On Balance | As George Floyd protests rage across the US, why does Donald Trump insist on posing in front of churches?

Name: US President Trump makes impromptu visit to church for Bible photo op amid protests
Uploaded: 2020-06-08T17:00:14.000Z
Duration: 53 s
Description: US President Trump makes impromptu visit to church for Bible photo op amid protests

The US president wants to brand as terrorists all those protesting against the killing of an African-American man by the police and is keen to use military force to quell demonstrations, using religion as the symbolic backdrop

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US President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump visit the Saint John Paul II National Shrine to lay a ceremonial wreath and observe a moment of remembrance under the Statue of Saint John Paul II on June 2 in Washington. Photo: AFP

Robert Delaney

Published: 1:00am, 9 Jun 2020Updated: 2:08am, 9 Jun 2020

Remember the New Testament story of how Jesus Christ got his henchmen to beat the living daylights out of merchants occupying the Temple of Jerusalem for defiling the house of worship with trade?

Well, that wasn’t quite how it went. Jesus didn’t have any henchmen, just the apostles, who weren’t particularly interested in getting into any serious scrapes with the Roman authorities. The offending merchants at the temple just got a good dressing down from Jesus, the story goes.

Nonetheless, it seems that US President Donald Trump and Attorney General William Barr saw protesters outside the White House on June 1 as the same sort of unholy desecration that enraged Christ 2,000 years ago.

With tear gas, rubber bullets and stun grenades, National Guard and Secret Service agents cleared the way for Trump – who throughout his life has shown about as much religious piety as Playboy founder Hugh Hefner – to stand in front of St John’s Church and hold up the holy book.

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US President Trump makes impromptu visit to church for Bible photo op amid protests

For anyone outside Trump’s base, the optics were grotesque. Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington called the move “antithetical to the Bible that he held in his hands”. And as Trump and the First Lady prepared for a visit to the Saint John Paul II National Shrine the very next day, Archbishop Wilton Gregory, the Catholic archbishop of Washington, denounced that photo opportunity as “baffling and reprehensible”.