Portland's actually pretty chill

The news, in brief …

• Trump threatens to use government shutdown to enact “irreversible” cuts and mass layoffs

  “We can do things during the shutdown that are irreversible, that are bad for them,” the president warned Tuesday. Read more.

• Judge disqualifies Trump-appointed Nevada US attorney from handling cases: “Not validly serving”

  Sigal Chattah must no longer prosecute criminal cases, U.S. District Court Judge David Campbell ruled. Read more.

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Bringing war to America

There are times when even most antiwar activists would concede that military force is necessary. When a war is already raging — when, say, the Nazis are invading France — it is no crime against humanity to fight back.

But that is rather different than introducing a state of war when there had previously been peace. To stay with World War II: that was deemed “the supreme international crime” by the Nuremberg Military Tribunal for the simple fact that it unleashes every horror that accompanies a military conflict.

Donald Trump is not Adolf Hitler, nor is his planned invasion of Portland anything like a blitzkrieg. If anything, he is purporting to be the reluctant warrior, one coming to save a city in Oregon that he claims has already been “ravaged” by war.

But Trump is definitely a liar, and as Salon’s Andi Zeisler points out, he’s definitely lying about her city. “Portland is a big city with big-city problems,” she writes, from a lack of good-paying jobs to a shortage of affordable housing. But while there are protests and occasionally clashes with ICE, it “is not at war.”

This president, however addled by Fox News and Truth Social he may be, certainly knows that. But it’s that opposition to him and his policies — his mass deportations and targeting of people’s neighbors — that he finds intolerable, and over which he is willing to deploy troops in the streets, as he has already done in cities like Los Angeles and Washington, DC.

Deploying soldiers in cities, even as political props, brings with it all the risks historically associated with having heavily-armed men and women mingle with civilians who do not want them there. Tell these soldiers that they are being deployed to fight terrorists — the “enemy within” — and you have the perfect setup for a deadly incident, or put plainly: American civilians, shot by American troops, bleeding out on American streets.

If Trump follows through on his threat to bring war to Portland, he will own whatever happens next. But he will have already committed a supreme crime against his own country.

Where do you see things headed with Trump’s domestic military deployments? Is it all just for show or is there a more strategic element to it? Sound off in the comments.

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Before you go …

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