The one big problem with Trump’s executive order “Designating Antifa as a Domestic Terrorist Organization” is that they haven’t demonstrated that sometjhing called antifa actually exists as more than as a vaguely-defined anti-authoritarian tendency. What better way then to conjure up antifa than to try to bait Portland into the mother of all antifascist confrontations, including threats of “full force” in order to conjure antifascist demons for media consumption.
The administration was surely hoping for a replay of the summer of 2020, when many thousands came out in the streets wearing bike helmets and respirators for nightly confrontations with tDHS officers, US marshals, and BORTAC agents at the downtown federal buildings. This months-long confrontation first brought together the federal occupation of a US city, administration threats against antifa, kidnappings of activists on the street, militant antifacist resistance, and ultimately the extra-judicial killing of a suspected “antifa member.”
A replay of that particular clash, this time with US military and a decisive victory over local residents of the city, could be both a powerful tool of intimidation and a propaganda victory.
Looking back at exactly what happened Portland that summer is useful for understanding how the Trump administration is thinking about it:
Federal agents began appearing at what had become large, daily Black Lives Matter protests but initially had not played an active role. Then on the night of July 1st, a group of federal officers came out of the boarded-up Mark O. Hatfield Federal Courthouse and began firing pepper balls at demonstrators, and pushing the crowd of protesters out along city streets of downtown many blocks away from federal property. Ten days later during a military briefing Trump, unprompted, said that he had send federal officers Portland because “the locals couldn’t handle it.” The next day an unarmed 26-year-old protestor named Donovan La Bella was shot in the head with an impact round by a U.S. Marshal in front of the courthouse, fracturing his skull and leaving him critically injured.
Days after on July 15, footage surfaced on Twitter showing two officers dressed in camouflage in an unmarked vehicle approaching someone in a black hoodie on the street, putting the person in the vehicle and driving away. That same night another person, Mark Pettibone, was grabbed and tossed into an unmarked van. He was searched, held, and finally released. Pettibone’s arrest, along with several others, involved the Customs and Border Patrol’s Border Patrol Tactical Unit (BORTAC) and the US Marshals Special Operations Group. A CBP spokeperson later confirmed to The Nation Magazine that its agents were responsible for the arrests, going on to state: “Violent anarchists have organized events in Portland over the last several weeks with willful intent to damage and destroy federal property, as well as injure federal officers and agents. These criminal actions will not be tolerated.”
The next day Department of Homeland Security Acting Secretary Chad Wolf made an unannounced visit to Portland where he toured the federal courthouse. No local or state officials agreed to meet with Wolf while he was there, but he met with the head of the Portland Police Union. He also went live on Sean Hannity’s FOX News Program that not to say that all Oregon officials he had talked to had asked federal agents to leave, but, he said, “That’s not gonna happen. Not on my watch.”
On August 29, Patriot Prayer and other Trump supporters organized a caravan of vehicles that drove through downtown Portland to counter the ongoing protests against police violence. Although there had been increasing clashes between far-right brawlers and antifascists in recent days, this was the first time right-wing activists showed up in force in the city since the beginning of the George Floyd protests. The caravan, which rolled into the city from the suburb of Clackamas. Participants hung out the windows of cars, the beds of Ford F150s, the sunroofs of SUVs waving flags and banners in a line stretching into the hundreds of vehicles.
Clashes began Later that evening, as the caravan began to disperse, a confrontation took place between a group of Trump supporters and counter-protesters in downtown. During the altercation, Aaron “Jay” Danielson was shot and killed. Video images of Danielson’s slain body, wearing a Patriot Prayer baseball cap and a pro-police “Thin Blue Line” patch on his pants, circulated widely on social media.
This fatal shooting of a person thus far identified only by his association with a local violent far-right gang would get the attention of the president that very night as Trump paid homage to Danielson on Twitter. Over a retweet of a tribute post to him shared by Women for Trump co-founder Amy Kremer the President wrote “Rest In Peace Jay!”
Subsequent investigations revealed that the suspect was Michael Reinoehl, who claimed to be providing security for Black Lives Matter protests. On September 3rd, a federal task force made up of U.S. marshals, FBI, state, and local law enforcement cornered and killed Reinoehl in his parked car in Lacey, Washington. In a statement, U.S. Attorney General William Barr said that Reinoehl was killed while attempting to escape and brandishing a firearm. 22 people near the scene who were interviewed by the New York Times, and all but one said they did not hear officers identify themselves or give commands before firing 30 rounds at Reinoehl. Further, the brandished firearm said to have provoked the fusillade was found not in or near his hand, but in the right front pocket of his pants.
It was unusual that U.S. Attorney General would devote such federal resources so aggressively to a local killing, let alone issue a public statement about it. The gesture alone points to the highly political nature of Reinoehl’s killing, as do Barr’s own words, which echo Trump’s ongoing campaign rhetoric about violent, Democrat-controlled cities. “The tracking down of Reinoehl – a dangerous fugitive, admitted Antifa member, and suspected murderer, Barr said, “is a significant accomplishment in the ongoing effort to restore law and order to Portland and other cities.” Reinoehl was a suspect in a murder case. Being an “admitted Antifa member” itself was not itself a crime at that point. Barr went on: “The streets of our cities are safer with this violent agitator removed, and the actions that led to his location are an unmistakable demonstration that the United States will be governed by law, not violent mobs.”
Barr’s public celebration of the killing of Reinoehl, who had been neither tried nor convicted in the shooting death of Jay Daniels, and that it was touted it as an example of Trump’s law-and-order agenda, is an admission that this was an act of political violence by the state. Trump himself went further than Barr in boasting abou the extrajudicial killing: “I put out, ‘When are you going to go get him?'” he told Jeanine Pirro on her Fox News program. “And the U.S. Marshals went in to get him. And, in a short period of time, it ended in a gun fight. This guy was a violent criminal. And the U.S. Marshals killed him,” Trump said. “I will tell you something, that’s the way it has to be. There has to be retribution when you have crime like this.”
Hence the role of Portland in Trump’s political imaginary, and maybe why we are seeing this siege happening now, just days after Trump’s executive order.
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