With his polls sagging, and amid his ongoing failure to address the raging pandemic, President Donald Trump appears to be seizing on the streets of Portland, Oregon—where protests against the police killing of George Floyd are ongoing—to try and scare Americans into reelecting him. Portland provided an opportunity for Trump to wield federal power at a time when the momentum of protests in other U.S. cities was waning, the Washington Post reports, leaving the president without a clear stage to act out his “law and order” campaign pitch. “In Portland, he found a theater for his fight,” the Post reports, noting the mobilization of militarized federal forces to be part of his campaign message as “a last bastion of safety for a reeling American public.”
In reality, sending Department of Homeland Security agents into Portland has only served to inflame the situation, with federal agents dousing unarmed marchers with tear gas—including Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler—and using unmarked vehicles to whisk protesters off the street. Wheeler, who also serves as Portland’s police commissioner, said that he was not consulted by the president or DHS officials before agents were mobilized to the city. “We had heard about it first when they were already here,” Wheeler said of the administration’s decision. “What we had been seeing on our streets was a de-escalation of the criminal activity, the violence, the vandalism that was being engaged in by a handful of people—we were seeing that tail off significantly.” Oregon governor Kate Brown was also unaware that agents had been sent to quash protests in her state until she saw photos of the federal presence at the courthouse on social media, around July 4. “This is a democracy, not a dictatorship,” Brown said in a statement. “We cannot have secret police abducting people in unmarked vehicles. I can’t believe I have to say that to the President of the United States.”
An administration official, according to the Post, “said the White House had long wanted to amplify strife in cities, encouraging DHS officials to talk about arrests of violent criminals in sanctuary cities and repeatedly urging ICE to disclose more details of raids than some in the agency were comfortable doing.” According to the official: “It was about getting viral online content.”
Trump’s crackdown on cities has been precisely this kind of crass political theater, with Politico describing such content to be “the ammunition [Trump] needs to fight perhaps his most aggressive culture war against urban, liberal voters.” Even though Portland is being framed as a dystopian city on fire by some in conservative media, including on Fox News, the tensions are largely taking place within just about a dozen blocks. Yet the coverage plays into Trump’s broader narrative. As my colleague Eric Lutz wrote earlier this week, the president has been fueling fears that there is scary, violent unrest in cities—typically more diverse and liberal bastions—and that he’s the one to stop it. A recent campaign ad amplifies the false claim that Joe Biden wants to defund the police by depicting an elderly white woman faced with an intruder. She calls the police to no avail—there’s nobody there to answer her emergency—and the intruder breaks in, coming after her. “You won’t be safe,” the tagline reads, “in Joe Biden’s America.”
Trump scaring suburbanites into voting for him comes as rapidly changing demographics threaten his standing among a constituency the Associated Press reported to be essential for his reelection prospects. Yet his appeal is largely based on an outdated view of such communities, one made clear in his message to “The Suburban Housewives of America” on Twitter this week: “Biden will destroy your neighborhood and your American Dream. I will preserve it, and make it even better!” Cynthia Rauzi, a 57-year-old yoga instructor and mother who lives in a suburb outside Austin, Texas, took offense to the message. “To suggest that suburban housewives are a bunch of pearl-clutchers who are afraid of everything … we’re smarter than that,” she told the AP.