His decision to invoke a military response to nationwide protests against police brutality — symbolized by the move Monday to gas mostly peaceful protesters in a park across from the White House to clear the way for a staged photo outside a church — appears to have been a fateful miscalculation. The incident has created a deep rift between the White House and the Pentagon, and drew an extraordinary rebuke from Trump’s former secretary of Defense. Images of a widening perimeter of fences and concrete barriers that the administration has erected in a several-block area around the White House, as federal agents and troops patrol key intersections, have only deepened the sense of Trump as an isolated, beleaguered figure.
