Criticism grows over deployment of Donald Trump's storm troopers in cities

No, it’s not a description of some totalitarian state, though some insist the United States is displaying all the dangerous hallmarks of one right now.

“We live in a democracy, not a banana republic,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi reminded President Donald Trump last week, joining several top US politicians in criticising his administration and key federal agencies for placing faceless “storm troopers” in Portland, Oregon to quell weeks of racial injustice protests.

Pelosi is far from alone in raising concerns over the sinister drift towards what many see as the growing authoritarian tendencies of the Trump administration right now.

No sooner had Pelosi spoken out last week than more than a dozen US mayors called for the president to remove federal forces from their cities or stop upcoming deployments, according to CNN, citing a letter addressed to the heads of the Justice and Homeland Security departments and signed by the mayors.

Among the signatories were the mayors of Portland; Seattle; Atlanta; Chicago; Washington; Boston; Philadelphia; Denver; Los Angeles, Sacramento, San Jose and Oakland, California; Phoenix and Tucson, Arizona; and Kansas City, Missouri.

Like Pelosi, they pulled no punches in their criticism of Trump, describing his unilateral deployment of federal forces into American cities as “unprecedented.”

It was a move the mayors said that “violates the fundamental constitutional protections and tenets of federalism”.

In their statement they also cited the tactics in Portland where federal officers were said to have “snatched” an individual from the street and placed him into an unmarked vehicle without identifying themselves. These were tactics, said the mayors, “we expect from authoritarian regimes – not our democracy”.

It was only belatedly that the American public received confirmation that federal Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officers in Portland, under an executive order from Trump, were responsible for the street “snatch”. But still the officers involved consistently refused to explain their presence or actions.

One report in The New York Times (NYT) suggested that some of those currently deployed are part of a specialised US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) patrol group that is normally tasked with investigating drug smuggling organisations.

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“It doesn’t surprise me that Donald Trump picked CBP to be the ones to go over to Portland and do this,” Joaquin Castro, Democratic representative for Texas, told the NYT. “It has been a very problematic agency in terms of respecting human rights and in terms of respecting the law,” Castro added.

The deployment of such officers and groups in US cities with no expertise in political crowd control is, says Anne Applebaum, staff writer at The Atlantic Magazine, a real cause for concern.

“These are people with experience patrolling the border, frisking airline passengers, and deporting undocumented immigrants – exactly the wrong sort of experience needed to carry out the delicate task of policing an angry political protest,” noted Applebaum recently, listing the Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Transportation Security Administration, and the Coast Guard as among those Trump is deploying.

For those protesters confronted on the streets by such officers, often they have no idea which department they come from.

In an interview with The Washington Post, one of those subjected to random arrest, 29-year-old Mark Pettibone, told how he was scared when men in green military fatigues and generic “police” patches jumped out of an unmarked minivan two weeks ago as he was walking home from a peaceful protest in Portland. The federal officers who snatched him off the street neither told him why he had been detained or provided him with any record of an arrest.

“I was terrified … it was like being preyed upon,” Pettibone was quoted by the US newspaper as saying.

As criticism over such actions has mounted, Trump however appears undeterred and determined to go ahead with his intention to launch a “surge” of federal law enforcement in cities run by Democrats, as part of his expansion of what has been dubbed “Operation Legend”.

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“Today I’m announcing a surge of federal law enforcement into American communities plagued by violent crime,” said Trump, who has accused Democratic mayors and governors of tolerating crime waves. “This bloodshed must end; this bloodshed will end,” he said, speaking at a White House event last Wednesday where he was joined by US Attorney General William Barr.

Named after four-year-old LeGend Taliferro, who was shot and killed in Kansas City, Missouri, in June this year while sleeping in his apartment, Operation Legend was implemented by Trump as he increased law enforcement and military efforts to crack down on violent crime in the wake of the George Floyd protests.

Last week the operation moved into high gear with Trump confirming that over 200 officers are heading to Chicago and Albuquerque in the coming days, and to more destinations soon.

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While Trump’s administration is at pains to point out they’ll be cooperating with local law enforcement, some locals clearly don’t see it that way. Local leaders also remain worried the administration is not being fully transparent over its motives.

Critics of Operation Legend insist Trump is using his executive power to order in federal officers in a way few presidents have ever done and in response are determined to politically challenge what they view as a dangerous precedent.

“Donald Trump’s troops” will not be allowed to “terrorise our residents,” Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot warned. Albuquerque leaders echoed Lightfoot’s objections with the city’s mayor, Tim Keller, saying in a statement “there is no place for Trump’s secret police in our city.”

These opponents say that with the US economy crippled by the coronavirus and several polls predicting a defeat for Trump in the November election at the hands of Democrat rival Joe Biden, the president has been promoting himself as the “law and order” leader, though in reality, this is just a blatant attempt to stoke racial fears in White suburban voters.

Speaking to The Washington Post, Justice Horn, a twenty-two-year-old community organiser in Kansas City and the co-chair of a group called Black Students for Biden, said that while he understood Taliferro’s family seeking justice for their son, it was “inappropriate for state government and the Trump administration to make this a political stunt, to look strong to the base on law and order”.

“If they really cared about solving crime they would have consulted the community and they did nothing,” Horn said. “They should have brought people together and been transparent about it.”

Many others too are suspicious of Trump’s motives over Operation Legend. They argue that the president is blowing things out of proportion to try and convince Americans that events in those places he has targeted pose an existential threat to their country. It’s an all too convenient argument, they warn, just as Trump is about to fight for re-election.

IN term of allies, Trump appears to have found one in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), an agency that critics say is only too willing to do a lot of the dirty work on his administration’s behalf, including separating migrant families and stepping up arrests of long-stay undocumented migrants.

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They point out that right now, on the pretext of protecting federal property in Portland, the DHS is being further used to crackdown on peaceful protesters.

Such is the growing concern over these roles that Tom Ridge, the founder of the DHS, warned recently that its mission is not “to be the president’s personal militia”.

Some though say they are not surprised by Trump’s latest controversial moves given that he has never been shy about his authoritarian impulses. This, they argue, is a president who has often expressed his admiration for dictators and so-called political “strongmen”. He is also a president who has often made clear his belief too that Article II of the US Constitution allows him to do “whatever I want.”

According to Anne Applebaum, author of a new book, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism, what we are witnessing right now in America is what she describes as “performative authoritarianism”.

“Students of modern dictatorship will find these tactics wearily familiar. Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom Trump admires, has deployed performative authoritarianism, alongside other tools, in order to keep himself in power for many years now,” says Applebaum.

Writing in The Atlantic magazine, she draws parallels with Putin’s deployment of Russian troops in unmarked uniforms – the infamous “little green men” – into Crimea and eventually eastern Ukraine to “dominate” the situation, a word she says Trump himself has used for his tactics in Portland.

Ultimately, of course, it is the November presidential election that Trump seeks to dominate, but right now the polls are not looking good for the incumbent.

According to a latest Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll, Democratic candidate Joe Biden leads Trump by eight percentage points in support among registered voters, and the former vice president appears to have a significant advantage among voters who are undecided.

70% of undecided or third-party registered voters say they disapprove of Trump’s performance in office and the same number said they think the country is headed on the wrong track. The poll found also that as many as 62% thought the US economy was headed in the wrong direction. This group also appears to be deeply concerned about the coronavirus, which has killed more than 141,000 Americans and forced millions out of work as businesses closed in an effort to slow the spread of the pandemic.

About 8 in 10 said they were personally concerned about the spread of the virus. When asked about the most important factor driving their decision to vote, 34% – a plurality – said they were looking for a candidate who has “a robust plan to help the nation recover”.

It is this poor polling and fear of election defeat insist some observers that in part accounts for the increasingly authoritarian measures we are now witnessing.

Ever since his election campaign in 2016, when he claimed to save America from its descent into “chaos” and “barbarism”, Trump has often fallen back on the law and order rhetoric to tap into White racial resentment.

Ahead of the November elections, he hopes to revive his old voter base as he declares a fight against those “anarchists” he claims are behind the recent protests and that the Democrats “are afraid to take on”.

According to the US political news website The Hill, some Republican strategists argue that sending federal agents to dispel violent unrest is an astute political calculation by Trump that resonates with GOP voters, particularly his base and suburban women who like his law-and-order message and want any violence they see to be stopped.

“This has the effect of stirring up more trouble, but allows Trump to demonstrate how he is pushing back on the trouble in the streets,” Doug Heye, a GOP strategist and former Republican National Committee communications director, told The Hill on Thursday, as Trump’s fight with city mayors escalated.

“We know that if one person smashes a window, much less something gets set on fire, it’s going to drown out whatever positive and peaceful things were done at a normal protest,” Heye said. “People see that and they want that fixed.”

If that is indeed the case and Trump’s deployment of federal agencies is part of a cynical ratcheting up of chaos and instability for electoral campaigning gain, then it makes for a huge political gamble.

“Trump thinks he’s set a trap: when Democrats complain, he’ll paint them as soft on crime,” observed CNN White House reporter Stephen Collinson, writing on the broadcaster’s website last week.

“And he’s using the heart-rending tales of urban crossfire deaths to tell crucial voters – women and suburbanites – that he’s the only president who can keep them safe,” added Collinson.

This weekend Trump showed no signs of backing down on his decision to expand Operation Legend, this despite the United Nations human rights office issuing a stark warning to the US authorities against using disproportional force against protesters. For the time being, the stand-off only looks likely to deepen and the acrimony increase.

As one headline in a New York Times editorial announced last week: “Trump’s Occupation of American Cities Has Begun.” The question on the minds of many American now though, is when and how will it end?