Editorial: President Trump takes aim at America's core principles

The president’s primary job is to preserve, protect and defend the U.S. Constitution. Even when it is inconvenient. Even when people are using it to say the government is wrong. Especially when they are doing that.

We know that, because the framers realized immediately they left important things out of the Constitution.

The whole point of our country is written in those first 10 changes they made. The Bill of Rights. Everything government does is supposed to be in service to protecting and ensuring those liberties. The very first one is the freedom to speak and assemble.

It is what set America the country apart from America the colonies. When 56 people signed their names to the Declaration of Independence, they did so knowing their words were weapons. They started a war over the right to tell the king that he was wrong, that they were treated unfairly and they wanted a voice.

The first thing they chose to enshrine in their new nation was the right to criticize it.

It is shocking that an American president should oppress that speech. President Trump’s actions Monday did that with a hail of rubber bullets and tear gas. A crowd of loud but otherwise peaceful protesters was then herded aside so he could walk across the street from the White House to St. John’s Episcopal Church. He posed for pictures, holding a Bible in his right hand, like a prop.

That jaunt raises issues with another aspect of the First Amendment — government involvement with religion.

“The president just used a Bible and one of the churches of my diocese as a backdrop for a message antithetical to the teachings of Jesus and everything that our church stands for,” said Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington.

On Tuesday, Trump made another pilgrimage, this time to the Saint John Paul II National Shrine. That was likewise met with disdain by Washington Archbishop Wilton D. Gregory, who called it an egregious misuse and manipulation of the facility and the late pope’s popularity.

In his Rose Garden speech Monday, delivered while the protesters were being rousted, Trump urged governors to deploy National Guard troops to “dominate the streets.” He claimed warlike powers to deploy troops into U.S. streets, defying the specific framework set up by the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878.

Yes, the raised voices of those protesting the death of a black man under the knee of a white police officer in Minneapolis have run the gamut from prayerful to powerful to pyrotechnic in cities all over the country, including Greensburg and Pittsburgh. But the answer to controlling the chaos isn’t muzzling the voices. For many of the protesters, the point is that their voices haven’t been heard.

Trump’s short statement gagged the First Amendment — and promised violence to other provisions of both the Bill of Rights and legislation passed by Congress over the course of 200 or so years. It all happened as he stood before the American people and proclaimed himself the “president of law and order.”

If Trump wants to be the law and order president, his first allegiance has to be to our highest and oldest law — the one that lets people criticize the government.