Americans have reacted with justifiable alarm to President Donald Trump’s aggressive response to protests around the country, notably in Portland, Oregon.
Far from calming things down, he has made them worse. Where they were originally anti-racism demonstrations against the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May, they are now aimed at federal interference as well.
Protests have intensified in Seattle, Los Angeles and New York; in Omaha, Nebraska, in Richmond, Virginia, in Austin, Texas, in Washington D.C., and in other cities. Protesters carry signs that read “Feds Go Home” and represent groups with names like “Refuse Fascism.”
The federal forces acting to control the protests are drawn in part from the Federal Protective Service, a division of the Department of Homeland Security whose job it is to protect federal facilities in the U.S. They have been joined by officials from other agencies, including Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Transportation Security Administration, and the Coast Guard, and their actions have reached beyond federal buildings.
Together, they amount to a secretive, unofficial paramilitary force controlled by the president, whose jurisdiction (he thinks) overrides that of local leaders. His acting secretary of Homeland Security, Chad Wolf, has called the protesters “violent anarchists and extremists,” as has the president himself. We “don’t need invitations by the state, state mayors or state governors to do our job,” Wolf has said. “We’re going to do that, whether they like us there or not.”
Trump has threatened to send his domestic army into cities whose mayors are “liberal Democrats” incapable of maintaining order. He has thereby politicized law enforcement to a degree seldom seen before in the U.S. Fourteen mayors have published a letter accusing him of an abuse of power and alleging that he is deploying federal law enforcement for political purposes in the run-up to the election in November. “These are tactics we expect from an authoritarian regime,” they write, “not our democracy.”
New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg quoted the Yale University historian Timothy Snyder in commenting on Trump’s response. “Be wary of paramilitaries,” he wrote in his trenchant short tract, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century, shortly after Trump’s election; “when the pro-leader paramilitary and the official police and military intermingle, the end has come.”
These disquieting words echo ominously as we watch heavily armed men in combat fatigues seize protesters, throw them into unmarked vehicles, and detain them without any formal justification.
A 53-year-old navy veteran who approached federal officers in Portland on July 19 to question their constitutional authority was pepper-sprayed and severely beaten with batons, leaving him with a broken right hand. He had decided to go to the demonstration after he watched “Pinochet-type behaviour from our own government” on television, referring to Augusto Pinochet, the Chilean dictator.
A “Wall of Vets” has joined the “Wall of Moms” already on the protest lines.
Goldberg acknowledged in her column that Customs and Border Protection is a federal agency, but she also noted that its leadership is devoted to Trump and is permeated with far-right politics.
“The state is allowed to use force,” Snyder pointed out to her, “but the state is allowed to use force according to rules.” He also noted that autocratic regimes often use border agents against its enemies: the people who become accustomed to using violence on the border are brought in to use violence against their own people.
According to Barry Friedman, a New York University law professor, there has been a tendency in the past among critics of Trump to cry wolf. “Well,” he says now, “this is wolf. This is it.”
Scattered critics have called Trump a fascist, on the assumption that fascism, unlike communism, varies widely as an ideology and outlook from nation to nation. The accusation gains credibility as time moves on and Trump shows himself to be a peculiarly American fascist.
Recently, he has said he has no confidence in the reliability of presidential election results. Mail-in ballots, especially, will be subject to fraud.
Who then will decide the outcome?
Ken Dewar is professor emeritus, department of history, Mount Saint Vincent University
