab the few most ferocious troublemakers, and cut teams got to work on
the ones who’d chained themselves together on the ground. In a matter of
minutes, troops from the 82nd Airborne were marching up the storied front
steps of the memorial—flex-cuffing an African-American grandmother
named Carole Evans on the paver that had been inscribed “I have a dream”
to mark the spot where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his iconic 1963 address.

Seeing the protest crowds retreating in disarray, SCRAG Zeller wanted to

keep the pressure up. If the paratroopers kept pushing eastward, he said,
they could roll all the way down the length of the Reflecting Pool and reach
the Washington Monument before the “rebels” knew what hit them. But that
would require large additional forces. Falcon Brigade’s 1st Battalion was still
staging at Nationals Park and would have to drive more than three miles
through the city to join the advance. Some of the support hardware was still

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at Joint Base Andrews over the river in Maryland. Brig. Gen. Wood ordered
them all toward the Lincoln Memorial as urgent reinforcements.

I
N THE OPEN bed of a 5-ton truck, PFC Kevin Diaz and his squad-mates

whooped and cheered as the convoy finally got moving. It was after
1930 hours and they were headed into the city for the first time since
morning—following a few hours of rest, a hot meal, and more refresher civil
disturbance training across the river at Fort Belvoir. Word was they’d be in
the thick of it for an assault on the Mall. Guys were starting to get keyed up.
“These assholes…” groaned Diaz’s friend PFC Jaxon Trimble as they rolled
down a narrow street outside Fort McNair. “We’ve been deployed a lot more
than 24 hours. This girl from my high school always posts premium camel
toe selfies to her Snap stories, and I’m missing them.” Their phones were all
locked up back at Fort Bragg.

“Wait, today’s Father’s Day, right?” asked Cpl. Adam Babick over the
thrumming diesels. The other guys, geared up in riot armor and face shields,
grunted that it was. “I just remembered tomorrow is a free week of Pornhub
Premium.” At this rate, they were going to miss that, too. “Let’s crush this
tonight and get back to ‘Nam before it’s over,” he said. The old joke—older
than most of their parents—was that Fayetteville was “Fayette-nam.” Rules
for the Use of Force, the guys jokingly agreed, went out the window if you
happened to be the unlucky commie anarchist standing between a
paratrooper and 4K Ultra HD doggystyle. PFC Trimble started to yowl a
crudely improvised song about “Antifa hunting” until the staff sergeant shut
him up.

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The truck slammed on the brakes and everyone tumbled forward. Several
minutes passed at a standstill. Guys wondered aloud what the holdup was.
Then an armored black shape roared past—one of the D.C. police BearCats
that had been escorting the convoy, gunning it to the front of the column.
Soon after, they heard loud booms echoing from up ahead. “Flashbangs,”
someone said reassuringly.

It was 15 minutes before they were moving again, but just as they were
starting to pick up speed along the waterfront, the column lurched to a stop.
More flashbangs. Another long wait. Pretty soon, word got back to Diaz and
the squad that protesters had been rushing out to block the streets. Some had
handcuffed themselves together and sat down in the road. The column
turned, taking a detour deeper into the city as commanders tried to route
them around the demonstrations. It was stop-and-go all the way. Diaz saw
Black mothers with little kids looking down warily from second-story
windows as the trucks rumbled past. After one delay, they passed some flex-
cuffed protesters sitting on a sidewalk at gunpoint. Diaz was struck by how
normal they looked. No ski masks. No Soviet flags. Instead, t-shirts and
jeans. Maybe some hoodies. One appeared to be a minister. At one point, Cpl.
Babick pointed upward at an octorotor drone that seemed to be following
them: “Theirs or ours?” No one was sure. By the time they reached the
Lincoln Memorial, it was getting dark.

When Col. Bower at Andrews called the JOC to report that his units were
ready for the follow-up assault, it was too late. In the hours-long delay,
protesters had erected fresh barricades along their new line of contact in
front of the Reflecting Pool. Some had flipped cars into improvised bulwarks
while others piled earth-filled shopping bags in the gaps. Several

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demonstrators had climbed onto truck roofs with gas cans in view of the
paratroopers and police, and promised to set themselves on fire if the
authorities attacked. Combined with the loss of surprise and the difficulty of
spotting in the dark any gunmen that might be in the crowd, this made for a
thorny tactical situation. Reluctantly, Brig. Gen. Wood decided to wait until
morning, and persuaded SCRAG Zeller to back him up on that to the
president.

As the night wore on, reports filtered into the bustling ops bay via FEMA and
USNORTHCOM that demonstrations were worsening elsewhere in the
nation as well. Despite the cell shutdowns, the crowds had adapted, and
street battles of varying sizes and intensities had gripped two dozen major
American cities. Five more protesters had been killed, and one police
officer—Atlanta PD sergeant Justin Yale, gunned down by a sniper who
remained at large.

After word of the shooting broke in D.C., someone—a group of Baltimore

cops, it would later emerge—had scaled the Lincoln Memorial and hung a
giant 20’ x 40’ “thin blue line” flag from its roof. A stark black-and-white
rendering of the American flag with a single blue stripe representing law
enforcement protecting society from chaos, it originated in 2014 to show
support for police officers, but was also soon adopted by opponents of Black
Lives Matter and a range of right-wing authoritarian groups. Some Unite the
Right marchers carried it in Charlottesville, and by 2021 it was seen by many
minorities and liberals as a veritable hate symbol. There is no evidence that
the flag hung that Sunday night was intended as anything other than a
memorial to Sgt. Yale, but the political divide was now wide enough that even

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when Wood and Zeller saw photos of the spotlit flag, they did not apprehend
how the image would be interpreted in many parts of the country.

After a low-key dinner in his private wing of Mar-a-Lago, President Trump

called the general and the SCRAG for an update at 9:46 p.m. He’d seen
inaccurate information online and congratulated them under the impression
that they had already retaken the Washington Monument. Wood reported
regretfully that the follow-up assault had to be scrubbed after the
reinforcements were delayed by sustained, well-coordinated demonstrator
actions. He’d been bracing for the commander-in-chief’s wrath, but instead
Trump was understanding. “I like you, General,” he said, according to a U.S.
intelligence official who later saw the JOC’s verbatim transcript of the
recording. “You’re a smart guy… Tell me why you’re still having these
problems.”

Wood answered that despite SOP 303, the protesters were still
communicating well and staying one step ahead of them. One of the DHS
officials in the JOC was brought onto the call to explain in more detail—
undercover police and signals intelligence showed that Trump Out was using
satellite internet effectively to share information and coordinate well-timed
actions across the city to thwart the authorities. “Can we jam up the
satellite?” Trump asked. Not effectively, the official explained. The
technologies they had wouldn’t work well over a large area like the National
Mall. “Can we shoot it down?” Trump asked, per the source who saw the
transcript. While the extent of America’s anti-satellite technologies remains a
closely-guarded secret, the DHS official had other reasons for dismissing that
idea—the communication satellites in question are privately owned by

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American and British companies, and the U.S. government had no legal right
to destroy them.

As the official explained, one partial solution DHS was pursuing was to get
the Trump Out app itself taken down. Homeland Security had sent Apple and
Google formal demands to remove the app from their online stores, but both
companies had refused and filed lawsuits asserting their right to keep it
accessible to users. The government was hoping for temporary restraining
orders in federal court on Monday, but the department’s lawyers said they
were unlikely to be granted. Their attempts to get Amazon Web Services to
cut off hosting stood a somewhat better chance of success—especially given
the new evidence of senior Trump Out organizers encouraging the Memphis
and Louisville airport actions—but it would still be up to the whims of the
judge. And it wasn’t like Trump could call Jeff Bezos at home and ask him to
pull the plug as a personal favor.

If they couldn’t take the app offline, Trump asked, they did have the power to
shut down the whole internet, right? This wasn’t his first time floating such
an idea—he’d publicly raised the prospect of “closing that internet up” as
early as 2015. The DHS official answered that that was above his pay grade,
but SCRAG Zeller interjected with a clear answer: yes. According to Section
706 of the Communications Act of 1934 (commonly referred to as Section
606, after its position in Title 47 of the United States Code), the president
was empowered to—upon issuing an emergency proclamation explaining a
threat of war—order the closure of any wire communication facility in the
country. While the act had been written decades before the internet had been
conceived, the prevailing legal consensus was that it would allow seizure of
the internet exchange points that formed the backbone of the web. Invoking

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Section 606 wouldn’t make the net go completely dark—online traffic could
still leak into the country via a variety of secondary channels—but it would
deny the vast majority of Americans access to the Trump Out app. And
combined with the cell network closures, the protesters tearing apart dozens
of American cities would lose most of their ability to coordinate resistance.
Trump agreed that this was the best course of action.

Just after eleven o’clock that night, Trump convened half a dozen senior
advisors—including Seb Gorka, Stephen Miller, Secretary Wolf, and
Homeland Security Advisor Bob Francis—in the estate’s secure room for a
videoconference to hammer out details of the plan. On the other end in D.C.
were Acting AG Ian Gallup and four-star general Paul Nakasone,
simultaneously serving as NSA Director and head of U.S. Cyber Command.
The first order of business, Miller said, per witnesses, was establishing a firm
legal footing for the order. Gallup said he would promptly have an opinion
drafted affirming Trump’s authority to shutter the U.S.-based internet under
Section 606. There would certainly be challenges from the left, he said, but
that would at least give them cover to act right away and fight it out in the
courts later.

“Shut it all down,” Trump said.

Nakasone strenuously argued against such a drastic action. The economic

impact would be catastrophic, he warned. The whole country would grind to
a halt. But Trump dismissed his concerns. “It’ll be just like the lockdowns
from the virus last year. We came through that just fine … and we’ll come
through this just fine. It’s the same thing. I think people are used to it now.”
But Nakasone firmly but respectfully disagreed. This time would be far

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worse. Such a sweeping and hasty shutdown of the internet was bound to
have devastating unexpected side effects. Practically everything was
connected to the internet now, he explained—power plants, electric grids,
water treatment facilities, traffic lights, oil pipelines, and more. Diabetics’
insulin monitors would stop working, cloud-based medical records would
become inaccessible, and hospital telemedicine links would fail. Police and
counter-terror databases would crash, and much of the Department of
Defense’s own critical communications would be thrown into disarray. If
anything, COVID-19 had made America even more reliant on these digital
lifelines.

Although he strongly advised against any broad-brush closure, Nakasone

urged the president to consider an alternative. Rather than shutting internet
service providers and internet exchange points altogether—as Trump had
characterized his wishes at the start of the meeting—the NSA could employ a
tool called CRYSTAL SPIKE that had been secretly developed to prioritize
essential communications over a devastated internet in the event of an
electromagnetic pulse or nuclear attack. It had never been deployed.

Under this plan, Gen. Nakasone explained, federal agents would take
physical control of the exchange facilities, and install software that blocked
all traffic except that from “whitelisted” IP addresses—this would allow them
to effectively lock up the commercial internet but mitigate disruption to the
nation’s critical infrastructure. The only catch, he said, was that it would take
a day or two to assemble the whitelist. As Nakasone testified to the Romney-
Porter Committee, he knew this timeline was wildly overoptimistic. In the
orderly rollout NSA officials had envisioned for 2023, developing, vetting,
and testing the whitelist would have taken six to eight months. But the

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general hoped that by buying a little time, he might be able to forestall
disaster until the president either changed his mind or resigned.

Trump seemed to understand the general’s concerns, but he was not in a

waiting mood. He was still convinced that the impact would be no worse than
the coronavirus lockdowns. But if the government couldn’t get a handle on
these demonstrations right away, he said, there would be a revolution. He
rattled off a list of prominent supporters who he claimed had called him
demanding immediate action. Some top CEOs, he’d heard, were afraid that
the protesters were going to win, and had begun putting out feelers to
Republican legislators about impeachment—overthrowing the elected
government, in Trump’s eyes. The president clearly felt cornered. If
everything was in danger of collapsing around his ears anyway, where was
the harm in boldness? “We have nothing to lose,” he said. He’d always
trusted his instincts before, after all, and they had gotten him twice elected
President of the United States.

No, Trump said, they were facing terrorism, and they would implement the
Section 606 shutdown right away, using whatever whitelist the NSA could
scrape together by morning. If that caused problems, they could add missing
IP blocks over the coming days. Nakasone testified that he made one final
protest for delay, and was able to get Wolf and Francis on board with a 24-
hour pause. They suggested deferring escalation until things had played out
for another day—there was a good chance the demonstrations would start to
collapse without having to incur the titanic economic losses of a shutdown.

At that moment, the meeting was interrupted by Mike Monaghan and

another member of Trump’s Secret Service detail. The protests across the

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water from Mar-a-Lago on the mainland had just turned ugly in the last
hour. Demonstrators enraged by footage of Carole Evans’s arrest and photos
of the “thin blue line” flag hanging like a fascist banner over the Lincoln
Memorial had started hurling taunts at police along the Southern Boulevard
Bridge—and scuffles quickly turned into hundreds of people rushing the
barricades. They had been repulsed with flashbang grenades and tear gas,
but several officers were being treated for injuries.

That only cemented Trump’s resolve. “We do it tomorrow,” the commander-

in-chief said. “That’s my decision.”

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