Skip to content Skip to footer

Trump’s Reelection Strategy Involves Terrorizing Us With Secret Stormtroopers

Trump has successfully normalized the unthinkable, and in places like Portland, he appears to be doing it to get votes.

Federal police walk through tear gas while dispersing a crowd of about 1,000 protesters at the Mark O. Hatfield U.S. Courthouse on July 21, 2020, in Portland, Oregon.

Donald Trump and his cohort of propagandists at Fox News would have us believe the major cities of the United States have been turned to ashes and rubble by mobs of racial justice and antifa activists. But after weeks of sustained protests in the aftermath of the police murder of George Floyd, the only thing actually in ashes is Trump’s credibility.

The image of rampaging activist hordes, however, is key to the all-encompassing fiction the right has been spoon-feeding to itself for decades. Believing in that fiction translates into the belief that anything done to stop it is positive on its face.

Enter the faceless, anonymous, heavily armed federal officers snatching protesters off the streets of Portland, Oregon. One would think that people on the right, who have spent years warning of “jack-booted government thugs” coming to take our rights by force, would be horrified by what we are seeing in Portland. It is their grim prophecy made flesh, and yet they are responding either with silence or active support, apparently because they saw it on Fox.

“I’m going to do something, that I can tell you,” Trump said of the uprising during his erratic Fox News interview last Sunday. “Because we’re not going to let New York and Chicago and Philadelphia and Detroit and Baltimore and all of these — Oakland is a mess.”

And then, the penny dropped.

“We’re not going to let this happen in our country,” Trump continued. “All run by liberal Democrats. Look at what’s going on — all run by Democrats, all run by very liberal Democrats. All run, really, by radical left. If Biden got in, that would be true for the country. The whole country would go to hell. And we’re not going to let it go to hell.”

Deploying federal forces to Portland — and to Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia and other cities, according to reports — is the unmistakable shriek of authoritarianism. Governors of the potentially affected states are gearing up to fight the administration. Their mood was best captured by, of all people, Tom Ridge. Ridge, the former Republican governor of Pennsylvania who served as George W. Bush’s director of Homeland Security, minced no words regarding Trump’s flagrant abuse of power.

“Had I been governor, even now, I would welcome the opportunity to work with any federal agency to reduce crime or lawlessness in the cities,” Ridge told the Pennsylvania Capital-Star. “But I would tell you, it would be a cold day in hell before I would consent to an uninvited, unilateral intervention into one of my cities.”

Trump’s actions in Portland are terrifying by any standard, but are also as crass and grasping as everything else he has done since he first polluted the White House. By openly stapling these actions to “Biden” and “very liberal Democrats,” Trump made it clear that as far as he is concerned, this is all about politics and the upcoming election. In poker, this is what they call a “tell.”

According to every reputable poll taken over the last several months, Donald Trump is trailing presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden by wide margins. Trump himself appears to have finally accepted this, which may explain the absence of bombastic nonsense at his newly reborn COVID-19 briefings. Of course, as far as those briefings go, we’ve all heard “responsible-sounding Trump” before.

Trump cannot campaign on his successful fight against COVID, because he has failed that challenge with spectacular vigor. He cannot campaign on the economy, because it has been all but obliterated by his COVID failures. He has tried to campaign on brazen racism, but it has not turned the polls in his favor.

What, then, is left to campaign on?

Why, the left!

Specifically, the vile, truthless caricature of the left Trump and his people have been conjuring for his base in an effort to justify the use of anonymous federal gendarmes against us.

More to the point, one gets the definite sense that Trump desperately wants an on-camera street fight with these protesters. Deploying those federal officers is a massively antagonizing move, and Trump would love nothing more than to have some protesters take the bait.

There would be more blood in the streets, Trump would have his fight, and he could point and say, “Look! This is the America Biden and the liberals want! Only I can save us!” Indeed, new Trump campaign commercials are making that specific argument. Ads are one thing; live footage of street violence is something else altogether.

If Trump really doesn’t want this, he’s damn close to getting it by accident. In the meantime, the protests will continue as citizens demand a long-sought redress of glaring racial and social injustices.

In Portland, the protests have produced surreal and beautiful displays of strength from vulnerable protesters in the face of federal violence. Some days ago, at the intersection of Third Avenue and Taylor Street, a group of protesters were being corralled by law enforcement officials, including some of these anonymous protest-snatchers.

Out of the crowd emerged a naked woman wearing only a mask and a cloth hat. She performed some ballet moves in front of the police before sitting down and exposing herself to their potential violence.

The police fired pepper balls at her feet, but she did not budge. A protester ran to her with a shield to protect her, but she waved him off. She sat, as bereft of protection as the police were armored, until the police — seemingly demoralized and confused — backed off. The woman disappeared back into the crowd, and no one knows her name, but some have come to call her “Naked Athena.”

The secret, rights-crushing cops in the streets of our cities are a manifest campaign move by Donald Trump. They also represent a deeply dangerous power grab that seemed inconceivable before Trump. He has successfully normalized the unthinkable, and in places like Portland, he clearly appears to be doing so to get votes.

Truthout Is Preparing to Meet Trump’s Agenda With Resistance at Every Turn

Dear Truthout Community,

If you feel rage, despondency, confusion and deep fear today, you are not alone. We’re feeling it too. We are heartsick. Facing down Trump’s fascist agenda, we are desperately worried about the most vulnerable people among us, including our loved ones and everyone in the Truthout community, and our minds are racing a million miles a minute to try to map out all that needs to be done.

We must give ourselves space to grieve and feel our fear, feel our rage, and keep in the forefront of our mind the stark truth that millions of real human lives are on the line. And simultaneously, we’ve got to get to work, take stock of our resources, and prepare to throw ourselves full force into the movement.

Journalism is a linchpin of that movement. Even as we are reeling, we’re summoning up all the energy we can to face down what’s coming, because we know that one of the sharpest weapons against fascism is publishing the truth.

There are many terrifying planks to the Trump agenda, and we plan to devote ourselves to reporting thoroughly on each one and, crucially, covering the movements resisting them. We also recognize that Trump is a dire threat to journalism itself, and that we must take this seriously from the outset.

After the election, the four of us sat down to have some hard but necessary conversations about Truthout under a Trump presidency. How would we defend our publication from an avalanche of far right lawsuits that seek to bankrupt us? How would we keep our reporters safe if they need to cover outbreaks of political violence, or if they are targeted by authorities? How will we urgently produce the practical analysis, tools and movement coverage that you need right now — breaking through our normal routines to meet a terrifying moment in ways that best serve you?

It will be a tough, scary four years to produce social justice-driven journalism. We need to deliver news, strategy, liberatory ideas, tools and movement-sparking solutions with a force that we never have had to before. And at the same time, we desperately need to protect our ability to do so.

We know this is such a painful moment and donations may understandably be the last thing on your mind. But we must ask for your support, which is needed in a new and urgent way.

We promise we will kick into an even higher gear to give you truthful news that cuts against the disinformation and vitriol and hate and violence. We promise to publish analyses that will serve the needs of the movements we all rely on to survive the next four years, and even build for the future. We promise to be responsive, to recognize you as members of our community with a vital stake and voice in this work.

Please dig deep if you can, but a donation of any amount will be a truly meaningful and tangible action in this cataclysmic historical moment.

We’re with you. Let’s do all we can to move forward together.

With love, rage, and solidarity,

Maya, Negin, Saima, and Ziggy