As Feds Stand Down in Portland, Questions Mount About Misbegotten Deployment

A third evening of peaceful protests in downtown Portland adds evidence to the argument that it was the actions of federal agents, not demonstrators, that predominantly fueled the violence around the federal courthouse over the past few weeks.  It was not at all assured that the feds would keep off the streets, as acting secretary of Department of Homeland Security Chad Wolf hedged the withdrawal plan struck with Governor Kate Brown with multiple conditions.  Moreover, the federal backdown came days after plans to send even more federal agents to the city.

Yet it is looking increasingly likely that various damning realities finally penetrated the consciousness of decision-makers in the Trump administration: that the federal deployment had created a political backlash harmful to the president, and that the agents were caught in a contradictory mission of both fomenting violence while not wanting violence to reach a level such that it appeared they could not do their official job of keeping the peace.  Did it finally occur to someone in the chain of command that an agent from CBP or the Marshals Service was going to end up killing a demonstrator on the streets of Portland, and saw that this wouldn’t benefit even a president determined to show his toughness to political enemies?  I don’t think we have the full story of why the feds retreated, but I hope we do sooner rather than later, as it will provide important insights into the scope and potential limits of the depravity Trump’s henchmen are willing to enact.

Several days ago, The New York Times reported on how some senior federal law enforcement officials immediately saw danger in the social justice protests that exploded in the wake of George Floyd’s killing, and advocated a federal response to the demonstrations.  Such figures include the FBI’s deputy director, David Bowdich, who wrote a memo implicitly comparing the violence on the streets to 9/11 and making it clear that he saw the demonstrations as an example of organized violence.  That is, in the midst of the greatest social justice awakening of the past half century, high-ranking security officials believed the United States itself to be under organized attack.

Apart from the insanity of not being able to see what was plain for the ordinary citizen — that the protests around the nation were overwhelmingly peaceful — federal security agencies could not seem to figure out who was actually doing all this purported organizing of violence.  The Times notes that “domestic intelligence agents are uncertain about the root causes” of incidents, such as when some protestors shot fireworks at the federal courthouse in Portland, and that efforts were made to tie such acts to “anarchist extremists” committing “violence against government personnel and facilities” in the Pacific Northwest over the past several years.  

The insistence that an organized violent assault on the United States was underway seems to have had several pernicious results, apart from the most obvious one of leading U.S. security agencies to deny the reality of an actual peaceful social justice movement by focusing on limited fringe activities.  It seems not to have occurred to anyone, or to enough people, that low-grade events like shooting fireworks can easily be the work of individuals; after all, lighting a fireworks fuse is hardly what we mean by “rocket science.”  The obsession with a phantom organized effort at violence has also led the federal government to bring charges against protestors for low-level crimes that would normally be handled locally, such as smashing a police car window and burning a parking-attendant booth.  Apart from constituting federal overreach, this might be seen as federal prosecutors attempting to gin up an impression of a nationwide conspiracy requiring a federal response; after all, why else would the feds be involved in a case literally involving a broken window?  Finally, the close alignment between federal security officials viewing protests as an existential threat to the United States, and President Trump’s ongoing attempt to characterize the Black Lives Matter protests as a hate movement, suggests a corrupt federal adoption of the president’s deranged and frankly white supremacist rhetoric.

Further strong support for the theory that federal security efforts around civil rights protests have gone off the rails came on Thursday, with news that, according to The Washington Post, “The Department of Homeland Security has compiled ‘intelligence reports’ about the work of American journalists covering protests in Portland, Ore., in what current and former officials called an alarming use of a government system meant to share information about suspected terrorists and violent actors.”  Tweets by two journalists were included in intelligence reports that “are not intended to disseminate information about American citizens who have no connection to terrorists or other violent actors and who are engaged in activity protected by the First Amendment.”  On top of this, one of the leaked memos indicated that intelligence officials were creating “‘baseball cards’ of arrested protestors to try to understand their motivations and plans.  Historically, military and intelligence officials have used such cards for biographical dossiers of suspected terrorists, including those targeted in lethal drone strikes.”  Strikingly, the next day, acting secretary Wolf removed the DHS official whose office wrote these reports, and “ordered the intelligence office to stop collecting information on journalists and announced an investigation into the matter.”  

We are likely to learn of more DHS abuses in the coming weeks and months, the logical outcome of an agency that can’t discern true threats from false ones, is institutionally compelled to treat even protestors as dangerous terrorists, and seems all too attentive to the inclinations of an authoritarian president.

The Logic of the Portland Protests

A misleading discussion has been under way, both in the media, among protestors, and among Portlanders more generally, about whether protests in downtown Portland have lost their focus now that they include confrontations with, and larger protests against, the federal presence.  This debate misses the forest for the trees.  First, as anyone attending or reporting on the protests can attest, the main focus remains on the BLM movement.  At the same time, people have clearly been energized by the federal presence, and want to make it known that the feds should leave town.  But rather than viewing this as some sort of failure or breakdown in the protestors’ focus, this needs to be seen as the logical outcome of an American president illicitly unleashing the federal government to make war on an American city for purposes of his re-election.  This is simply too large an intrusion for Portlanders to ignore; to tsk-tsk about how the focus on BLM has been lost is to dismiss both the federal government’s malicious role and to apply a bizarre set of expectations to Portlanders.  If anything, it is absolutely remarkable that, in the face of the inevitable distraction posed by Trump’s paramilitaries, the majority of protestors remain true to the cause that brought people out to the streets to begin with.  And as I argued recently, an artificial distinction has been made between those protesting police violence against African-Americans and those protesting federal agents dispatched by a racist president who fully endorses every last blow that police inflict on African-Americans nationwide.  In fact, as this staggering New York Times article from Tuesday details, officials throughout federal law enforcement viewed suppression of civil rights protests as their duty from the beginning of the George Floyd-inspired tsunami of demonstrations nationwide.

Pivot Point in Portland?

The last few days have brought whiplash-inducing developments in the story of the federal government’s incendiary deployment of federal agents to Portland.  A couple of days ago, it was reported that the Trump administration was planning to send 100 additional US marshals to confront protestors in Portland, while also considering dispatching an additional 50 CBP agents.  It was chilling to learn that, after the federal presence had provoked a massive escalation in the size of the Portland protests — with some recent demonstrations estimated to involve between 2,000 and 4,000 attendees — the federal government viewed increasing its footprint as in any way reasonable.

But now we have news that Oregon Governor Kate Brown has reached an agreement with the Department of Homeland Security to replace the federal presence around the federal courthouse in downtown Portland with state police over the the next two weeks, beginning on Thursday.  However, according to The Oregonian, DHS head Chad Wolf says that the federal forces in the city will remain “until the violent activity toward our facility ends. We are not removing any law enforcement while our facilities and law enforcement remain under attack.” Additionally, Wolf indicated that both members of the Federal Protective Service and US Marshals would remain within the perimeter of the courthouse and inside the building itself (The Washington Post has a thorough rundown of the discrepancies in the statements being made by Brown and Wolf). It is certainly possible to read Wolf’s caveats as setting down a list of conditions that may not be easily met by the city.

These two developments — plans for deployment immediately followed by plans for retreat — suggest confusion and conflict at the federal level as to the effectiveness of the agents’ presence in Portland, both in terms of achieving what the government has claimed they are meant to, and in terms of serving the underlying purpose of supporting the president’s re-election effort by demonstrating his willingness to commit abuses against the citizens of Democrat-governed urban areas.  The involvement of Vice President Mike Pence in the negotiations hints to me that he and others in the White House may be concerned about a public backlash to the president’s efforts to operate as a full-on authoritarian.  Additionally, the earlier reporting on the planned new deployments noted that “some federal law enforcement officials worry that agents in Portland may be losing control of the streets around the federal courthouse and losing the public debate over their handling of the unrest”; such a recognition of reality may also lie behind this hedged federal climb-down from confrontation.

The reality is that, from the president’s perspective, he has to date gotten some of what he wanted and a lot of what he didn’t.  A small minority of protestors have continued to vandalize and engage in physical confrontations with the federal agents, which means the president has been able to feed his grossly exaggerated narrative of a Portland in chaos.  Yet far larger crowds have appeared near the federal courthouse downtown to continue showing their support for the Black Lives Matter movement, and also obviously to protest the federal presence.  In fact, Portlanders have acted heroically and effectively since the beginning of the protests in support of BLM two months ago, despite countless abuses by Portland police and then by federal security agents.  Against the federal effort, which is as much a propaganda initiative as a physical one, protestors self-identifying as moms, dads, teachers, doctors, and nurses have put the lie to right-wing attempts to paint the protests as the project of “violent anarchists.”  America watched secret police tear gas soccer moms, and asked what the hell Trump was doing.  America watched federal goons beat veterans, and knew immediately whose side was the just and moral one.  This is clearly not what Trump wanted.

The prospect of a de-escalation and withdrawal of the over-the-top federal presence is good news, particularly in light of the steady escalation of federal violence to date.  Multiple peaceful protestors have sustained serious head injuries after being shot by those misleadingly-named “nonlethal munitions,” as luck and helmets have so far held at bay the reality that any object shot at someone’s skull fast enough is able to kill them.  Many others, numbering at least in the hundreds, have been shot by pepper balls and rubber bullets, beaten with batons, and tear gassed and maced indiscriminately.  As the formaldehyde-infused maraschino cherry on top, the feds have behaved in the manner of a secret police force, obscuring individual and unit identities, and abducting Portlanders off the street in unmarked van, as if this were not the United States of America but warn-torn Sri Lanka or 1980’s Chile. It has felt inevitable that the federal agents would end up killing someone.

This is as good a point as any to point out that any framing of the conflict as being primarily between the city of Portland and the federal government is utterly misleading.  When an American president brings the power of the federal homeland security apparatus to bear on an American city for nakedly partisan ends, the president is not simply making war on that city — such a gross abuse of power means he is making war on all Americans.  It would be ridiculous to think that Portland should be responsible for taking on the federal government; a major clue to this absurdity is that this is exactly how Donald Trump keeps trying to frame it.  It is a relief that Governor Brown has stepped in; a state-level response to the federal intrusion was completely appropriate, but the true offense has been President Trump’s abuse of power against the nation as a whole.

Among other things, this sinister and brutal occupation renders absurd the federal government’s presumption that it is any position to set conditions for its own withdrawal.  The deployment of government agents in support of Donald Trump’s re-election campaign is a presidential abuse of power, and the willingness of officials and agents of the DHS and affiliated agencies to implement the president’s deranged plan merits investigation and appropriate punishment.  Agents who violated the rights of protestors need to be held to account, up to losing their jobs; officials who were complicit in a plan to brutalize American citizens for political purposes must be held to account, including at a minimum an assurance that they will be fired and banned from future government employment. And as many have already pointed out, this deployment highlights the final transformation of the Department of Homeland Security into an instrument not of defense against foreign threats, but of domestic repression. While its agents abused lawfully protesting citizens, the leadership of DHS spread lies that portrayed all protestors as violent and the city as on the brink of destruction — a distortion of truth all the more stunning when one stops to consider that this same department is charged with making accurate assessments of actual external dangers to the nation’s security. Where we would expect competence and commitment to the national interest, we instead witnessed hysteria and subservience to a corrupt president. In the name of our actual security, it’s time to think about doing away with the Department of Homeland Security.

The Feds Have Occupied America’s Whitest City in the Name of White Supremacy

One point about the deployment of federal agents to Portland that has not gotten much attention is that Portland is the whitest of American mid-size cities (though The New York Times has just published an article centered on this fact). This detail intersects suggestively with the long-standing offensive by right-wing politicians (including the president) and media against antifa and “violent anarchists,” who are generally characterized as white, and who stand as a distinct enemy in parallel to the African-American-led Black Lives Matter movement. While I can buy that some of this demonization of antifa is meant to paint them as outside agitators who are secretly leading the BLM movement from behind (just as in earlier decades outside agitators, e.g. communists and Jews, were said to be behind black resistance movements and urban uprisings), the idea that the Trump administration would choose to advance its toxic mixture of authoritarianism and white supremacism in Portland of all places confirms that there’s more to be unpacked here.

The spectacle of anonymous, armed and armored federal agents tear gassing the majority white crowds who have shown up in support of African-American rights and against police violence, and the seeming indifference of Trump and his allies to thinking this imagery might backfire on them, suggests that the right wing has begun to fully internalize the idea that there are now two types of whiteness in America: the whiteness of racists, and the whiteness of those who are not racists. If you are white and are not a racist, you are no longer to be considered part of the community of privilege and immunity from state violence to which your whiteness previously entitled you. I think the right-wing obsession with antifa is ultimately an obsession with this unfathomable enemy in their midst, a projection of fears about an insidious force that hates America and wants to burn it all down. After all, antifa represents an explicitly antifascist attitude, not the violent and revolutionary one that the right describes; yet it is the imaginary revolutionary fantasy that the right has seized on.

When you make something up so vigorously, there’s a lot of information to be gleaned from such a pure play of fear and anger. At one level, such projections of immense power onto an imaginary enemy reflects an unconscious recognition that it is in the realm of ideas that white supremacism is most threatened, as it will ultimately be undone by a change in attitude by enough white people. It also projects outwards the very real violence that is required to maintain a system of white supremacism — it’s not the police who are committing violence, it’s those antifa terrorists! One fun angle is that while the projections are insane, the racist right’s fears of doom are actually justified. In fact, such justification is now found in Portland, where, in an upsetting inversion of the stories they tell, federal agents are opposed not by antifa but by anti-racist white people who we might accurately term “ordinary American citizens who are white.”

Of course, the only solution for President Trump is to keep insisting that these protestors are actually hardcore antifa terrorists, despite all the evidence to the contrary. And so federal agents have proceeded to tear gas and beat white moms and white veterans, icons of the military-suburban-American-way-of-life complex, as they protested in support of the Black Lives Matter movement. To keep the fantasy alive, in other words, white supremacists like Donald Trump must now make war on white people — which has the perverse effect of attacking white supremacism itself. After all, if being white alone isn’t enough to get you into the club of protection, then this means (among other things) that white supremacism is clearly not based on tacit notions of white genetic or cultural superiority, but professions of allegiance and militant enforcement of a racial order. And if white people realize they are no longer immune from arbitrary police and state violence even if they’re white, well, good luck selling that shit.

Tellingly, the idea that the privileges of being white increasingly come with the condition of being the right sort of white person is paralleled by the increasingly authoritarian bent of the GOP, most glaringly under Donald Trump. In somewhat caricatured form, the bargain is that the president expresses the will of his white supporters; in return, they offer unquestioning support, treating his every pronouncement as wise and good (see: Trump’s insane opposition to masks and the widespread GOP embrace of his deadly position).

Trump’s Celebration of Violence Against Portland Mayor Is Embrace of Fascistic Politics

Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler has rightly drawn harsh criticism for his handling of the Portland protests over the last two months and lackluster police reform efforts in the city — from my perspective, the accurate criticisms have been of his refusal or inability to reign in police violence and press for more meaningful restructuring of policing in the city.  But even the mayor’s most strident critics should be appalled by President Trump’s comments about Wheeler after the mayor was tear-gassed last week while attending a protest outside Portland’s federal courthouse.  As Talking Points Memo reports, Trump told Sean Hannity that, “He made a fool of himself.  He wanted to be among the people so he went into the crowd and they knocked the hell out of him. That was the end of him.  So it was pretty pathetic.”  I would be surprised to learn that any previous president had celebrated physical violence against a political opponent in the way that Trump did here.  We have all gotten used to the president’s slurs and denigration of rival politicians, but the celebration of actual state violence against a Democrat is far past any conceivable red line of what should be permissible in this country.  This is textbook fascist politics, incompatible with not just American but any form of democracy.

Oregonian Misses Reality of Protests' Continued Civil Rights Focus

The Oregonian’s Sunday cover story asserts that the downtown Portland protests since the arrival of the federal presence a few weeks ago have substantially diverged from their original Black Lives Matter focus.   The paper interviews several activists and community leaders who argue that the protests have been co-opted by white protestors with varying agendas, yet ultimately provides unconvincing evidence that civil rights are no longer at the center of the protests.

Most tellingly, the paper notes that the protests had almost dwindled away until two weeks ago, when federal agents shot a Portlander in the head with a non-lethal munition.  The paper writes, “Now rage over the federal government’s response to the after-hours strife in Portland is fueling the protests and threatens to overshadow the message of racial equality that spurred thousands of Oregonians to flood the streets at the start.” Yet even passing familiarity with the protests of the past two weeks shows that this is not an accurate statement of the facts.  It is certainly true that the entrance of the feds into the mix has energized the protests, and that the protests now include a focus on ejecting the federal agents from Portland.  But as most anyone who has attended the protests can tell you, the peaceful demonstrators — who constitute the overwhelming majority — remain overwhelmingly focused on voicing support for the BLM movement.

It’s also important to realize that opposition to the federal presence is also an act of support for the civil rights movement in which BLM plays a central role.  While the president and his allies claim that the federal troops are here to put down a non-existent existential threat to the city posed by “violent anarchists” and antifa, it’s clear that the federal deployments here and elsewhere are as much intended to suppress civil rights demonstrations as to gin up a sense of impending anarchist doom.  That the federal agents are acting in support of the re-election campaign of a white supremacist president is a fact I would wager is not lost on most demonstrators.  To argue that opposition to the federal presence is unrelated to opposing police brutality against African Americans, and the broader agenda of true equal rights for African-Americans, is simply to embrace Donald Trump’s lies and propaganda about the purpose of the deployments.

As I read The Oregonian article, before the resurgence of the protests in the face of the federal presence, the demonstrations were increasingly dominated by more hard-core, predominantly white activists who sought physical confrontation with the Portland police and federal paramilitary.  In the last few weeks, though, thousands upon thousands of peaceful demonstrators have arrived downtown to engage in pro-BLM chants and listen to pro-BLM speakers.  In the face of this, to say that the federal presence has distracted from the BLM message is sheer distortion, when in fact it has helped revive the actual BLM protests.  That the protests have also broadened to include opposition to a federal presence intended to suppress a civil rights movement is hardly an argument that opposing the federal agents is somehow a distraction from the civil rights focus.  Oregonians are not out there protesting the federal government as a matter of general principle — they are protesting a grotesque abuse of power in support of white supremacy and authoritarianism.

There is inevitably some truth to the idea that the federal presence has distracted from the fight against local police abuses.  The deployment of what amount to Republican paramilitaries serving the president and his party’s political purposes is a scandal and an attack on democracy in and of itself, and requires a response by the city and its residents.  But this is the result of a president and his advisors deciding to make Portland the focus of a disinformation campaign about a nation under siege by dangerous antifa types.  Like it or not, the focus of the nation and the world is on us, and a repudiation of the president’s abuse of power is now unavoidably in the mix.

And as I noted above, this abuse of power is deeply connected to the president’s white supremacist agenda, and media outlets like The Oregonian are not doing their job when they fail to relate the local issues to the national context.  The story could as well have been about the federal agents re-invigorating the peaceful protests because the president has seen fit to place the power of the federal government against civil rights demonstrations; instead, The Oregonian made an editorial choice to tell a story about the federal presence somehow leading to protests increasingly unconnected to civil rights concerns, and to focus on the late-night confrontations often instigated by more extreme protestors — protests that in fact lead the police and federal agents to engage in violence against all demonstrators present, peaceful or not.  This was a poor choice by The Oregonian.

For The Oregonian to essentially argue that the escalated late-night confrontations between more hard-core protestors and the feds is the entire story of the last two weeks, while dismissing the massive infusion of peaceful protestors in support of BLM and civil rights during that time — a story that has been reported by major outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post — does a disservice to the remarkable show of racial solidarity that Portland has witnessed.  Shame on them for promoting a false narrative that misleads the paper’s readers, denigrates the commitment of thousands of Oregonians who have showed up to fight the good fight, and repeats unquestioningly the president’s lies that the federal paramilitaries are all about antifa and not also about suppressing civil rights protests.  This is also an offense against the many Oregonian reporters who have been reporting the actual facts of the situation, at risk to life and limb due to the illegal targeting of journalists by both federal agents and local police.

Camouflage Debate Is, Yes, Camouflage For More Pressing Questions

The militarized federal response to protests in Portland has been grotesquely inappropriate and reprehensible, but critiques of the fact that federal agents are wearing camouflage uniforms seem to miss the forest for the trees.   A spokesman for Secretary of Defense Mark Esper said that, “We want a system where people can tell the difference [between police and military personnel],” while Democratic Representative Ruben Gallego told the Washington Post that, “They need to stop this charade and stop pretending they’re the military.  They need to put their ICE uniforms and CBP uniforms back on.”

Of course those performing what is supposed to be police work should not be wearing camouflage. But the public’s central concern should be that law enforcement is acting like soldiers, not that they look like soldiers.  Photos of federal agents and Portland police confronting demonstrators instantly point up the limits to this argumentation; apart from the color of their uniforms, the feds appear all but indistinguishable from the police, bulked up by helmets and body armor, and bristling with weaponry.  The weaponry, and the willingness to injure people they do not recognize as citizens exercising constitutional rights to protest, is the true violation of their purported law enforcement role.

I can understand someone making an argument that military uniforms encourage CBP and other Department of Homeland Security-associated federal agents to think of themselves as soldiers, but against their weaponry and clear mission from higher-ups to suppress the Portland demonstrations with shows of force, this argument becomes academic.  For those genuinely interested in establishing and maintaining a clear line between police and military powers, a stronger case can be made that by dressing in camouflage, these purported police are honestly showing what they really are: a paramilitary force serving the political needs of a lawless president, glad to embrace military uniforms as part of their mission to intimidate and terrorize demonstrators.  Any insistence that they change their uniforms that doesn’t also question their weaponry, tactics, and mission ends up providing rhetorical cover fire for their malign activities. 

The reasons for pushback specifically on the question of uniforms appears to have more to do with institutional fears from both police departments and the US military that their reputations will be sullied by confusion spawned by CBP types.  As the Post notes, “the uniforms [. . . ] can chip away at the image of the military, which enjoys the highest level of trust of any public institution.”  I suppose it is important that the military preserve its public trust, but as a national concern, this pales in comparison to Americans not being subject to the violence of federal agents, whatever their uniform or agency.  Likewise, if police are interested in not being thought of as a militarized presence, the best way to do that would be to lose their own body armor and extravagant weaponry, which many argue end up escalating conflicts with the civilians they’re sworn to protect. It should be obvious that acting like soldiers even while wearing police uniforms discredits public faith in the police, and rightly so.

States and Cities Must Stand Up to Federal Rent-a-Car Fascists

A few days ago, perhaps in the first flush of outrage about news that federal agents have been arresting Portland demonstrators without informing them of their identity and tossing them into unmarked vans, Never Trumper and former John McCain advisor Steve Schmidt tweeted that, “The Governor of Oregon should deploy the State Police and the National Guard to arrest on site [sic] any heavily armed Paramilitary forces who are operating without ID’s, Badges and snatching Americans off of the street and stuffing them into unmarked vehicles.  [. . .] We are watching a Secret Police forming before our eyes and it is both an abomination and unacceptable.” 

I’m finding it notable that Schmidt’s comments have not been echoed more widely, even as I can also understand why.  For reasons that I assume even Schmidt would concede, one strong (but hardly the only) reason why a Democratic governor like Kate Brown would decline to send in the National Guard and state police to address federal lawlessness is because in matters of force, the federal government could easily re-gain the upper hand, given that the president is commander-in-chief and controls the U.S. military.  There is also the not-small matter of being the governor who ends up getting accused of trying to start a civil war. This isn’t to say I’m not sympathetic to Schmidt’s sentiments — to the contrary, I believe that members of the CBP and other federal security agency are following illegitimate orders and acting unconstitutionally, and deserve to lose their jobs and be banned from future government employment.

But I think the deeper question that Schmidt raises is important to consider — not specifically whether to risk a civil war-style shootout between federal and state officers, but what state and local governments are actually obligated to do to protect their citizens from a federal force that is acting, for all intents and purposes, like a secret police force accountable not to the law but to President Trump.  Right now, Oregon officials’ strategy is both to publicize and to denounce the federal presence, and to use the law and legislation against the feds.  The state attorney general has filed a lawsuit against federal agencies, while in Congress Democratic senators are working on legislation to constrain the Department of Homeland Security from such deployments.  But if the federal depredations continue, and escalate, despite these actions (and will such a bill really make it through a GOP-majority Senate?) then like it or not, state and local officials would indeed be derelict in their duty not to take stronger measures to stop this activity.

The trick to doing so is that, as I started off saying, the risks of escalating a conflict with the federal government are mind-bogglingly dangerous when a corrupt and amoral man like Donald Trump is commander-in-chief.  It is not hard to see a scenario in which, to use Schmidt’s example, the governor’s deployment of the National Guard to halt federal abuses results in Donald Trump assuming control of the Oregon National Guard, and in turn deploying it to assist the federal agents in conducting their illicit suppression of protests; or, more nightmarishly, sending in the 82nd Airborne Division to enforce order in the city as the president fantasized about doing in Washington, D.C.  We are very much in a situation where the president is looking for excuses to escalate his behavior; the seeming conundrum is that his behavior requires a response that will also deny him the opening for an escalation.

Yesterday, David Roberts of Vox raised a related issue, writing, “How long until we see the first violent clash between federal agents operating in US cities and the police forces of those cities?  And what happens then?”  Roberts’ tweet was generally hammered on Twitter by respondents who saw it as nonsensical to think that the police would ever be in conflict with federal agents.  But Roberts wasn’t suggesting that the police are some sort of benign force that would stop the feds out of the goodness of their hearts; his observation encompasses both the possibility of an accidental conflict or one resulting from direct orders of city authorities to counter illegal activities by federal agents.  Even here in Portland, where there is strong evidence that the police have been operating in coordination with federal officers despite the mayor’s instructions not to, the feds and the city police are all responding to demonstrations often literally within a block of each other; accidents could surely happen (and the avoidance of such may be one way police are justifying themselves whatever coordination they have with the federal forces).  But the other possibility — that police could come into conflict with federal agents, say, by attempting to prevent them from performing an illegal arrest — can’t just be waved away by declaring that all cops are bastards and that this would never happen.  In fact, this issue just became a lot more concrete, as yesterday President Trump declared his intention to expand the DHS deployments to cities like Chicago, Detroit, and Philadelphia.  In response, Philadelphia’s district attorney stated that he would charge with assault any federal officers who assault or kidnap people in that city.  Again, as with Schmidt’s call for state action against offending federal agents, it is hard to see how such a move would not be used by the president to escalate whatever federal presence Philadelphia is unlucky enough to receive.

But the probability that such a move, akin to Schmidt’s example of calling out the National Guard in Oregon, would provoke a presidential escalation isn’t the same as saying that state or local officials shouldn’t take such actions.  What it does mean is that if they do so, they need to be prepared for what steps they might take when the federal government responds.  No one should ever lose sight of the broader context — that the president is acting as an authoritarian, deploying illegal force against social justice protestors in an attempt to create a fictional narrative of a nation under attack, all in the name of rescuing his reelection campaign from its apparent death spiral.  He is forcing state and local officials to consider acts of resistance against federal intrusions that no legitimate president would force them to.

Yet local and state officials have an obligation to resist, and to protect their citizenry from lawlessness, wherever that lawlessness comes from.  And in turn, it’s absolutely essential that the citizenry demand such protection from their local governments.  Hold their feet to the fire; make it clear to them that they must address these fraught and unprecedented questions.  Crucially, no effort to resist these deployments is happening in a vacuum.  Just as state officials are obliged to act decisively, congressional Democrats are as well — and some are, with Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley and others proposing legislation to curb deployments of federal agents to American cities.  House Democrats, in control of that chamber of Congress, also have an immense amount of power to block funding to the Department of Homeland Security and beyond until this presidential lawlessness ends. 

In turn, mass non-violent demonstrations in Portland against the federal presence would give the lie to the president’s propaganda about the nature of the protests he seeks to suppress.  Already, we are seeing how an infusion of fresh protestors is helping to highlight the violence and inappropriateness of the federal tactics; this weekend saw both protesting mothers and a Navy veteran gassed and beaten, respectively.

Hitting the president’s actions on such multiple fronts can help rob the force and violence he wields of any possible legitimacy, by making it look disproportionate, lawless, and absurd.  Conversely, protestors backed up by Congress and state officials gain an additional legitimacy from sympathetic legislative action, while those government officials can point to mass resistance to support their anti-authoritarian proposals.  And always, keep in the forefront of public attention the central fact that the president is attempting to use violence to advance his re-election effort by attacking anti-racist, social justice protests; is in fact using violence to advance authoritarian rule and white supremacist ideology.

Buddy System

A story at The Oregonian by K. Rambo zeroes in on questions crucial to understanding both the abuses committed by Portland police over the last several weeks, and the violence perpetrated by federal agents deployed here more recently.  Despite assertions by both the Portland Police Bureau and Mayor Ted Wheeler (who acts as police commissioner) that there has been no coordination between the PPB and federal agents, and that the police do not take direction from the feds, the article documents multiple instances of the police and federal units appearing to act in coordinated fashion against demonstrators.  This raises the question of whether the Portland police are either lying to the public, or are acting in a way in which the distinction between active versus de facto coordination with the feds is a meaningless distinction.  As recently as last night, “Portland police and federal officers marched in tandem toward hundreds of Portlanders” after the PPB declared a demonstration to be unlawful.

As the article notes, the federal agents are not bound by the same restrictions on use of force as the local police (for instance, a restraining order keeps the PPB from deploying tear gas except in extreme cases).  It would seem that if the PPB is taking advantage of things like federal use of tear gas for their own operations, they are violating the spirit and possibly the letter of the restrictions placed on them.  As the director of Portland’s Independent Police Review put it, “We can’t have the feds doing PPB’s dirty work and being able to get away with it because they don’t have any oversight.”

The article also notes that when acting Homeland Security secretary Chad Wolf was in town last week, he did not invite Mayor Ted Wheeler to a meeting, yet did find time to meet with the president of the Portland Police Association — a fact noted by Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty, who issued a statement that “We know Portland Police are collaborating with this federal occupying force.”  The Oregonian article notes that within hours of her statement, the PPB indicated that beginning Saturday night, “the Federal Protective Service will not work in the Portland Police incident command center.”  The fact that until this point the FPS has done so, and “how it does not constitute tactical coordination,” as The Oregonian points out, are items that remain unanswered.

Siege Mentality

An early Sunday morning tweet by President Trump reminds us that propaganda and disinformation are at the center of federal deployments to Portland.  He refers to “anarchists” and “agitators,” and concludes “These were not merely protesters, these are the real deal!”  The language of extremist elements seizing control of Portland had found more baroque expression in a Department of Homeland Security press release from late last week; “The city of Portland has been under siege for 47 straight days by a violent mob while local political leaders refuse to restore order to protect their city. Each night, lawless anarchists destroy and desecrate property, including the federal courthouse, and attack the brave law enforcement officers protecting it.”  The statement went on to repeat the phrase “violent anarchists” dozens of times.

Portland is indeed under siege  — though not by “violent anarchists,” but on the ground by lawless federal agents increasingly acting as a secret police force on behalf of the president; and in the media by a presidential disinformation campaign.  We here in Portland have had particularly bad luck to be the test case for such extensive federal deployments, but the disinformation campaign that supports such actions has been nationwide.  President Trump has consistently attempted to describe the social justice protests provoked by the killing of George Floyd as the work of anti-American extremists bent on violence and destruction.  In denying the reality of a mass, peaceful movement for racial equality and an end to police violence, he affirms himself as the de facto head of a white supremacist, anti-democratic minority seeking to block the emergence of a more just and equal America.

The presence of federal agents in Portland, purportedly to protect federal property but clearly pushing their mandate into a mission to terrorize legitimate protestors, is the president’s propaganda campaign and warped racism made flesh.  Committing violent acts against peaceful protestors who march in favor of civil rights and against police abuses, these acts constitute the president’s declaration of war against civil rights and civil society.  And by themselves acting as the instigators of violence, the federal agents work to create the appearance of a reality that will lend credence to the president’s propaganda, most crucially by generating images of chaos on the streets that can be broadcast by the president’s re-election campaign and allied right-wing media.

The cruelty and absurdity of this escalating war on American citizens has been amply documented night after night.  Federal agents tear gas, pepper spray, beat, and arrest non-violent protestors.  Only in the addled fantasy life of our president and his rapidly-eroding base do these demonstrators constitute a crack squad of hardened criminals; one looks in vain for the A-Team of anarchists and antifa against whom only the most highly-trained and brutal forces of Homeland Security might stand a chance.  What will be increasingly clear as time passes should already be clear enough for anyone willing to face the facts: the Trump administration has declared war on its own citizenry in the name of promoting white supremacism and the authoritarian aims of a president who is well on his way to suffering a catastrophic electoral defeat in November.

Battlespace Portland, Part II

Oregon Public Broadcasting is reporting that over the last few days, “federal law enforcement officers have been using unmarked vehicles to drive around downtown Portland and detain protestors.” Chillingly, the federal officer are dressed in camouflage, are both armed and armored, and have no insignia to indicate who they work for; they are also reportedly not identifying themselves when arresting their targets.

OPB interviewed two people who underwent this experience.  One of them, Mark Pettibone, described being “tossed” into a van; those detaining him pulled his cap over his eyes and held his hands over his head, apparently so he would not be able to see.  He was brought to a location that he subsequently realized was the federal courthouse, where he declined to answer questions without an attorney present.  He was not informed as to why he had been arrested.  After an hour and a half, he was released without being charged for a crime.

OPB also reports that “officers are also detaining people on Portland streets who aren’t near federal property, nor is it clear that all of the people being arrested have engaged in criminal activity. Demonstrators like O’Shea and Pettibone said they think they were targeted by federal officers for simply wearing black clothing in the area of the demonstration.”

This is an instance where videos of the incidents may be the most effective way of communicating how very sinister and grossly inappropriate these federal actions are.  I have to admit that the first time one came up in my Twitter feed, I was sure it was either a parody of federal law enforcement gone wrong, or a video of Russian actions in Crimea or some other site of paramilitary mayhem.

The Department of Homeland Security has been coordinating the deployment of federal agents in Portland, including elements of a Border Patrol tactical team that has also been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, and the U.S. Marshals Service Special Operations Group. Last Saturday, a member of the latter group shot a peaceful protestor in the face with a non-lethal munition, fracturing his skull; the man remains hospitalized. 

As the abductions began being reported more widely, acting Homeland Security Director Chad Wolf visited Portland on Thursday; a DHS statement released in connection with his trip here strongly reinforces the case being made by many, including Greg Sargent at the Washington Post and local politicos like Democratic Senator Ron Wyden, that the activities of federal agents in Portland have very little to do with any actual need for their presence, and very much to do with President Trump’s desperate re-election effort to create an impression of an America besieged by widespread violence:

The city of Portland has been under siege for 47 straight days by a violent mob while local political leaders refuse to restore order to protect their city. Each night, lawless anarchists destroy and desecrate property, including the federal courthouse, and attack the brave law enforcement officers protecting it.  

A federal courthouse is a symbol of justice - to attack it is to attack America. Instead of addressing violent criminals in their communities, local and state leaders are instead focusing on placing blame on law enforcement and requesting fewer officers in their community.  This failed response has only emboldened the violent mob as it escalates violence day after day.

The hysterical, exaggerated assertions of mayhem and violence, rather than accurately describing reality, are meant to distort it, as well as to incite fear and anger in the reader.  “Siege,” “violent mob,” “lawless anarchists”: these words and phrases promote a funhouse mirror version of reality, in which Portland has supposedly been brought to its knees by wilding antifa types.  My personal favorite element of this inversion is the reference to those who “desecrate property,” as if all property were sacred ground, like a church or a Trump hotel.

The impression that the DHS release is less a statement of facts than poorly-written propaganda grows as you read the seemingly endless list of offenses cited by Wolf; the phrase “Violent anarchists” kicks off nearly every one of the dozens of incidents, as if repetition alone will make the unsupported label true.  In this, it is a very Trumpian document indeed.  The fact that around half the incidents of alleged violence consist of graffiti on federal buildings projects a sense not of menace, but an effort by Wolf to juke the statistics in favor of crackdown.  And the fetishization of symbols may be most absurd in his statement that, “A federal courthouse is a symbol of justice - to attack it is to attack America,” to which the obvious retort is that if this is so, then shooting and abducting peaceful American protestors is also attacking America, on steroids.  

You can’t overstate how inappropriate it is for the man charged with heading the Department of Homeland Security to talk about small scale demonstrations in Portland as an existential danger to the city requiring both federal mobilization and the language of war.  The DHS was created to help protect the United States against external threats, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 being the catalyst for its very existence.  Yet, we now have the man charged with coordinating America’s domestic security efforts acting as if graffiti, broken glass, and isolated assaults on police and federal agents by American citizens constitute an attack on America itself.  A man unable to distinguish between actual threats to domestic security and non-existent ones has no place holding such a job; the same is doubly the case when he promulgates a false narrative about such threats.  In doing so, he reveals himself not as a public servant protecting Americans’ safety, but as a dangerous ideologue promoting the authoritarian vision and illicit re-election strategy of an unmoored president.  

The absurdity of Wolf’s claims is clear to most anyone who actually lives in Portland.  While Wolf promotes an idea of a city under “siege,” residents are aware that the protests involving federal buildings are limited to a few square blocks of downtown, where those buildings actually are.  The city of Portland spreads across 145 square miles.  Wolf is lying, and we know it. There is also the uncomfortable (for Wolf) fact that crime has actually declined in Portland over the last several weeks.

But the attempts by the Trump administration to gin up a false narrative of a city under attack by anarchist hordes is most vividly contradicted by city and state officials’ vehement assertions that the federal presence is not welcome in the city, and that federal forces are in fact committing and perpetuating violence here.  From Governor Kate Brown and Representative Earl Blumenauer, to Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler, we are hearing a consistent message that the federal agents should not be in Portland.  And it’s not just elected Democrats saying this.   Multnomah County Sheriff Mike Reese stated that, “the actions by out-of-state federal agents last weekend failed to display good decision making and sound tactical judgment [. . .] These actions caused a significant setback in our local efforts to end the nightly violence around the Justice Center and in Portland”; meanwhile, according to Mother Jones, Portland Deputy Police Chief Chris Davis noted that the Portland Police Bureau “did not request federal assistance and is not coordinating with the federal officers; Davis is quoted as saying, “I don’t have authority to order federal officers to do things.  It does complicate things for us.”

In the last 24 hours, news of these federal abuses have exploded across the national media (this afternoon, it was a top story at both the New York Times and Washington Post websites).  Even as the president believes he has much to gain by creating an impression of dire conflict so as to arouse his most fervent, Fox News-addicted followers, the majority of Americans will find the activities of federal agents in Portland to be beyond the pale.  Some commentators have already drawn parallels between what we are seeing here and the activities of the Pinochet regime, which “disappeared” thousands of Chileans, and of Russia under Vladimir Putin, which deployed troops without national identification to mount a covert invasion of Ukraine.  Given the white nationalist and authoritarian agenda of the president and his advisors, it would be naïve to think that they aren’t aware of these precedents, and either find inspiration in them or are indifferent to the dark resonance they carry for patriotic Americans.  

But alongside exposure, this violent intervention in the affairs of an American city demands a concrete response that shuts it down and holds the perpetrators to account, from the agents following orders to treat peaceful protestors like hardened criminals, all the way up to the incompetent Chad Wolf and his flailing commander-in-chief; all have broken faith with basic notions of freedom and accountability in the deployment of what amounts to a secret police force acting to terrorize legitimate protestors into submission.  It is reassuring that Democratic officials in Oregon are largely united in identifying these activities as reflecting a presidential effort to energize his base, but they must follow up their outraged words with concrete action to end these illegitimate federal actions ASAP.  As a start, elected Democrats need to call for Chad Wolf’s immediate resignation.  As a defender of police state tactics and as a fantasist of a looming “anarchist” menace, he’s unworthy of his position; as the coordinator of such tactics, what he actually is worthy of is congressional investigation.  Likewise, federal agents who violate the civil rights of American citizens deserve neither the benefit nor the honor of public service, and should be removed from Portland immediately.

Battlespace Portland, Part I

[Editor’s note: I’d been working on this post over the past week, and the overall story it covers has now gained national coverage with reports that federal agents have been driving unmarked vans in downtown Portland and arresting non-violent protestors without identifying themselves or the reason for the arrests. These secret police-type arrests are a huge development, and I’ll be writing about it shortly; in the meantime, I still wanted to post this mildly outdated piece, with the caveat that there’s more to come.]

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the multiple incidents of police violence against social justice protests in Portland, including actions directed at journalists covering the demonstrations. Since then, the American Civil Liberty Union has filed a lawsuit against the City of Portland and its police department “on behalf of journalists and legal observers who were targeted and attacked by the police while documenting protests in Portland over the killing of George Floyd,” as described by The Oregonian. 

As if homegrown police violence were not enough for the city, at the beginning of July Portland received deployments of various federal law enforcement officers under the direction of the Department of Homeland Security.  Such personnel include elements of BORTAC, a Border Patrol tactical team that has also deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the U.S. Marshals Service Special Operations Group.  Portland, along with Seattle and Washington, D.C, has been singled out by the Trump administration for such military-grade deployment of federal personnel.  Since their arrival, federal security forces have employed non-lethal munitions and tear gas against mostly peaceful protestors; The Oregonian reports that “Civil liberties advocates and activists have accused federal authorities of overstepping their jurisdiction and excessive use of crowd-control measures, including using tear gas and patrolling beyond the boundaries of federal property.”  The use of tear gas is significant, as “Portland police are prohibited from using tear gas under a recent temporary court order unless they declare a riot.” 

Last Saturday, an officer with the U.S. Marshals’ Special Operations Group shot a peaceful protestor in the face with what is being described as an “impact munition.”  The shot fractured the man’s skull, and he has been hospitalized since the incident.  The shooting provoked a broad outcry from Oregon’s federal officials, as well as Governor Kate Brown, who like other Oregon politicians placed the onus for the incident squarely on the presence of the federal agents; she noted that, “President Trump deploying armed federal officers to Portland only serves to escalate tensions and, as we saw yesterday, will inevitably lead to unnecessary violence and confrontation.”  In a similar vein, Senator Ron Wyden referred to the president acting as if American cities “are enemy strongholds.” 

Some Oregon federal officeholders have sent a letter to the Department of Homeland Security asking for responses to a number of crucial questions, such as who is directing the Department of Justice and DHS response in Oregon, what the chain of command is, and what other Oregon cities are sites of federal deployments.  But it’s clear that the issues raised by the shooting of a peaceful Portland protestor are larger than Oregon’s right to be rid of trigger-happy agents far more used to combatting drug runners on the border than citizens exercising their right to free speech on the streets of an American city.  As Greg Sargent writes at The Plum Line blog, the deployment of these forces to Portland and elsewhere is part of President Trump’s ongoing effort of “trying to escalate tensions around the [nationwide] protests, while utterly refusing at every opportunity to de-escalate them.”  Sargent points to the clearing of Lafayette Square of peaceful protestors for a presidential photo-op last month as the template for such a strategy. 

The shooting in Portland is all the more disturbing because of President Trump’s comments on Monday that, “We’ve done a great job in Portland.  Portland was totally out of control, and they went in, and I guess we have many people right now in jail.  We very much quelled it, and if it starts again, we’ll quell it again very easily.  It’s not hard to do.”  It’s nauseating to contemplate that the president took a victory lap a day after a severe injury to a protestor, or that he was specifically celebrating that fact; but as Sargent suggests, the idea that urban riots threaten the national fabric has become part of his re-election campaign.  In this case, much like the demonstration at Lafayette Square, Portland is being used as a larger canvas for the president not only to indulge his instincts for bullying and violence, but to create a fictional portrait of a city so out of control that only the iron fist of Homeland Security, and the president who authorizes such actions, can put it to rights.

Portland City Commissioner Joanne Hardesty made an important link between the president’s actions and Portland’s failure to rein in police violence, noting that if it weren’t for the Portland Police Bureau’s inability to deescalate violent protests previously, there wouldn’t have been such a clear opening for the president to try to make Portland part of a campaign ad.

I realize that these small nighttime protests can seem abstract to many Portlanders. But regardless of the exact mix between overwhelmingly peaceful protestors and a minority with more confrontational attitudes, we should all be worried far more by the police and Homeland Security’s nightly practice of abuses than the acts of a small group of people who engage in vandalism.  The power of the US government is vast, and violence against citizens by members of a department created to protect the United States against external threats is disturbing in the extreme.  The same critique goes for the Portland police, who are becoming acclimated to thinking of Portlanders as an enemy force to be put down, rather than a citizenry that they serve.  It is a purely anti-democratic development for officers of the law and security agents of the federal government to grow comfortable with inflicting pain and terror on their fellow Americans.  This concern is all the greater when we focus on the federal agents deployed with what may be specific orders to view the protestors as the enemy, with their allegiance not to the law but to the president who has ordered them to such questionable ends.

Democracy at War

Reporting from The New York Times about Democratic Party pressure on the Biden campaign to expand the 2020 electoral map helps highlight some of the key potentials and dangers of our political moment.  With polls showing Joe Biden leading Trump in swing states, and suggesting tight contests in long-time GOP strongholds like Texas and Georgia, some Democratic officials are encouraging Biden to make a play for states that Democrats have not won for a generation.

Of course, it’s not just polls, but also the energy of the Democratic base and the possibility of persuading independent voters, that’s spurred this effort to re-think the path to the presidency.  And this, in turn, is inseparable from Donald Trump’s catastrophic, white supremacist, and increasingly authoritarian presidency, which has filled millions of Americans with a sense of existential urgency.

Beyond the simple logic of pressing the party’s political advantage for its own sake, some strategists are pointing specifically to the need to discredit Trump and Trumpist politics as a prime reason for the Democrats to go big in 2020.  The Times piece doesn’t delve into the nature of what these Republican politics are, but naming them shows the degree to which the Democrats’ partisan quest for victory is at this point inseparable from defending the fundamentals of American democracy.  The Trumpist politics they need to discredit are white supremacism and authoritarianism; and they need a national repudiation not only for the sake of the party, which cannot prosper in a world where voter suppression, foreign election interference, and violence against citizens are the order of the day, but for the larger good of American democracy.

From this perspective, the Biden campaign’s reluctance thus far to fully embrace a broadened campaign strikes me as potentially self-defeating.  While there are strong and understandable reasons to play it safe in the name of winning the White House — the upset of 2016, partisan polarization that suggests Trump can rely on a strong base of voters no matter what he does, the need to spend limited financial resources wisely — this risks missing a historic opportunity.  This election is as much a referendum on American democracy as on American support for the Democratic Party’s agenda and opposition to Trumpism — but to the degree the Democrats can strengthen the case that they are now effectively the sole vessel for promoting democracy, they also strengthen the case for why they, as a party, should be trusted with power.

A broad campaign that targets states like Texas, Georgia, Arizona, and Ohio would signal to Americans that the Democratic Party is confident in its claims to power at this crossroads in our history; and this vote of confidence is in turn a vote of confidence in the American people, which can help catalyze the result that not only Democrats, but the nation as a whole, requires — an utter rout of the Republican Party in 2020 and beyond.  This argument for the “go big” approach is only strengthened when you consider the coattails effect of a successful presidential candidate; close Senate races in Georgia, Iowa, and elsewhere could more surely end up as Democratic victories if Biden makes a real play for those states.  

Beyond this, if there is any lesson of political strategy that we have learned over these past four years, it is that the best defense against Donald Trump is a good offense.  Our broken media environment, in combination with the president’s manic capacity to generate fresh outrages on a daily basis, means that he has kept the political initiative far too often during his term of office.  Conversely, the Democrats have been either reluctant or unable to counter his strategy by going on offense against him, and in support of fundamental national values.  When Trump is forced to be reactive, and feels his position weakening, he tends to lash out, to act even more impulsively than normal, to alienate.

The concept that a Trump on defense is a Trump who turns off voters becomes even more important in the face of what appears to be Trump’s massive loss of voter support in the face of his gross incompetence in handling the coronavirus pandemic and the George Floyd social justice protests.  Starkest for me are the findings that seniors now support Biden over Trump, a turn-around of a key GOP demographic that does not bode well for the larger Republican Party in November.  If this is not what collapsing support looks like, then I don’t know what does.  Given the escalating death toll from the coronavirus, and the president’s decision to further amplify his white supremacist rhetoric and policies, it seems the Biden campaign is in danger of misreading the degree to which Trump’s support will somehow rebound.

The Times article notes some Democrats worry about over-confidence in the calls to expand their presidential efforts, but this sounds more like lack of confidence to me.  It’s not just that Democrats should be feeling a righteous, fully-earned fury about removing this corrupt president and party from office.  Politicians and voters should also be thinking more about how November will very much be a faith election.  Not faith in the religious sense, but faith in the democratic sense that is always an unsung but crucial part of our nation and government.  Faith that our neighbors are not monsters who wish to see our country turned into an apartheid state.  Faith that our fellow citizens don’t want their children to grow up in a country where the government thinks everyone should fend for themselves in a pandemic.  Faith that they don’t want political disputes to be settled by vigilante violence and the deployment of armed forces on our streets.

Of course you need to keep making the case for why democracy, racial equality, and free and fair elections are worth defending, as their defense can never again be taken for granted; but you also have to have faith that enough of your fellow citizens will accept these premises.  Our faith has been badly tested by the election of Trump, and by how quickly huge portions of the electorate and political system supported him and have hewed themselves closely to his un-American politics; but our faith should be somewhat restored by the mass resistance that has continued and escalated throughout this rancid presidency.  If you think that what this president and the GOP are doing is crazy and outrageous, have faith that you are not alone, that even previous supporters are seeing through the propaganda to the horrid reality of their misrule.  The Democrats need their presidential campaign to compete as widely as possible to send this overwhelming message: democracy cedes no territory to the proto-fascists, the white supremacists, the defenders of the Confederacy.  Democracy is no longer on defense.  Democracy is at war with its enemies, and will sweep them away through the means of its choosing: the relentless and methodical pursuit of democratic politics, the only form of politics we consider legitimate in this country.  Elections, open debate, the inclusion of all in our decision-making.  Our ideals made material are the weapons that will help stop Trumpism and bury it.  

Is Anyone Buying the Trump Administration's Back-to-School Blather At This Point?

Jennifer Rubin has a solid beatdown of the Trump administration’s desperate plan to force school re-openings in the fall as a way to stimulate the economy and rescue the president’s diminishing re-election prospects.  Apparently, freaky billionaire/Education Secretary Betsy DeVos was on weekend talk shows promoting the idea; things did not go well, and the public was at least able to confirm that there is no actual plan for getting schools ready to re-open beyond a mandate to do so.  Rubin also notes the very important points that a) the president really has no leverage to actually deny funding to schools that aren’t unconstitutional b) such denial of funding would hurt the most vulnerable students and c) this chaotic strategy runs completely against decades of Republican insistence that local communities, not the federal government, should make decisions about schooling.  Rubin also makes the salient point that DeVos herself clearly sees the effort to deny funding to uncooperative public schools as a front in her war to replace public schools with private ones.  In the appearances Rubin cites, it was also illuminating to read of DeVos making the tacit argument that there is a battle going on between those who want kids to be educated and those who don’t, when the real struggle is between those who don’t want their kids and teachers to get sick and spread disease, and those who don’t care as long as it helps the president get re-elected.

Donald Trump’s effort to strong-arm America’s teacher and kids into returning to class, no matter the state of the pandemic or their ability to stay healthy, is an act not only of political insanity but borderline evil.  As I wrote a few days ago, it would be one thing to declare that the nation will spend whatever it takes to return kids to school safely; it’s another thing entirely to say that schools must re-open or actually lose money.  Every day that the administration presses this absurd point is another day that they deliberately feed themselves into a political wood chipper, and broadcast to the world the fundamental indecency and incompetence of Trump and his Republican allies. 

A President Grows Weary of His Faucian Bargain

After months of reports of President Trump’s displeasure with the straight-talking Dr. Anthony Fauci, administration officials have taken the extraordinary and horrific step of engaging in a slur campaign to undermine Fauci’s public standing and professional reputation.  According to this New York Times report, White House officials have distributed a compilation of purportedly erroneous statements by Fauci to various news outlets, “laid out in the style of a campaign’s opposition research document.”  As the Times notes, this move comes after weeks of increasing divergence between Fauci’s admission that the country is not doing well with the coronavirus pandemic and the president’s continued deranged insistence that the country is well on its way to recovery.

This is not the most outrageous act perpetrated by this president, but in the face of a pandemic that continues to infect and kill thousands upon thousands of our countrymen, it may be one of the most telling.  Fauci has both substantively and symbolically been a boon to the Trump administration, providing honesty and experience to the effort to contain the coronavirus, while providing a veneer of assurance that the government response must be somewhat competent because of the presence of professionals like himself.  As we are engulfed in disease and economic dislocation from coast to coast, it’s clear that however much expert advice was provided to policymakers, it has been disregarded enough that the United States now stands as the worst-hit country in the world.  In this dire situation, experts like Fauci become the enemy of the Trump administration, as their disregarded guidance stands as a judgment on the political leadership’s catastrophic failure.  The respectability that Fauci brought to the White House effort is now no longer welcome, because it was grounded in his willingness to speak truthfully about the pandemic.  Since such truthfulness now necessarily includes at least a tacit indictment of the administration’s coronavirus response, Fauci must be discredited.

The public will at some point turn to the question of whether the experts advising the national response to the pandemic have done their ethical duty in the face of the president’s determination to undercut the effort on every front.  I think there’s a reasonable question of whether they have given cover to this administration’s failure by providing the appearance that health professionals were being listened to.  While the brunt of the culpability falls on those politicians like Trump and Republican governors who chose not to follow their guidance, the broad reluctance of national health officials to confront the obvious malpractice of the politicians they serve deserves more scrutiny.  Yet even such a harsh critique is light years from an outright effort to discredit Fauci, and by extension, to intimidate other health professionals into toeing the party line, as this anti-Fauci crusade is surely also intended to do.

It's not hard to see the self-defeating and self-destructive aspects of this predictable Trumpian turn.  Denigrating experts like Fauci will help worsen the pandemic, while also clarifying for the public that the president’s sole interest is his own, not the nation’s.  That this is all Trump and his advisors can think to do reveals not only the dire political straits they are in, but the depth of our collective national nightmare.  The Trump administration is choosing to wage a losing battle against reality rather than do its job and protect the national health.  In crucial ways, making Fauci into the enemy is a stone’s throw away from making the American people the enemy in the struggle to staunch this pandemic.  Vulnerable to disease, perversely addicted to truth-telling in matters of life and death, increasingly immune to White House propaganda in the face of undeniable facts about the impact of the coronavirus, the citizenry may yet come to represent in the president’s mind the greatest obstacle to his re-election.  And when that happens, will the president still be persuaded to lift a finger to save us from even greater waves of illness and death?