The impossibly dumb reason for Trump's invasion of Portland
It'd be hilarious if he wasn't the commander in chief.
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“Well wait a minute, am I watching things on television that are different from what’s happening?”
That was Donald Trump, making an incredible admission to Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek that he was confused about unrest in Portland while watching TV. The call took place on September 26. That same day, Fox News ran two segments in which b-roll of rioting in Portland from 2020 ran in the background as guests spoke to on-air personalities.
A Wall Street Journal report has details:
Trump recounted his conversation with Kotek during a weekend interview with NBC News’ correspondent Yamiche Alcindor. He alluded to their conflicting accounts of Portland.
“I spoke to the governor, she was very nice,” Trump said. “But I said, ‘Well wait a minute, am I watching things on television that are different from what’s happening? My people tell me different.’ They are literally attacking and there are fires all over the place … it looks like terrible.”
In short, it sounds like Trump was watching old riot footage on Fox, thought it was happening in real time, then went on Truth Social the next day and said he was ordering troops to “war ravaged” Portland with “full force, if necessary.”
Trump’s confusion isn’t just darkly comical (and a troubling reminder of the president’s growing senility) — it’s also a stark illustration of the whiplash-inducing disconnect between his rhetoric and the reality on the ground in cities like Portland and Chicago.
Portland is not “on fire” as Trump has claimed. In fact, things are so calm there that Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem took time on Tuesday to stand on the roof of the city’s ICE facility and have a staring contest with a man in a chicken suit. It was filmed, of course.
If you watched any of Trump’s Wednesday “roundtable” with a group of far-right “journalists,” you’ll understand the slapdash way in which the Trump administration makes decisions.
One of the figures present at the meeting — which included such terminally online and outright fascist propagandists as Andy Ngo and Jack Posobiec — suggested that Trump designate antifa as a foreign terrorist organization.
“Sounds good. Steve, what do you think?” Trump asked deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller, who nodded in the affirmative.
And just like that, Antifa became a foreign terrorist organization.
The event demonstrated the complete lack of seriousness with which Trump and the government’s highest-ranking officials make historically important decisions — and the highly anecdotal “evidence” that backs them.
That same unseriousness has been on display for a week now as the Justice Department lawyers have argued in court on behalf of Trump’s efforts to deploy National Guard troops to Portland and Chicago over the objection of governors and local officials.
DOJ lawyers have argued that, in addition to threats against ICE agents and facilities in Portland, a surging population of undocumented immigrants in Chicago must be taken care of. But the sincerity of those claims was drawn into question by Attorney General Pam Bondi’s testimony in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday.
Asked by Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.) how many undocumented immigrants were actually in Chicago, Bondi couldn’t say.
“Ooh,” she said, shuffling through some papers in front of her. “Does anybody know?” Graham asked during the awkward silence. “I do,” Bondi replied. “Countless.”
Bondi then repeated the Trump administration’s claim that there has been a “1,000 percent increase in attacks against our ICE officers.”
“Right,” Graham responded. “But I just want to know, is there, like 10 or 100,000 … does anybody know?”
Bondi never even attempted to cite a number, saying only that “we have made multiple arrests, of course.”
In fact, so far, immigration agents have reportedly arrested about 1,500 undocumented immigrants.
Bondi’s failure to even come up with a rough number of undocumented immigrants in Chicago suggests the Trump administration’s deployment of Texas National Guard members to the city isn’t really about that. It’s about taking control of a city run by a Black mayor in a state run by an outspoken Democratic governor, JB Pritzker, who argues the deployments are really just a pretext to tamper with next year’s midterm elections.
In mid-September, DHS flooded Chicago with immigration agents. They’ve angered residents not just by rounding up immigrants and brown-skinned US citizens, but by harassing neighborhoods. ICE’s excesses have included throwing around tear gas outside elementary schools, gassing Chicago cops, shooting one woman last weekend, and killing an immigrant man last month. A few days ago ICE raided a Chicago apartment building like it was the Abbottabad complex of Osama bin Laden, displacing dozens of residents and zip-tying near naked children, pointing guns at citizens filming agents, and resulting in the arrests of just two alleged criminals.
Chicagoans have been following ICE agents around, honking their car horns, and warning neighbors that La Migra is coming. Clashes and arrests have become a daily occurrence outside an ICE facility in nearby Broadview.
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In its lawsuit against the Trump administration that seeks an order stopping the president from sending the National Guard to Chicago, the office of Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul notes that Trump “has long directed threatening and derogatory statements towards the State of Illinois, the City of Chicago, and its leaders.”
Raoul’s office argued that the “supposed current emergency is belied by the fact that Trump’s Chicago troop deployment threats began more than ten years ago,” when the president, then a private citizen, said that the US military should be operating in Chicago, not Syria.
The lawsuit details statement after statement from Trump over the span of the ensuing decade in which the president expressed his disdain for the city, its crime rates, its “sanctuary” policies, and the “radical left-wing mobs” running rampant there. In 2015, Chicago became the only US city to effectively kick Trump out when protesters shut down a rally for then-candidate’s presidential campaign.
The playbook for sending the National Guard into Chicago is similar to the one used in Los Angeles in June, where frustrated Angelenos rose up in defiance of the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration actions and stymied the work of ICE agents on the streets. The arrival of National Guard troops in Los Angeles led to a police riot there on June 14. Ultimately, things could’ve gotten way more out of control than they did.
Violent altercations in the streets between federal agents and demonstrators are just the sort of thing that could lead Trump to invoking the Insurrection Act, which gives the president even more authority to deploy the military to US cities.
“The Trump administration is following a playbook: cause chaos, create fear and confusion, make it seem like peaceful protesters are a mob by firing gas pellets and tear gas canisters at night,” Pritzker said at a press conference on Monday. “Why? To create the pretext for invoking the Insurrection Act so that he can send military troops to our city.”
That same day, Trump said he’s open to invoking the Insurrection Act.
If Trump takes that step, it will immediately be challenged in federal court, where judges will ask some of the same questions they’ve asked as the administration has attempted to send the National Guard into Portland and Chicago: Why is this necessary? What laws are being broken? How have local police not been able to handle the situation?
Justice Department lawyers in Oregon argued that attacks on the ICE facility there, plus the sniper attack on the ICE facility in Dallas recently, constitute a “rebellion” — one of the stipulations in a section of federal law that allows the president to federalize members of a state’s National Guard. Further, DOJ lawyers have claimed, having to defend ICE facilities from protesters has prevented federal law enforcement from enforcing the law — another stipulation from the section of law that Trump has cited in sending the National Guard into Portland and Chicago.
On Thursday, US District Court Judge Ryan Nelson, who was appointed by Trump, appeared to agree with this position. In a court hearing in which Nelson and two other judges heard arguments from the Justice Department and the Oregon Attorney General’s Office, Nelson said it sounded like Trump actually hadn’t been able to enforce the law, and therefore should be allowed to send in the National Guard to help him do so.
“The president gets to direct his resources as he sees fit, and it just seems a little counterintuitive to me that the city of Portland can come in and say, ‘No, you need to do it differently,’” Nelson said.
The judge added that the court, Portland officials, and the Oregon attorney general aren’t privy to what’s happening “behind-the-scenes.” They should be deferential to the president’s argument that, perhaps behind the walls of the Portland ICE facility, agents are unable to do their jobs enforcing federal immigration law because of what’s happening outside, Nelson said.
That may be what Justice Department lawyers are arguing, but it isn’t what was actually behind Trump’s order on Truth Social to send in the troops.
A confused Trump seemingly thought Portland was burning because he saw old riot clips on Fox News. He may or may not believe that Chicago is providing sanctuary to undocumented immigrants, but that’s besides the point. The real reason he sent the Texas National Guard to Chicago is because it has an outspoken Black mayor and a governor who has told Trump to kick rocks.
While judges and lawyers argue in court about the limits of Trump’s power — what the law actually says — Trump bulldozes forward. He doesn’t care about any of that. Justice Department lawyers may be able to reverse engineer a legal justification for Trump’s impulsive orders, but we all know the true rationale behind his domestic deployment of the military: vengeance and domination.
That’s it for today
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An unserious madman with more power than he can handle. There was a woman who warned us of exactly this. The one who laughed.
"Justice Department lawyers in Oregon argued that attacks on the ICE facility there, plus the sniper attack on the ICE facility in Dallas recently, constitute a “rebellion”"
First, Trump loses all credibility of concern over what constitutes a "rebellion" after he pardoned ALL of the violent 'offenders' from the jan 6 insurrection.
Second, if the sniper attack on the ICE facility in Dallas is so central to the case, why are the troops being sent into states very far away from Dallas Texas?
This president and this DoJ have ZERO credibility after all their lies and not obeying lawful court orders and therefore do not deserve 'deference'.