Portland is not burning to the ground. Chicago is not out of control.
That much we know.
So why is the White House sending in the troops?
I think it’s because Stephen Miller wants to start a civil war.
Let me take you through my thought process.
First, I asked myself why is Trump engaging in such inane, demonstrably false assertions about these cities? It seems to me there are three possibilities:
- That he is mentally unwell and has lost touch with reality. (See my post from Sept. 29: “Trump: ‘Am I watching things on television that are different from what’s happening?’”)
- That he has been manipulated by his top aides, who are taking advantage of his ignorance and susceptibility to conspiracy theories.
- That he is knowingly, intentionally lying.
Determining which one of the three — or which combination of the three – is at issue here should absolutely be a top priority of the Washington press corps
And if he’s lying, the follow-up question should be: Why? What is he trying to accomplish?
But then I realized that for the sake of answering my first question — why is the White House sending in the troops? — it actually doesn’t matter what’s going on in Trump’s head.
That’s because, as we have all learned over the last several months, Stephen Milller is Trump’s operational lead – if not his puppeteer. Miller, the white nationalist who is Trump’s deputy chief of staff in charge of increasingly everything, is the one who makes things happen in Trump’s White House.
Unlike Trump, Miller is not stupid, nor does he suffer from dementia. He knows full well that what Trump is saying is not true. (He may well be the one encouraging Trump’s demented fantasies.)
So we know the answer for him is No. 3: He’s knowingly, intentionally lying.
And given what we know about him, from his own words, it’s not hard to figure out why: He wants a national cleansing.
He wants MAGA and the state to wipe out the opposition. He wants, in short, a civil war. And he thinks he can start one in Portland and Chicago.
“The issue before [u]s now is very simple and clear,” he tweeted on Saturday. “There is a large and growing movement of leftwing terrorism in this country. It is well organized and funded. And it is shielded by far-left Democrat judges, prosecutors and attorneys general. The only remedy is to use legitimate state power to dismantle terrorism and terror networks.”
And he knows full well what will happen if troops — especially from red states — occupy two peaceful blue cities: The residents will fight back.
As Jonathan Chait wrote in The Atlantic: “Violence is not the cause of Trump and Miller’s desire to use state power to crush their opposition. It is the pretext for which they transparently long.”
New York Times columnist Thomas Edsall (with whom I have had my differences) asked several experts about Trump and Miller’s intentions. The answers, published this morning, were revelatory.
“If Trump, Miller & Co. are not hoping to provoke violence, they sure act as if they are,” Sean Wilentz, a professor of history at Princeton, wrote in an email to Edsall. “It’s not simply about provoking violence, though, but inflicting it, as ICE has been doing all along. The spiral of violence usually begins with official violence.”
Barbara Walter, a political scientist at the University of California-San Diego and the author of “How Civil Wars Start, explained:
The quickest way to piss people off is to send soldiers into their neighborhoods especially when there’s no reason for them to be there. It’s inherently provocative, and Trump and his team understand this. Research by the political scientist Robert Pape shows that the single most powerful predictor of suicide terrorism is the presence of foreign troops on local soil. People hate, hate, hate that. They hate the humiliation, the powerlessness, the feeling of being occupied.
Once citizens begin to view their own government’s security forces as an occupying army, violence becomes inevitable. Trump’s team knows this. In fact, that’s the point. They are not trying to restore order; they’re trying to trigger the very unrest that would justify further crackdowns. In the end, violence serves their ultimate end: They want to create the illusion of disorder so they can tighten control and stay in power indefinitely.
Indeed, Trump and Miller know very well how volatile Portland is, in particular. As Anna Griffin wrote in the Times today, Trump sent federal law enforcement officers there in 2020, ostensibly to quell nightly demonstrations at the federal courthouse. Their presence vastly swelled the protests, with violence escalating on both sides.
Far from being a lesson in what not to do, Griffin wrote, “for Mr. Trump, those weeks appear to have provided a playbook.”
And Chicago, while perhaps less of a tinderbox than Portland, has been a hotbed of resistance throughout Trump’s second term and the site of major protests. It’s a city with a strong tradition of actively supporting its immigrants, and it’s not going to stop now.
Illinois and Oregon are fighting in the courts to keep the troops out. Oregon has successfully blocked them so far; but National Guard members from Texas are staging outside Chicago as of this morning.
Sending troops into these cities is provocation, no more and no less. Miller is hoping for the spiral of violence to begin shortly.
It’s imperative that journalists see that troops have been sent there to generate violence, not to stop it.
And it’s essential that journalists approach official statements going forward with more skepticism. They are too willing to grant such statements legitimacy, even when they’ve been lied to before. Just this week, government claims about why a Border Patrol agent opened fire on a Chicago resident turned out to be one lie after another.
Stephen Miller wants to incite a war between the state and the people. When that war starts, the media’s tendency will be to blame both sides — or to blame the people. But they should place the blame where it belongs: On Stephen Miller.