Portland has been Senator Ron Wyden’s hometown since the mid-1970s, so he has seen all manner of marches and protests. But as the Oregon Democrat walked the city’s streets last week, talking to locals and working to lower tensions that have persisted since the killing of George Floyd, he encountered a problem he’d never had to deal with before: Heavily armed federal troops wearing combat fatigues, dispatched by President Donald Trump and the Department of Homeland Security, who were stoking violence instead of quelling it by firing rubber bullets and snatching civilian demonstrators.
“I wish Trump would tackle the coronavirus with as much intensity as his secret police are attacking my friends and neighbors,” Wyden said. “In Portland, we’re seeing the cowardice of the Trump administration, trying to convince the country that peaceful protesters are some kind of anarchist threat. He’s trying to draw a line from Black Lives Matter to the far left. It’s nonsense.”
The political strategy is as transparent as it is cynical. With the American coronavirus death toll surpassing 142,000 and the number of new cases soaring, Trump’s poll numbers are sinking. So he’s doubling down on the racial-division playbook he has relied on for more than three years, and on his fetish for using weaponry to press that agenda. On Wednesday afternoon Trump announced he will escalate the authoritarian incursions by sending hundreds of federal agents into Chicago, supposedly to help combat violent crime in the city, with other cities to follow. His threats have been explicitly aimed at cities that have Democratic mayors, most of them governing racially-diverse populations, including Albuquerque, Oakland, and New York. “It’s painful to see the department used this way,” says Janet Napolitano, who led DHS during President Barack Obama’s first term. “DHS does not exist to be a federal anti-protest police force. It’s like the president is starting the fire and then saying, ‘I have the only fire extinguisher.’”
In 2018, when Trump wanted to dispatch military troops to patrol the southern border, then secretary of defense James Mattis managed to keep their role minimal; this time, Trump has a gung ho accomplice in acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf, who has blustered that he doesn’t care about objections from mayors or governors. If the genuine goal were to improve urban safety, DHS would be coordinating with local cops and government, said Juliette Kayyem, an assistant secretary for Homeland Security under Napolitano. “This is not only risky to the citizens of Portland or Chicago. It’s incredibly risky to local and state law enforcement to bring in federal armed entities that aren’t integrated into planning,” Kayyem said. “The ties to a federal interest are negligible at best, and Trump keeps changing the justification. He says Portland is because of unrest, but Chicago is because of drugs. But sometimes we think too hard. This is just a corrupt, desperate president corrupting an agency. We’ve seen it at DOJ, we’ve seen it at the State Department, at the [Education] Department. What’s curious about this DHS deployment in Portland is that there wasn’t a lot of fanfare in advance. We all sort of woke up and it had happened. So is it all a reality show for campaign pictures and Fox News?”
It certainly looks that way—and so far it looks like a flop. Joe Biden has been enjoying higher poll numbers than Trump on law-and-order issues. “The reason we’re seeing a disparity is because of the contrast in leadership between someone who is completely erratic and chaotic and oversees a government that has been ineffective, and Joe Biden, who is experienced and knows how to make government work for people,” said TJ Ducklo, a Biden campaign spokesman. Perhaps. So far the Biden campaign has also been careful not to hand Trump any ammunition: It wasn’t until Tuesday, in response to media inquiries, that Biden commented about Portland, issuing a statement in which he labeled DHS’s tactics “egregious.” Wyden, for one, is happy that Biden isn’t taking the bait. “Democrats from one end of the country to the other understand what this game is really all about,” he said.