Trump Itches for His Reichstag Fire: Fascism’s Coming Out Party in Portland
In late February 1933, much of the German Reichstag - home of the German parliament - was burned. Hitler used the fire as an excuse to suspend civil liberties and to crack down on leftist parties and organizations. It was soon understood that the Nazi regime plotted the Reichstag Fire and blamed the Communists for the blaze. It’s a dramatic and old story. It’s a story that’s also unfolded in many variations. We are now experiencing our version of that story.
We have a president who is doing what he can to provoke confrontations and increase tensions on the nation’s city streets. Trump is doing this to gin-up excuses for crackdowns on protest and to stoke resentments and antipathy towards Democratic leaders at the national, state, and local levels. He is stoking suburban angst as way to pump oxygen back into his waning support among the white voters he’ll need for another Electoral College win on November 3, 2020.
Trump and his accomplices are desperate to get the subject of his criminal neglect of the Covid-19 plague off the front pages. He and his enablers are deliberately trying to provoke confrontations in Portland. This is the context in which Trump, with his consigliere, Attorney General Barr, has deployed a variety of federal forces to Portland and, by now, possibly elsewhere.
All this is inspired by the President’s feckless response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Trump’s foul machinations are also the result of his bigot-inspired hostility and indifference to the pain and suffering of communities of color. In Trump’s febrile mind, those who’ve suffered disproportionately from the health crises facing our nation, who’ve experienced fraught relationships with police and local prosecutors for most of our history, need to shut up and sit down.
Officials in Portland or the state of Oregon did not invite federal intervention or reinforcements. The orders to deploy them flowed out of Trump’s swamp in Washington, D.C. These federal forces, much like those unleashed in Lafayette Park in Washington, D.C. are anonymous. Their vehicles are rented. The federal forces on the street have no visible identification. They grab people off the street without probable cause or warrants.
Protection of federal property is the putative purpose for the heightened federal presence. Yet civil rights outrages are inflicted even when people are not near federal structures, monuments, or buildings. Federal forces have severely wounded and sickened demonstrators and used tear gas in opposition to local court orders. They have beaten a Navy veteran and broken his ribs. They are unconcerned about being observed or filmed.
Portland has become a kind of bricks and mortar bogeyman to the right wing. Social media and Fox News spew endless exaggeration and hyperbolic lingo about anarchists, socialists, applying all of the epithets and scary sobriquets that have become part of the right-wing catechism.
Now Trump is threatening to repeat what he’s doing in Portland in high profile, Democratic-run cities — Chicago, Oakland, New York City, Philadelphia, and Detroit, for example. What better way to distract from the monumental failure of Trump in managing the current public health crisis? What better way to distract from the nearly 145,000 who will have died by this weekend, many due to Trump’s criminal ineptness?
Perhaps Trump doesn’t have a Reichstag to burn down, but he can line-up ceaseless provocations, stoke tensions along racial, ethnic, and economic lines. He can misdirect public anxiety in China’s direction or over to “ungrateful” erstwhile allies — anything other than Trump taking responsibility for his own miserable failures.
Since Trump is incapable of acknowledging error, he can only spit and snarl at critics and produce another sideshow and diversion. The process has become like some political version of atomic fusion. Each of Trump’s lies and ploys to turn our heads from the tragedy in front of our eyes contributes to ever larger piles of social and institutional destruction.
Because Trump personally is incapable of long-term thinking, he has no long range plan and frets only about how to avoid the wrath for his crimes or the retribution for his corrupt indulgences. So who is actually orchestrating this set of actions to send federal personnel all over the country to urban, Democratic strongholds to “restore order?” My speculation is that it is William Barr. His performance at Lafayette Square in Washington, D. C. now seems like a dress rehearsal for what is unfolding all over the urban landscape.
An op-ed recently asks “Protestors are being snatched from the streets without warrants. Can we call it fascism yet?” That question is already too late. It’s time to ring the fire alarms, because the Reichstag arsonists are spreading through the land. It is time to resist.
