Trump Agrees to Send Home Troops From Washington, Easing Tensions With the Pentagon

WASHINGTON — President Trump agreed on Thursday to begin sending home 82nd Airborne Division troops he had ordered to Washington, temporarily easing a contentious standoff with the Pentagon over the role of the armed forces in quelling protests that have broken out across the nation.

None of the active-duty forces ever actually deployed in Washington, instead remaining on alert outside the city while National Guard troops took up position near the White House and elsewhere around town. But they became caught up in a confrontation pitting a commander in chief intent on demonstrating strength in the face of street demonstrations versus a military command resistant to being drawn into domestic law enforcement or election year politics.

Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper initially tried to send home a small portion of the 1,600 active-duty troops on Wednesday, only to have Mr. Trump order him to reverse course during an angry meeting. The president finally acquiesced on Thursday, according to an administration official who asked not to be named discussing internal deliberations, but it did not appear the two men spoke directly.

Mr. Esper ordered 700 airborne soldiers to head back to Fort Bragg, N.C., by evening and a Pentagon official said the remaining 900 soldiers from the division as well as a military police unit from Fort Drum, N.Y., could begin withdrawing as early as Friday. More than 2,000 National Guard forces remain in Washington, a number set to climb to 4,500.

Protesters returned to the White House on Thursday to find that National Guard units that had established a perimeter blocks away had pulled back, allowing the crowds all the way up to the northern edge of Lafayette Square once again, at least during daylight. But the government fortified the square, adding concrete barriers behind chain-link fences installed earlier in the week and extending the fences farther around the White House.

What appeared on Thursday to be an uneasy truce between the White House and Pentagon did not mean that the conflict was over. While Mr. Trump’s advisers counseled him not to fire Mr. Esper, the president spent much of the day privately railing about the defense secretary, who along with Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, opposed the president’s desire to send regular troops into the nation’s cities.

Mr. Trump has been dismissive of Mr. Esper as weak, according to people who have heard the president speak on the matter, but he told aides that he understands their warnings that he would risk more criticism from military officials if he were to dismiss the defense secretary, fueling a rising revolt among retired officers in the thick of a re-election campaign.

Mr. Trump has repeatedly portrayed himself as a strong supporter of the military, in contrast to President Barack Obama, and boasted of the taxpayer dollars he has invested in the armed forces. But his threat to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807 to send active-duty troops into the streets pushed some top officers to the brink.

“This is a critical moment to decide whether the Department of Defense is going to be independent of the politics of the moment and focus on its principal role of defending national security or whether it’s simply going to become a political arm of the president,” said former Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta, who served under Mr. Obama.

General Milley, the country’s highest military officer, who was appointed to his current role by Mr. Trump, has strenuously opposed invoking the Insurrection Act, arguing that militarizing the federal response to the conflict was unnecessary and would harm the military in the years to come.

On Wednesday, Mr. Esper joined General Milley in clear opposition to invoking the act and announced it publicly. But by then, both were already reeling from the criticism they received for accompanying Mr. Trump on Monday night on his walk across Lafayette Square for a photo op facilitated by riot police who forcibly cleared out peaceful protesters with chemical agents, flash grenades and mounted officers.

But the havoc wrought on Monday night, and the participation of Mr. Esper and General Milley, prompted former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis to speak out in a statement accusing the president of trying to divide the nation.

After a day in which Mr. Mattis’s statement was widely praised by former military officers and even a senior Republican senator, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, the president lashed out at Mr. Mattis, posting a letter on Twitter from his former lawyer John M. Dowd harshly attacking the former defense secretary. “Read it!” Mr. Trump commanded his followers.

In the letter, Mr. Dowd pronounced himself “appalled and upset” by Mr. Mattis’s statement. “You lost me,” Mr. Dowd, a onetime Marine captain, wrote Mr. Mattis, a retired four-star general. “Never dreamed you would let a bunch of hack politicians use your good name and reputation — earned with the blood and guts of young Marines.”

Mr. Trump also again falsely insisted that he fired Mr. Mattis, who in fact resigned in protest over a plan to withdraw troops from Syria. “I did fire James Mattis,” Mr. Trump wrote, adding that he “was no good for me!” In fact, when Mr. Mattis stepped down in December 2018, Mr. Trump himself wrote that “General Jim Mattis will be retiring, with distinction.” He changed his story only to maintain that he had fired Mr. Mattis after growing angry about the former defense secretary’s resignation letter.

In private conversations lately with aides, the president described Mr. Mattis as someone more concerned about getting invited to parties in Washington than anything else, according to a person familiar with the discussion. He has come to see Mr. Mattis the same way he views one of his former White House chiefs of staff, John F. Kelly, a retired Marine general who periodically comments about his White House tenure in scornful terms. Mr. Kelly told The Washington Post on Thursday that Mr. Trump was not telling the truth when he said that he fired Mr. Mattis.

Later in the day, Mr. Trump disputed Mr. Kelly, claiming that he did not tell his chief of staff that he had fired Mr. Mattis because Mr. Kelly “was not in my inner-circle, was totally exhausted by the job, and in the end just slinked away into obscurity.”

He also slammed Ms. Murkowski. “Few people know where they’ll be in two years from now, but I do, in the Great State of Alaska (which I love) campaigning against Senator Lisa Murkowski,” he wrote.

Senior Pentagon leaders are now so concerned about losing public support that General Milley released a message to top military commanders on Wednesday affirming that every member of the armed forces swears an oath to defend the Constitution, which he said “gives Americans the right to freedom of speech and peaceful assembly.”

The memo helped temper some of the unrest among retired officers. “It’s a start,” said James G. Stavridis, a retired admiral and NATO commander. “All of the service chiefs have also put out guidance against racial discrimination. I think it’s about as far as they can go in uniform without resignations.”

National Guard commanders, who in recent months have sent thousands of troops to assist American communities in combating Covid-19, also expressed fears that supporting civilian police to quell protests could tarnish the Guard’s image.

“We in America should not get used to or accept uniformed service members of any variety having to be put in a position where they are having to secure people inside the United States of America,” said Maj. Gen. Thomas Carden of the Georgia National Guard.

“While we are glad to do it and honored to do it, this is a sign of the times that we need to do better as a country, and we ought to look at this as a forcing function for our country to do better,” General Carden said. “We stand ready to do this mission anytime we are called on to do it, but I pray I never have to do it again.”

Richard Kohn, an expert on civil-military relations who is a professor emeritus at the University of North Carolina, said that episodic crises between political leaders and military generals are a recurring feature of American history, but called the current tensions unusual and especially troubling.

“There is the stench of authoritarianism and intimidation — and even illegality — in Mr. Trump’s attitude and bluster and his intended actions,” he said.

Kori Schake, the director of foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute and a former national security aide to President George W. Bush, said Mr. Trump was corroding the professionalism of the military.

“The fact that so many active-duty officers and former officers are speaking up in support of the Constitution,” she said, “shows the damage this is doing to the covenant between the American people and the military.”

Michael Crowley and Thomas Gibbons-Neff contributed reporting from Washington, and Maggie Haberman from New York.