Will Portland be Trump’s first step toward martial law?
Let’s count down the steps. After arch-conservative rabble-rouser Charlie Kirk was killed by a sniper, Trump and figures in his administration started blaming “radical leftists.” Charging that leftist groups promote violence, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson told USA. Today, “For years, radical leftists have slandered their political opponents as Nazis and Fascists, inspiring left-wing violence like the tragic assassination of Charlie Kirk.”
Top White House aide Stephen Miller identified unnamed radical leftist groups as responsible for the attack on Kirk: “With God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, eliminate and destroy this network and make America safe again for the American people.”
JD Vance, guest-hosting Kirk’s podcast days after he had been killed, blamed political violence on “proud members of the radical left,” and said the administration would go after a shadowy network of unnamed leftist nonprofits that “foments, facilitates and engages in violence.” Trump himself announced that he would be taking to Attorney General Pam Bondi about charging leftist groups under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) because “We have some pretty radical groups and they got away with murder,” Trump told reporters darkly.
Notice that for the first two weeks after Kirk’s murder, they talked loosely about radical leftists and left-wing violence. Then last week, Trump moved by executive order to designate Antifa as a “domestic terrorist organization.”
Antifa can’t even be called loosely-knit. Generally considered leftist, activists associated with the name Antifa – which stands for “Anti-fascist” you will recall – are anti-authoritarian anarchists and nihilists who have shown up at right-wing demonstrations such as the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville and started fights with their followers. Sometimes they come dressed in black, wear helmets and carry makeshift weapons like clubs. More often, they blend in and try to cause disruptions from within crowds of demonstrators. Incredibly, Republicans blamed the January 6 assault on Antifa, saying that the crowd of Trump supporters who walked from Trump’s speech on the Ellipse to the Capitol were Antifa agitators dressed in Trump supporter costumes.
Equally incredibly, now that Trump has pardoned those convicted of crimes on January 6 and lionized them as patriots, charges that they were Antifa agitators have disappeared.
The key thing about Antifa for Trump and the Right is that it is an all-purpose target. They aren’t organized and don’t hold meetings or rallies, and there are no membership rolls, so anyone could be named as Antifa.
The other key thing about Trump’s designation of Antifa as “domestic terrorists” is that there is no federal law that specifically targets home-grown terrorists. Democrats have tried to pass such a law in every Congress since 2017, calling their proposed bill the “Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act,” but Republicans, fearing that the law would be used to target right-wing militias such as the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, have opposed the bill, and it was never passed.
Now here they are, confronted by what they allege to be an enormous underground conspiracy of leftist terrorists to commit violence against conservatives, and they don’t have a stand-alone law they can use to define domestic terrorism and punish those accused of committing whatever that is.
Not to worry, however. Donald Trump, whose desire to deploy the military was stymied by senior Pentagon leaders after demonstrations around the country against the police murder of George Floyd in 2020, has no such constraints on him now. The first thing he did this time around was to appoint a puppet Pentagon chief, the execrable mock-Nazi tattooed Pete Hegseth, who almost immediately started firing military commanders he alleged were “woke.” Now that Trump has, or thinks he has, a military command structure loyal to him, he’s been deploying soldiers to Democratic Party-controlled cities, including Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., to “fight crime” and “protect ICE agents.”
Recently, he has threatened to deploy soldiers to Memphis, Tennessee; New Orleans, Louisiana; Baltimore, Maryland; and Chicago, Illinois. On Saturday, he announced in a post on Truth Social naturally, that he is ordering his “Secretary of War” to “provide all necessary Troops to protect War ravaged Portland, and any of our ICE Facilities under siege from attack by Antifa, and other domestic terrorists. I am also authorizing Full Force, if necessary.”
Let’s begin with the fact that there are no ICE facilities “under siege” by Antifa. There are not even any anti-ICE protests in Portland. And in case you were wondering, the words “Full Force” have no meaning in any context involving either the U.S. military or domestic law enforcement, including local police departments, state police, or the FBI. If you were to tell a U.S. soldier or a cop on the street in this country to use “full force,” he or she would not know what that consists of either tactically or legally. Is it an authorization to carry and use firearms? Is it an order to “shoot to kill?” If so, under what circumstances?
Despite all the macho rhetoric, after ordering the United States military to basically attack Portland, an American city, Trump got on his official helicopter, and from there, onto Air Force One, and took himself at great taxpayer expense to be a spectator at the Ryder Cup golf tournament.
Is that what a Commander in Chief does when he believes that federal facilities and federal employees, in this case ICE agents, are under “attack” by a “domestic terrorist group?” Well, folks, if you’re Donald Trump, it’s what you do.
This is one reason why it’s so difficult to write about Donald Trump. Not one thing he does follows from the other, and nothing he does – I mean nothing – flows from any sort of conventional sense of order and normalcy.
Let’s take American soldiers, for example. When soldiers are ordered into battle, which certainly sounds from Trump’s Truth Social order is the case with Portland, certain steps are taken, and certain formalities are followed. If you’re a soldier, you want to know that your commander has your back. From a golf course? You want to know that the orders you are given make sense and are legal. Full Force? You want to know that the mission you are given is well thought out and that the target is accurately identified. War ravaged Portland? Lastly, you want to know who the enemy is. Antifa?
At the same time we have a new deployment of armed soldiers to a “war ravaged” domestic city, Secretary of Whatever Hegseth has ordered all the U.S. generals commanding units everywhere around the world – including units based on the West Coast of the United States where Portland is located – to fly to Quantico, Virginia, to listen to him give an address of “less than an hour” on “grooming, standards, and the warrior ethos” according to the Washington Post. Today it was announced that Donald Trump will also be there on Tuesday, which means that he will not be in the Situation Room in the White House overseeing the deployment of soldiers authorized to use “full force” while deployed to “war ravaged Portland.”
It occurs to me that one of two things is going on here. Either Donald Trump wakes up in the morning – his Truth Social post was at 10:19 a.m. – and he watches Fox News and he issues orders just because nobody can tell him no, and his administration has no choice but to carry them out, all for the satisfaction of his bloated ego.
The other possibility is that there is a greater and far more sinister plan at work, that the Antifa terrorist designation and the Portland orders are part of a pattern of threats against Democrats and yes, Leftists, to fall into line, or I, Donald Trump, have a lot of soldiers, and I’m going to send them all over the country, and they’re going to do anything I tell them to do, including making arrests of people whom I, Donald Trump, designate as “terrorists” because they are followers of something called “Antifa.”
Both scenarios are possible because each of them comports completely with what we know of Trump. He is an egotistical fool who wants to flex his muscles and show himself to be a big man. He thinks of himself as a king. Look at what he has done to the White House, gold-leafing everything in sight so that it closely resembles ine of Saddam Hussein’s overwrought, gold-toilet-fixtured and marble-bedecked palaces. He also appears to consider being elected president as a license to enrich himself in the same way that Putin does and Hussein did, looting their treasuries, self-dealing as the rule not the exception, with his own bank account the largest focus of his rule.
He is also a political tyrant. He appears to admire Vladimir Putin more than he admires even a revered recent American president from his own party like Ronald Reagan, and he has wanted to put the U.S. military on the streets of his own country since the early months of his first administration. He has no respect for democracy and the rule of law and has flouted what we call “norms” since he first took office back in 2017. Having appointed three justices to “his” Supreme Court, he has armored himself against political threat from within, so to speak, including a bar to any prosecution at any time for anything he has done, and an effective bar to impeachment because of his fearful rule over the Republican Party.
There is a third, just as terrifying possibility: Both things can be true at once. Trump is running a confiscatory presidency focused on enriching himself at the same time he is bent on imposing an authoritarian rule on this country that will not be broken by any conventional political means…such as elections.
So, Portland could be the first step to what amounts to martial law over blue states and blue cities, or it could be yet another distraction intended to protect Trump from what he knows is in the so-called Epstein files and that he is really afraid of in a way we can only imagine. The one thing we have going for us is that neither of Trump’s military deployments have resulted in any kind of military takeover of either city where they have been tried. The troops go where they’re told, there ends up being nothing to do, they stand around and get bored, and they go home.
We’ll have to wait and see what happens in Portland. My best guess is that military commanders on the small unit level are telling their troops not to do anything stupid that will get themselves or their unit in trouble. That is what soldiers were told in Iraq and Afghanistan. Commanders knew from experience that there would be a beginning and a middle and an end to both wars, and the real mission was to get through them with your skin and reputation intact. Military leaders could be telling their troops that the Trump administration is like another war they’ve got to endure. Do what you’re told, but don’t kill anybody and wait for the order to go home.
In order for Trump to impose anything close to what we might consider as martial law, soldiers would have be ordered to violently take over a city and arrest or kill anybody who gets in their way. But our soldiers didn’t sign up to patrol American streets and arrest or help to arrest their fellow citizens. Martial law, in the end, will be more difficult to impose than Trump thinks it is.