Using active-duty military to disperse protesters ahead of President Donald Trump’s visit to St. John’s Episcopal Church “rang echoes of what the Founders feared more than anything,” retired Navy Admiral James Stavridis said Sunday.
In an interview on NBC News’ “Meet The Press,” Stavridis, a former supreme allied commander at NATO, said the dispersal of George Floyd protesters at Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C., was both disturbing and “wrong.”
“This is a moment when I think many of us watched the use of active-duty military to clear peaceful protesters out of Lafayette Square, and it rang echoes of what the Founders feared more than anything, which was the use of armed active-duty military against citizens, and they built safeguards in, including the First Amendment,” Stavridis said.
He said the protests aren’t “a battlespace to be dominated.”
“In this country, we have about a million police officers. We have about 500,000 National Guard who are citizen soldiers who operate under authority of governors,” he said.
“My view, that’s plenty of people who can do the policing function and their real role is to protect the peaceful demonstrators. This is not a battlespace to be dominated, these are zones of protests to be protected.
“There are sufficient forces to do that, and I think the military’s very concerned about getting pulled into the maelstrom of politics in an election year in order to push protesters as they were at Lafayette Square. That was wrong.”
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