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.