The reviews are in for President Trump’s reenactment of Terry Gilliam’s movie Brazil in the streets of Portland and so far they are less than stellar. According to local officials and pretty much everybody else, the heavily armed, federal shock troops deployed to the City of Roses exacerbated the situation by attracting larger crowds to the protests and then beating, tear gassing, and shooting them with less-than-lethal munitions.
Polls show that the president’s Lafayette Square style crackdown did not give voters the anticipated stiffies except, of course, for the usual toothless, beer-gutted red hats. However, the exercise has provided federal authorities with valuable experience in suppressing dissent that may come in handy in the event of a delayed election like the one later this year that President Trump suggested delaying.
The Department of Homeland Security made the most of its deployment to Portland. It compiled “intelligence reports” not just on protesters but on journalists reporting on the protests. Masked officers wearing no identification badges or insignia abducted protesters off the street and carted them off in unmarked vans. Department of Homeland Security tactical squads gained invaluable experience beating peaceful protesters and shooting them with “impact munitions” that can cause injuries guaranteed to keep contentious practitioners of the First Amendment off the street.
Although these types of tactics have been successful in places like Argentina and Chile as well as various eastern bloc countries in the 1970s, they have not had a proper trial run here in the United States recently. And since delaying an election could create unpredictable events on the streets of America’s cities, the Trump administration is girding its loins for November.