Ivanka Trump joined in the controversial photo-op with her father yesterday in her designer purse as she joined in the walk from the White House to St. John’s Church.

Trump handed her father the bible from her white Max Mara purse, which retails for $1,540, when the group reached the church last night after crossing Lafayette Park, which had been cleared of peaceful protesters ahead of their visit.

President Trump is facing an onslaught of criticism for posing in front of the boarded-up 104-year-old Episcopal Church in Lafayette Square, across the street from the White House, in a photo-op orchestrated by Trump adviser Hope Hicks.

Hicks has been identified as having helped hatch the plan for the staged event that saw police and National Guard forces facilitate by using tear gas and rubber bullets to clear away peaceful protesters.

The move was conceived as a way to allow Trump to demonstrate his self-proclaimed role as the ‘law and order president’ and – came after the president vowed to use the military to restore order in cities across the country after protests broke out nation wide following the death of George Floyd, a black man who died after a white cop knelt on his neck for eight minutes.

As a PR move, Trump’s photo-op may have backfired, after global and national media broadcast images of shield-bearing and mounted police using force to clear Lafayette Park, an area whose use as a forum for demonstrations and speech has long been protected.

Longtime GOP operative Brendan Buck, a former spokesman for Speakers John Boehner and Paul Ryan when he was a vice presidential nominee, blasted the decision.

‘We long ago lost sight of normal, but this was a singularly immoral act,” he said.

Hicks accompanied Trump as he walked across Lafayette Park to pose at the church.

As did Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner.

Kushner is a senior adviser to the president and Hicks works in his office.

The contrasting image of the president in front of a church holding a bible compared with images of protesters being gassed and arrested has resulted in a wave of outrage.

Mariann Budde, the Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington which oversees the church, said she was ‘outraged’ by the action. ‘The president cleared the park and courtyard of our church… stood in front of St Johns as if it were spiritual validation and justification for a message that is antithetical to the teachings of Jesus and God of justice,’ she said.

D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, who had ordered a 7 pm curfew Monday, said she was ‘shocked’ that people who didn’t seem to provoke attack were ‘attacked’ by federal law enforcement who cleared the way for Trump.

Hicks was Trump’s longtime press aide, following him from the Trump Organization to the White House.

She served as White House Communications Director before leaving to take a position with the Fox Corporation, then returning as a counselor to the president this year.

Joe Biden suggested that Trump open a Bible ‘instead of brandishing it,’ as Trump did outside St. John’s Church.

‘I will seek to heal the racial wounds that have long plagued this country – not use them for political gain,’ the presumptive Democratic nominee pledged in a speech in Philadelphia today.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi brandished her own bible today to chastise the president.

The speaker held up her bible, in a counter to Trump brandishing a bible on Monday afternoon, to read from Ecclesiastes 3: 1-8, focusing on its message of a ‘time to heal.’

‘Let’s focus from time to time to heal,’ she said during an event in the U.S. Capitol. ‘We would hope that the President of the United States would follow the lead of so many other presidents before has to be a healer in chief and not a fanner of the flame.’

The walk outside the White House gates – the first as president by the heavily-guarded Trump – came after he had been confined at home for more than a day.

Trump had been upset by the leak that Secret Service had taken him to bunker deep beneath the White House as police clashed with protesters Friday night.