In the hours immediately following the attacks of September 11, 2001, former Vice-President Dick Cheney, his wife Lynne Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Mary Matalin and other senior White House staff were briefly removed by the Secret Service to the President’s Emergency Operations Center (PEOC), a secure bunker buried approximately 120 feet beneath the East Wing of the White House. In 2015 a set of photographs depicting the scene in that bunker (which after the 9/11 attacks had undergone substantial improvements by the Obama administration) was released to the National Archives.
The PEOC was originally constructed by Franklin D. Roosevelt during World War II, and according to WhiteHouse.gov it has since undergone modifications to enable it to withstand a nuclear attack. Another even more secure enclave (a “Doomsday” bunker”) buried significantly deeper purportedly exists under the North Lawn. Usage of either the PEOC or the “Doomsday” bunker has been understandably difficult to document, but there appears to be no official account of their usage since the 9/11 attacks. As the New York Times notes, “The [PEOC] bunker has not been used much, if at all, since those early days of the war on terrorism, but it has been hardened to withstand the force of a passenger jet crashing into the mansion above.”
On Friday, one day after Tweeting “When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” a message intended to taunt those protesting the cold-blooded police murder of George Lloyd, Donald Trump spent at least part of and possibly the entire evening huddled in this bunker. The Times describes the scene that evening in the public areas just outside the White House:
Hundreds of people surged toward the White House as Secret Service and United States Park Police officers sought to block them. Bricks and bottles were thrown, and the police responded with pepper spray. At one point, an official said, a barricade near the Treasury Department next door to the White House was penetrated.
What is not clear from the Times article is the number of protesters who actually “surged” towards the White House; nor is there any quantification of how many “bricks and bottles” were thrown, where they were thrown from or towards whom, or the extent which the “barricade” at the Treasury Department “next door to the White House,” was “penetrated.”
What does seem clear is that absent their “bricks and bottles,” none of the protesters were carrying or utilizing any type of firearms. There are references to “fireworks” being set off, but the degree and intensity of these displays is not described. Fox News reported and photographs confirm that Secret Service Agents had tremendously beefed up security around the actual White House with the assistance of officials from the Department of Homeland Security, the DEA and the District of Columbia National Guard. All were out in extraordinary force, and supposedly there was a “search” conducted at some time for “car bombs.” The reason anyone was “searching for car bombs,” or whether car bombs were ever an actual threat, remain undisclosed (there is no car traffic directly in front of the White House, a measure implemented during the Clinton administration specifically intended to eliminate that threat).
Photographs and video taken at the scene depict fires burning in the street to the accompaniment of crowds of people shouting. But the photographs and videos are of the Lafayette Park area across from the White House (or other areas much further away) and none of this activity is shown to be breaching the gates or entering directly upon the premises or grounds that surround the actual structure. Fox News reports indicate that prior to the 11 pm curfew the authorities administered ”a major barrage of tear gas stun grenades into the crowd of more than 1,000 people, largely clearing Lafayette Park across the street from the White House and scattering protesters into the street.”
There were no deaths reportedly associated with the protests, although (again), Fox News reported sixty Secret Service members were “hurt” over a three day period. The extent of those injuries was not disclosed, nor is there detail on the number of protesters who may have been injured.
So in sum, it appears that the protests amounted to up to 1000 unarmed people milling about the area of Lafayette Park at any given time, some possibly carrying (at the most) bricks, bottles and possibly fireworks, faced by an extraordinary number of law enforcement officials in possession of high-tech, lethal weaponry, body armor and protective shielding, as well as the ready means to dissipate crowds through gas, tasers or other means. The fences surrounding the White House itself were not breached (which we assume would have automatically triggered a lethal response), and the staggering protective capabilities of the U.S. military, which presumably could have wiped out the entire protest or incapacitated the protesters in a matter of seconds, were apparently not even a consideration.
As noted in the Times article, the Secret Service has protocols which they use to determine whether the White House building is threatened. Whether a president can override their protocols and refuse to be directed into the PEOC bunker is not entirely clear under the law, but let’s assume that Donald Trump had no say one way or another whether he would be so relocated to this fortified bunker, for the first known time since the 9/11 attacks.
This was no “9/11” moment, however. There were no planes or ICBM’s hurtling out of the sky to strike the White House. Neither the U.S. nor its leadership were under any threat or danger by a group of unarmed people, even ones throwing bricks and bottles. The reason people were specifically protesting outside the White House was, for the most part, for the lack of any leadership by this president in responding to a gaping open wound of racial injustice and police violence towards the Black community. The reason people were protesting is that there has been zero genuine effort by Trump or anyone in his administration to empathize or even acknowledge the anger and fear that the murder of George Floyd generated. Instead the president deliberately chose to fan the flames of violence (in the midst of a pandemic) with incendiary and provocative Tweets, demonstrating once more his complete and utter disregard for anyone beyond his racist base of voters. As the Times article notes, the protests that followed were predictable, and may have even been the intent:
“One adviser to Mr. Trump, who insisted on anonymity to describe private conversations, said images of widespread destruction could be helpful to the law-and-order message that Mr. Trump has projected since his 2016 campaign.”
When he finally poked himself out of the bunker on Saturday, Trump himself confirmed that there had been no immediate threat to himself as he was well-protected by an arsenal of “ominous weapons.”
After his evening in the bunker, Mr. Trump emerged on Saturday morning to boast that he never felt unsafe and vow to sic “vicious dogs” and “ominous weapons” on intruders.
So even by his own admission there was no need for Trump’s retreat into his bunker.
Since the Secret Service isn’t going to tell us, we’ll probably never know whether the existence of a threat sufficient to prompt Trump to scurry into a bunker not used since the 9/11 attacks was based on any real evidence, a fiction created out of whole cloth to generate concern for his safety, or simply an unseemly act of cowardice. Either way it serves as a fitting metaphor for a president who has done nothing but run away at every opportunity from taking any responsibility for his actions.