In the Line of Coronavirus Fire

Given that Donald Trump has ignored, downplayed, and grotesquely mishandled the coronavirus epidemic, it’s no surprise that even the Secret Service personnel who protect him and Vice President Mike Pence have been sickened by covid.  But this account from The Washington Post helps drive home the toll the president has inflicted on the agency.  It’s not just that Secret Service personnel have been sickened while protecting the president during recent rallies, but that the president’s disregard for basic safety protocols has raised the risks for his own security personnel.  To date, dozens of Secret Service agents have been sickened or forced to quarantine in connection with presidential visits to cities like Tulsa and Tampa.  The strain has been so great that a trip by Pence had to be delayed until a sufficient number of healthy Secret Service agents were available.  

The Post notes that some critics are asking whether agents who are already pledged to protect the president from a bullet should “be required to risk contracting a lethal disease — and infecting a loved one — to secure an event that does not follow health protocols?”  This question, of course, is moot, because they have been, and have been done so, by a president clearly unfazed by the horrific butcher’s bill of this virus.  One wonders, in fact, if he has spared so much as a second’s thought of how his indifference to even basic protocols at rallies threatens to sicken or kill those whose job includes a willingness to die for his own safety.  It is incredible to think that even Secret Service agents have become collateral damage in the president’s quest to deny the severity and persistence of the coronavirus.  There really is no part of American government or service that he shows the slightest regard for.

Portland, City of Presidential Dreams

In his nomination acceptance speech Thursday night, Donald Trump gave our city a special shout-out that challenges the old saying that there’s no such thing as bad publicity; forecasting the national doom sure to follow the election of Joe Biden, he warned that the “Radical Left” “will make every city look like Democrat-run Portland, Oregon.”  Trump, of course, was not alluding to the illicit deployment of federal forces to the city in an effort to “quell” Black Lives Matter protests — deployments that resulted in widespread civil rights violations and serious injuries to peaceful protestors, and which are now the subject of lawsuits against the Department of Homeland Security and the Trump administration.  Instead, his appeal was to the propaganda effort of right-wing media and the administration itself to transform the junior league antifa fringes of the Portland protestors — adept deployers of fireworks and water bottles — into the most profound danger to American society since forever and ever.

Donald Trump’s inclusion of Portland in his acceptance speech is both sinister and absurd — sinister for the belief that he has the resources to conjure into at least media reality an utterly distorted vision of this city, and absurd for these very same easily disproven distortions.

To hang your re-election on maintaining the fiction that Portland is a city threatened by antifa armies is deeply weird — some might even say, Portland weird.  Props to The Oregonian’s Lizzy Acker for a rapid and tart response to the president’s remarks; in dedicated service to the public good, she enumerates the various warning signs that your city is becoming the next Portland (the presence of flowers and multiple rivers are two key ways to tell it’s too late to escape the transformation of your town into a communistic hellhole).

Contrary to Donald Trump’s desire to impose his self-serving visions on the rest of us, we are all free to draw our own conclusions about the nature of our current reality, and to vote accordingly.  Portlanders, and in fact most Americans, understand that they are under assault — not from yellow-shirted momtifa or protesting veterans who get their bones broken by police, but by a pandemic that the president’s incompetence has allowed to kill more than 180,000 of our fellow Americans; by a white nationalist movement headquartered in the White House; and by an accompanying movement willing to embrace authoritarianism and discard democracy if that means keeping non-whites out of power. All the propaganda in the world can’t hide a triple plague.

Power Wash

The United States finds itself as Exhibit A in a real-world political science experiment, but not a fun one like studying the correlation between city manager-style government and the effective provision of public goods.  As we watch the guardrails of democracy dissolve on a daily basis, and a president act more and more openly as an authoritarian leader, the question of how to stop the destruction of a democracy doesn’t so much loom as burn madly like a cross set afire by white supremacists.  A sense of disorientation, a civic nausea, choke our days, as presidential crime, immoral policy, and assertions of unchecked power recur without apparent consequence. A failed impeachment several months ago seems only to have emboldened the president’s worst tendencies, even as the coronavirus pandemic has rendered his incompetence and malice deadly on a mass scale.

So the November election looms as our chief opportunity to stop the slide, to return to the presidency to someone committed to American democracy, rather than intent on its destruction.  But as has been broadly noted, a Joe Biden victory would not shut down hard questions about how to repair the damage done to the political system.  As just one example — important norms broken by Donald Trump will need to be embodied in legislation, so that in the future, a president who attempts to break them will be not only breaking with tradition but also breaking the law.

But the single most vexing question about how to repair American government involves how to handle the past crimes and offenses of the Trump administration.  As observers like Jeet Heer and Josh Marshall have recently written, the country has an urgent need to expose the corrupt acts of the Trump administration to public view.  Heer quotes a government reform expert, Sam Berger, as saying that, “Ignoring the Trump administration’s attacks on the rule of law will only invite further attacks—and likely even more brazen and threatening ones.”  Jeer endorses the need for investigations, not only as a means of upholding the law, but also as a way to educate the public, “shame” those who engaged in bad behavior, and provide momentum for new anti-corruption laws. 

A basic challenge to such inquiries is that a new presidential administration investigating the previous one would seem to be just the sort of banana republic-style shenanigans that we’re trying to get out of.  I’ve described this as a sort of “democracy paradox” — in order to preserve the rule of law, a political party is forced to investigate its political opponents in ways that both set a bad precedent and may seem illegitimate to voters of the investigated party.  On the second point, it is a given that the Republican Party would in fact label any Democratic investigations of the Trump administration as politicized witch hunts, and would work to smear them as mere partisan attacks.

But such protestations on the part of the GOP should not be taken at face value as an honest defense of democratic values — not by the citizenry, the media, or the Democratic Party.  The GOP’s lack of credibility, though, as well as the overall project of holding the Trump administration to account for its corruption and crimes, is best served by making careful and accurate distinctions among the types of corruption it has practiced.  There has obviously been an enormous amount of financial self-dealing among Trump and his allies, from the president profiting off the Trump Hotel in Washington, D.C. to the steering of lucrative contracts to donors.  But alongside such offenses, the president has also employed and abused the U.S. government for illicit political ends.  These acts encompass subverting accountability for the Russian attacks on the 2016 election and undermining our ability to conduct free and fair elections in 2020; deploying federal troops against American citizens in Washington, D.C. and Portland, Oregon for re-election purposes; and making murderous decisions about the coronavirus pandemic in an effort to damage the political prospect of Democratic governors.  In other words, we need to distinguish between corrupt behavior that involved more mundane efforts to profit off the presidency, and behavior that amounted to an attack on both the government and the people of the United States.

Making such a distinction in what we mean by “corruption” can help navigate the inherent dangers to a new presidential administration and Congress investigating the previous president.  Ultimately, both “corruption” and “crime” are general terms that obscure the specific offense for which Donald Trump most needs to be held accountable: his full-scale assault on American democracy and the American people.  And this is the point at which Democrats also cannot avoid confronting a basic truth: such an assault has been aided and abetted by Republican senators and representatives for going on four years.  Through both active support and tacit approval, the GOP has enabled the president’s work at tearing down accountable government and faith in elections.  In turn, Donald Trump has overtly followed in the footsteps of previous Republican presidents and politicos, following the logic of white supremacism, voter suppression, and prioritization of oligarchic interests to their inevitable authoritarian ends. 

The GOP’s enabling of Donald Trump was put on display most vividly when all but one Republican senator voted to acquit him in his impeachment trial, despite incontrovertible evidence that the president had used the power of the U.S. government to threaten an ally to gin up a fake narrative about his then-likely opponent in the 2020 election.  Efforts by Republican senators to spread a false narrative about Joe Biden and Ukraine, based on Russian disinformation efforts, continue to this day.  This is certainly corruption, but it is also an abuse of power, an attack on free and fair elections, and an effort in tandem with the president’s own work to undermine the November election.

Acknowledging that the United States faces not just a Donald Trump crisis but a Republican Party crisis, in which the corrupt acts constitute an existential threat to democratic rule, clarifies how we need to think about post-Trump administration investigations.  The Democrats need to internalize this basic fact: the point must be not simply to restore some abstract “rule of law,” or punish generic “corruption,” but to inflict maximum political damage on a political party that has set itself in opposition to democratic government in this country.  As I’ve written before, this is a case where the Democrats’ partisan interests and duties as defenders of the constitutional order fully align.  Continuing to behave as if the GOP is a party committed to fair political competition and democratic values would be delusional after its embrace of Donald Trump over the past four years.

To facilitate this take-no-prisoners approach, Josh Marshall’s argument for prioritizing a massive airing of the facts and extent of Donald Trump’s corrupt acts, rather that emphasizing investigations that lead to prosecutions, feels increasingly persuasive.  The crux of his argument is that the American people, given the full facts of what happened, will be able to render appropriate political judgments on Trump and the Republican Party that will be more consequential than whether those who committed crimes in the Trump administration go to jail.  The fact that such an exposure could be accomplished much more quickly than investigations, so that the political impact would be accelerated, also seems to be a major consideration.  

But a fact-finding approach will only be effective if the Democrats prioritize and provide a proper narrative to what they investigate and what they unearth.  The Trump administration has committed and enabled countless acts worthy of investigation; emphasis must be placed on those acts that most directly harmed American government and that disqualify Trump’s political allies from holding political office.  The American people have a unquestionable right to know what bad acts were done in their name; but the Democrats have a political imperative to specifically press the case that Trump and the GOP committed political offenses that are simply unforgivable if we want to call ourselves a democracy.  

Attacks on Vote-by-Mail Delegitimize Trump

Never lose track of the fact that President Trump’s attacks on mail-in voting are an attack on voting, full stop.  No legitimate president would ever engage in a full-on disinformation campaign to convince Americans to fear that their votes won’t be counted, or that they can’t trust the outcome of an election.  In this way, his attacks on voting are in fact disqualifying attacks on his own re-election campaign and legitimacy.  As many political observers have argued, he is clearly trying to cast doubt on the presidential election so as to illicitly claim victory before all the votes are counted.  He would not be doing this if he thought he’d win in November.  He expects to lose, and so is already deploying propaganda and the power of the executive branch to seize power illegally.  This plan is in plain view; the fake fears about mail-in voting are pure propaganda, unsupported by evidence.  The true fear, which is right out front, is that vote by mail, and voting in general, actually work.  The president already learned this lesson in a way few presidents do, by losing the popular vote in 2016 while squeaking out an electoral college victory.

There is really no overstating how destructive this presidential strategy is for our country, beyond the obvious one of a criminal president cheating his way to “reelection.”  As Jennifer Rubin reminds us, many in the Republican Party fear that the president’s war on vote-by-mail will hurt the GOP in elections across the country by suppressing the Republican vote.  Though this might superficially seem like good news for Democrats, it is still in service of the president’s obsessive interest in retaining power by muddling the outcome of the vote.  As Rubin writes, “It seems, however, that he does not care whether Republicans lose; instead, he cares about constructing a narrative in which he can undermine the results and claim to have had the election stolen.”

But it is easy to see that the same arguments the president would use to claim victory in an election he lost could also be deployed by members of the GOP who also lost their elections.  In fact, these GOP politicians would have a tremendous incentive to do so, both in order to bolster the president’s fraudulent claims to power and their own chances of holding on to office.  In other words, Donald Trump’s war on voting has an internal logic whereby his entire party has an incentive to call into doubt an election the party is generally likely to lose — a loss they will have made all the more likely by having embraced the president’s campaign against vote-by-mail.

Efforts to delegitimize legitimate votes can only have the effect of spreading chaos and uncertainty as to outcomes, and creating a situation where those who hold power — like the president — can simply refuse to relinquish it, no matter what the election results.  This is the president’s end game, and any Republicans unwilling to repudiate his strategy make themselves party to his war on self-government.

Faced with the president’s clearly-signaled strategy, Democrats, Republicans of good faith, and other defenders of democracy need to insist on the basic principles of our democracy, without compromise.  We must be absolutely committed to clear rules of voting, the most basic of which is that each person’s vote must count.  Such commitment, among other things, will highlight how far the president and his supporters have strayed from the basics of American government.  Propaganda and disinformation do not determine who gets elected; our votes do.

Crashing Support Among Women Shows That Reality Is Trump's Truest Enemy

There are so many dispiriting and frightening threads of our national story right now that hope can feel elusive, and panic just another headline away.  The coronavirus pandemic has killed thousands, sickened millions, and shattered the American economy, even as President Trump continues to insist it will just go away, and as the national response is crippled by his indifference and incompetence.  Meanwhile, the president and the GOP more and more openly engage in direct attacks on democratic governance, perhaps most chillingly in the president’s effort to subvert vote-by-mail and preemptively call into question the results of the November election.  

These are sound reasons to be worried — and also why it’s important to pay attention to reports like this one from The Washington Post showing that most Americans clearly do not accept these failures of governance.  The Post describes how Republicans face an overwhelming loss of support among female voters as the election approaches; this is reflected both in high-level statistics, such as Joe Biden’s current 23% lead over Trump (in comparison, Hilary Clinton won the female vote by 13%), and in evidence that many women who previously supported the president have now turned against him.  

Exacerbating this threat to the GOP is that the president has created an environment in which “many Republican women in Congress were reluctant to criticize Trump or party leaders publicly, fearful of triggering the president’s wrath.”  Another helpful way of putting this is that the president’s misogyny would lead him to denigrate and threaten women who called him out on his misogyny; the basic problem keeps Republican women in fear of talking about it — surely an abusive dynamic.  (The article also reminds us of the staggering fact that only 13 GOP House members are female.) 

And among ordinary Republican-leaning female voters, the pandemic appears to have played a decisive role in undermining previous support for the president:

The exodus of women has been particularly distressing to Republican strategists because many of the women are die-hard conservatives on issues such as abortion and police power who have reached a tipping point when it comes to Trump.

Once willing to overlook controversies because their families were doing well, the security these voters felt with the booming economy is now gone because of the pandemic, the pollsters say. Now they are worried about their children, their elderly parents and their livelihoods — and they don’t see Trump as a leader who can protect them.

In other words, the overwhelming realities of Trump’s misrule — his incompetence, his inability to perform the basic presidential function of protecting the American population against threats — have broken through to millions of women voters.  That this is occurring in the face of daily propaganda and misinformation from the White House and right-wing media is remarkable.  Particularly heartening is that these realities are reversing previously-held positions about the president: according to Republican focus groups, previous GOP supporters “were shocked by Trump’s performances [at news conferences], belying the image of a successful businessman they though they had voted for in 2016.”  Likewise, his “law and order” rhetoric appears to be failing, and GOP strategists see women “increasingly blaming him for the chaos and uptick in racial tensions, as well as the increasingly devastating pandemic,” rather than seeing him as a president who will protect them and the country.

The piece notes that the president recently tweeted, “Suburban Housewives of America. . . Biden will destroy your neighborhood and your American Dream.  I will preserve it, and make it even better!”  Critics noted the anachronism of the 1950’s-retro “suburban housewives” phrasing, and indeed the tweet is illuminating for the wishful thinking it contains.  If only women were all passive homemakers requiring the support and protection of a man!  This was hardly the full truth in the 1950’s, and this is even less true today.  I wonder if it also provides a clue to a potentially fatal flaw in Donald Trump’s low-brow authoritarianism, which like other far-right movements seeks to impose a clear hierarchy of power in which men rank higher than women.  A majority of white women were comfortable enough with the implicit promise of such a worldview in 2016 that they voted for Donald Trump; but after four years of seeing this attitude in action, I wonder if many of them are no longer so ready to say goodbye to modernity and ideals of equal rights.

Understanding the Federal Violence in Portland

Zack Beauchamp at Vox has written an excellent primer that both conveys the authoritarian dangers of the federal presence in Portland, and connects them to a larger crisis of American democracy.  Beauchamp assumes, as have many others, that the deployments in Portland have been connected to Donald Trump’s “law and order re-election campaign,” but drives home how unprecedented such presidential actions are.  Shockingly, he notes that there appear to be no analogues in modern democracies where a militarized national response occurred without the assent of local authorities and, perhaps more importantly, in the absence of actual circumstances that would justify such a response (the single exception is possibly the troubles in Northern Ireland).  There has been no mass lawlessness in Portland; yet the Trump administration has pretended that there is.

But Beauchamp quickly pivots to a deeper story here: how the Republican Party, which “claims to be for federalism and states’ rights,” has fallen in line with outright authoritarianism.  For, as he writes, “To even think about this kind of deployment in Portland, let alone to see the brutal results and then to announce expansions to other cities, reflects a radical de-democratization of American politics: a sense, on the part of the president and his allies, that the residents of Portland [. . .] are the enemy.”

Beauchamp points to the polarization of American politics, and particularly the increase in “negative partisanship,” which he describes as a “political identity defined not so much around liking one’s own party as hating the other one.”  He continues:

But in a democracy, rising negative partisanship is playing with fire. For a democratic system to work, all sides need to accept that their political opponents are fundamentally legitimate — wrong about policy, to be sure, but a faction whose right to wield power after winning elections goes without question. But if political leaders and voters come to hate their opponents so thoroughly, they may eventually come to see them not as rivals but as enemies of the state.

The idea that we are at a point where one national party — the GOP — sees the other — the Democrats — as enemies of the state is key to understanding what has been happening in Portland over the past few weeks.  It helps us understand how it is not just Trump, and not just Republican politicians, but the widespread endorsement of the use of violence among rank and file GOP party members, that created conditions for the monstrosity of the Portland occupation to occur.  Even small-scale dissent in the president’s party could quickly undermine his authoritarian actions; instead, we are witnessing mass GOP acceptance of his strategy, all the starker for the utter violation of decades of GOP rhetoric about states’ rights and the limits of federal power, as Beauchamp notes.

But this is also where analytical concepts like “partisanship” and “polarization” also, paradoxically, begin to lose their utility, as they are notions that describe features of a democracy, a key aspect of which is the assumption of legitimacy of all participants.  Once a party acts as if its opponents are enemies of the state, it is no longer acting as a democratic party, but as an authoritarian one.  In such circumstances, to say that extreme partisanship is the issue misses the forest for the trees: if you don’t believe opponents should be able to compete for power democratically, you no longer believe in democracy.

In the United States, there has been a clear line between the Republican Party’s diminishing ability to win free and fair elections, and its increasing opposition to democracy and its incentive to demonize its opponents as illegitimate.  And this is where we can, in retrospect, see how terms like “polarization” and “partisanship” also served to obscure the crisis now upon us.  For the actual, substantive conflicts that underlay their rise were often conflicts that were always about democracy versus authoritarianism.  Most centrally, the clash between white supremacism and equality for all was never an issue in which two legitimate, democratic forces were in conflict.  The idea that non-whites should have less political power has always been an anti-democratic political belief; its substantive consequences can be seen in the GOP’s decades-long effort to suppress the voting rights of minority Americans, leading to increasingly strident measures to ensure the power of a diminishing white majority.

Indeed, Beauchamp makes an analogous point, when he writes that, “The extreme federal deployment there isn’t just about demonizing Democrats and antifa; it’s a means for the president to activate the kind of racial grievance politics that propelled him to power in the Republican Party. His mechanism for doing so is by leaning into the side of his political personality that admires foreign dictators like Vladimir Putin and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, both of whom have notably suppressed protests by force.”

In these extreme and dire circumstances, the way forward for defending our democracy is to clearly identify what the stakes are and to be as specific as possible as to what the nature of that conflict is — including the abomination of one party treating its opposition as deserving of physical punishment.  As political scientist Lilliana Mason tells Beauchamp, “It’s not just about partisanship — it’s about who gets to be considered a ‘real’ American, with the full rights and privileges that entails. But it also clears the way for Trump’s push toward authoritarian rule.  It feels like the brakes are off.”  White fears about loss of power are driving authoritarianism; and Trump’s authoritarianism relies on playing on those fears.  Opponents of Trump and defenders of democracy must make explicit these drivers of Republican authoritarianism, must lay bare the true conflicts rending American society, with the aim of building a majority that can re-assert the primacy of democratic rule and values in this country.  This is not an abstract political exercise, but an all hands on deck moment.  From mass protests to Democratic officeholders raising legislative hell, all possible peaceful and legal means must be brought to bear to stop and roll back this authoritarian menace.  Knowing and articulating what we’re fighting against, and fighting for, are essential.

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.