As we wait and see if the Trump administration can win on appeal, the power to deploy the National Guard to Portland, Trump himself keeps carrying on about the war zone in Portland.
And here’s the DHS Secretary.
I mean, is this a reference to using secret weather control technology to make it rain less?
Meanwhile, Portland:
I suppose it is possible that the dancing animals are in the one part of Portland that is not on fire. And while I cannot 100% confirm that Mercado is in front of the ICE facility, Google map searches confirm that that is what the building looks like.
Still, I am sure that the following was totally necessary:
The Darth-Vader-ordered-from-Temu voice just adds to the ambiance.
For an eye-witness account, see this piece from The Atlantic: Portland’s ‘War Zone’ Is Like Burning Man for the Terminally Online. If only war zones really were only as bad as what is described in that piece. No doubt, veterans of real conflicts dealing with PTSD would like a word.
All of this reminds me of when Trump called Chicago a hellhole back in early September and then, somehow, the Chicago Bears and the Minnesota Vikings managed to play a Monday Night Football game.
Here is a photo I took of my TV that night, with the grim images of downtown Chicago that I sent to fellow OTBer Michael Bailey with the caption “Hell. Hole.”
It was a miracle, I guess, that local law enforcement was able to keep both Soldier Field and Millennium Park free of hellishness without the aid of federal forces. Although now that I look at the picture, there does appear to have been some kind of beastman in front of the Bean. Scary stuff!
All flippancy aside (although this is all truly absurd), all of this is serious and speaks to a number of things about the administration, although I am not sure exactly how to ultimately assess it all. As with most things Trump, there are truly scary ways to assess this situation, but also the reality, as problematic as it is, thankfully tends to be far from real worst-case scenarios.
I am trying to sort my thoughts out on this kind of stuff. What is the real threat being posed here? How much of this is a serious attempt to militarize our cities and how much of it is performative gaslighting? What does Trump actually believe about these places? What are his aids and advisors telling him?
Let me be crystal clear on one thing: I think it is dangerous, and a waste of resources, to deploy the National Guard in this manner. So whatever else I say in this post, please keep that in mind. The Guard is not a law enforcement agency, and using the military as regular law enforcement is inappropriate and leads to a situation in which the military will start to view US citizens as “the enemy.” This is not healthy for any society, let alone an ostensibly democratic one. Further, it is provocative to deploy troops in this manner, especially when the targets are predominantly cities run by Democratic leadership, and the president is explicit about that being part of the logic (I use that word advisedly) for the deployments.
So, the good news is that these deployments, to date, have not been so much a real militarization of cities as much as it has been a lot of sound and fury signifying very little. For example, the LAT reported the following about the LA deployment: National Guard came to L.A. to fight unrest. Troops ended up fighting boredom. Axios, likewise, noted, Troops deployed to LA have nowhere to sleep and lack supplies: Newsom.
In DC, we know that members of the Guard picked up trash and did landscaping work.
On the one hand, I continue to believe that we have people in this administration who are correctly described as fascists. And things like the young woman in the clip up above being pepper-sprayed for, you know, talking, is thuggish at best. This is neither healthy nor good. But it also isn’t full-blown militarization.
The fact that Trump allows himself to be blocked by the courts in these deployments is a good sign and shows that there is some level of constraint.
I am not saying that we shouldn’t take all this seriously; we should. Still, I am cautioning that we need to be balancing the maximalist rhetoric that comes out of the mouths of this administration with what is actually happening.
There is also the whole cable-TV angle.
First and foremost, the obsession over Chicago is a long-term, right-wing, media-fueled narrative. To be clear, there is crime in Chicago. But not as much as the rightwing media narrative likes to pretend is the case. Chicago is far from a hellhole. Indeed, it is a lovely place and one of my favorite cities to visit.
Second, this whole situation really does bring into question Trump’s mental capacity in ways that other stories don’t for me. I have mentioned over the years, mostly in the comments, that I have my doubts about Trump dementia theories. I mean, they were rampant in his first term, and yet here we are. As much as his speeches at the UN and Quantico were rambling and ridiculous, I resist diagnosis at a distance, especially by non-experts. I resisted diagnosing Biden, and I do the same with Trump. If anything, as I have noted before, blaming his behavior on dementia lets him off the hook to some degree in ways I am unwilling to do. When my Grandfather thought I was at his house to rob him, rather than helping my grandparents move out, I gladly blamed the dementia. In Trump’s case, his long-term record of intellectual chaos, weird syntax, and general lack of knowledge about the world makes it hard to determine when there has been a real change. I say this, agreeing that he is clearly showing signs of aging.
My general theory of Trump is that he is a huge narcissist who actually managed to become the most important person in the world, which is an unfortunate overlapping reality. And in term two, there is clearly no one who will tell him “no” on anything.
But this Portland thing has gotten me to seriously wonder what is going on. There are reports that Trump said the following to NBC’s Yamiche Alcindor.
“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.”
All of this has led many to conclude that he is referring to video from the BLM protests in Portland from his first term. Deploying the guard based on b-roll from a half-decade ago is, well, nuts.
Here’s the deal: he is the President of the United States. He has the capacity to get real, immediate information that transcends what is shown on TV, and yet he not only seems to get a lot of his information (such as it is) from television, but he appears incapable of understanding what he is seeing.
This is disturbing, to put it mildly.
To be more direct, either he truly does lack the capacity to know what he is looking at on TV, or he is simply lying and hoping other FNC viewers will misinterpret what they are seeing so he can use it as a justification for Guard deployments. Neither is a good option. Worse, the former seems the most likely explanation. And even worse, that means those around him are unable or unwilling to disabuse him of these notions.
