The US President is threatening to place large swathes of the United States under military occupation
WASHINGTON – Suddenly, we must all turn our attention to Portland in Oregon, the latest Democrat-run stronghold where Donald Trump is engaging in a military deployment.
Despite the absence of any evidence to support his claims, Trump on Saturday described the city as “war-ravaged”, insisting that immigration facilities there are “under siege” by people he described as “domestic terrorists”. It’s an operating principle that he is now advancing as he repeatedly threatens to place large swathes of the United States under military occupation.
In fact, protesters are simply exercising their constitutionally guaranteed rights to demonstrate against the increasingly heavy-handed tactics of Ice, the US President’s masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents who are sweeping suspected illegal immigrants off the streets of Portland and countless other cities across the nation.
Ice’s operatives in Portland will now be backed up by what Trump described as the “full force” of the military as they seek to feed freshly captured detainees into the President’s mass deportation maw.
Trump notably did not announce a deployment of the National Guard, who remain on the streets of Washington DC, allegedly controlling a purported crime-wave in the nation’s capital. This time around, he referred simply to providing “all necessary troops”, suggesting that he remains determined to spark a confrontation between Portland’s protesters and active duty members of the US Army or Marine Corps. That would set the stage for a fresh legal battle, after a federal judge in California ruled earlier this month that similar deployments in Los Angeles were illegal.
Oregon’s Democratic Party leaders are rejecting presidential plans that they lack the immediate power to stop. “There is no national security threat in Portland,” the state’s governor, Tina Kotek, said on Saturday. “Our communities are safe and calm … any deployment would be an abuse of power,” she insisted. Portland’s mayor, Keith Wilson, said “the President will not find lawlessness or violence here unless he plans to perpetrate it”.
Day by day, it becomes increasingly evident that Trump and members of his inner circle covet a physical confrontation with critics of the President’s mass deportation policies, and are ready to bring charges of terrorism against them.
On Saturday, Deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, who serves as the President’s de-facto top ideologue, said the country is now “witnessing domestic terrorist sedition against the federal government”. He announced the deployment of a Joint Terrorism Task Force to Illinois to combat protests outside an Ice detention facility near Chicago. “All necessary resources will be utilised,” he threatened.
Miller’s use of the word “sedition” is not coincidental. Three years ago, five members of the far-right “Oath Keepers” were charged with seditious conspiracy for their actions on January 6 2021, the day Trump’s supporters stormed the US Capitol and tried to overturn the outcome of Joe Biden’s election victory.
Miller is now indicating that if Biden’s Department of Justice could use rarely tested anti-sedition laws dating back to the Civil War in a successful effort to jail Trump supporters, then today’s White House can use the same laws to go after prominent Democrats backing the anti-Ice protesters.
It has only been a month since Miller first described the Democratic Party as a “domestic extremist organisation”. Now he has been put in charge of the White House effort to prosecute “domestic terrorist organisations”. It appears that the liberal philanthropic Open Society Foundations operated by Hungarian-born financier George Soros is firmly in Miller’s sights and may soon be formally accused of funding “pro-terror groups”.
Days after former FBI director James Comey was charged with perjury and obstruction, the Department of Justice is moving heaven and earth to act as Trump’s office of personal retribution.
Investigations appear to have been mounted into a number of his historic foes, including New York attorney general Letitia James and Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis, both of whom launched criminal probes of Trump during the Biden administration. Former special prosecutor Jack Smith, who led investigations into Trump’s involvement in the January 6 uprising and his alleged mishandling of classified documents, is also now targeted by a Department of Justice probe.
There is no reason to believe the White House is bluffing over its determination to jail as many of Trump’s critics as possible, and Miller has even spoken of ordering some of them into “exile”. The President’s zeal to spark confrontation with his critics currently appears to know no bounds.
