For President Donald Trump, cities are crime-ridden, infested with rioters and looters, and overseen by liberal mayors who are absent, complicit or both. Portland has stood out as his personal punching bag. He has called it a “mess” and dispatched federal agents to the city. This week, Trump’s Justice Department singled out Portland as an “anarchist jurisdiction” where city leaders have “permitted violence and destruction of property” and from which the White House threatens to withhold federal funds if the city doesn’t change course, Politico reports. Portland has presented the kinds of domestic unrest not seen in decades. Downtown protests surrounding the federal courthouse passed the hundred-day mark, and the city just saw its deadliest month since the 1980s.
With only six weeks until the election, the conflict has reached new levels of violence, and things are getting worse. That roiling unrest presents an unprecedented challenge for local officials struggling to contain the violence—as well as for national Democratic leadership trying to figure out an effective response to a local crisis that has broader political implications. Portland “represents a worst-case scenario, in terms not of how bad it could possibly get, but how bad it is now,” said Mark Pitcavage of the Anti-Defamation League. Portland’s homegrown clash of extremists on both sides is creating a gravitational pull on others nationwide. Left-wing forces, including antifa, insist that “riots and looting” are “a legitimate and profound form of protest,” said a post on a popular far-left regional Facebook page encouraging violence. The pro-Trump group Patriot Prayer, headquartered north of the city, is eager to confront the opposition. The head of the militia group Oath Keepers says, “Civil war is here, right now.”