“A mother is the truest friend we have, when trials heavy and sudden fall upon us; when adversity takes the place of prosperity; when friends desert us; when trouble thickens around us, still will she cling to us, and endeavor by her kind precepts and counsels to dissipate the clouds of darkness, and cause peace to return to our hearts.” – Washington Irving

It took me a while to dig it out, but there is one statistic out of Portland that practically screams out to be seen.

The President of the United States and his loyal puppy Chad Wolf, the acting and illegal head of Homeland Security have claimed the situation in Portland is so dire that the President had to order his own Palace Guard into the city to bring law and order to this idiosyncratic community.

The President seems to be uncomfortable with the lack of obedience in Democratic cities. So he’s sending men with guns and tear gas in to bring them into line, save statutes and federal buildings.

In the first place, good luck with turning Portland into Main St., Disneyland.

Portland has been protesting and it’s citizens marching and breaking store windows forever. It is part of Portland’s DNA. This city is much loved by the people who live there, mayhem, and all.

And almost all of the city is untouched by the protests.

Not one citizen of Portland has asked for the federal government to come in and run their city.

The question I had been pondering is how many people have died in more than 50 nights of this anarchy and violence? I couldn’t find the answer in all those stories online.

Close your eyes, and take a guess.

The answer is that there have been four injuries, none of them life-threatening and 113 arrests.

In Los Angeles, there were 6,000 arrests in one night after George Floyd was killed, more than 2,000 protesters in New York were arrested the first night of protests there.

There have been no fatalities in Portland, not one protester, one police officer, one innocent civilian, or bystander. 

To me, that seems to be the most essential information to come out of Portland, but I’ve yet to find a major media outlet that has seen fit even to mention it.

Between 1999 and 2018, 450,000 people have died from overdoses from opioids. President Trump has not sent a single solder from his private Army to stop this tragedy. That is our value system in America.

More than 140,000 Americans have died from the coronavirus, the President has barely mentioned it in weeks.

How does one define a crisis in the age of Trump? A crisis is one that might help his re-election. He doesn’t seem to care about anything else. That’s one reason his campaign stinks like month-old fish and he’s out for some big-time distraction.

Portland has its troubles, but it’s hard to find the emergency that prompted the federal government to take over the city’s response to the prolonged demonstrations there against alleged police brutality and the death of George Floyd.

If you look at a calendar, the reason for the “intervention” is apparent enough, the election is November 3, and our President is running scared.

President Trump tends to try to prove everyone’s worst fears about him again and again as if he seeks to frighten as much or more than he seeks to actually lead. I see a man shouting to his world, “look at me, see how tough I am! I am a killer,” just like my Dad wanted me to be!”

As he moves farther and farther to the edge of reason and democracy, he is telling us almost daily now, “see, everything you all feared about me is true.”

Look, he says, if I can totally screw up Portland, just wait until I get to New York and Chicago.

Except he really isn’t very tough, and he’s really bad at tyranny. He’s a scared little kid living inside of a big white house.

The President seems to relish his outlandish positions, and he no longers cares if it is a rational position or a legal position.

He just cares that it will offend and frighten people, that is his disorder, his own idea of power, and the reason he will not succeed.

I am not a constitutional scholar, but his new and most desperate iteration is that of an authoritarian and anti-democratic leader. He has taken the meaning and tone of the election to an entirely different level.

Demagogues feed off of crisis, and Trump needs a crisis to try to prove he is handling one and is necessary.

But he’s blowing it, from Tulsa to Lafayette Square to Portland.

Trump is not saving his hide; he is creating one of the great backlashes in political history and too messed up to see it.

His base is just as unmoored as he is right now; both are lurching desperately from one new and hysterical narrative to another.

And by the way, those moms are kicking his ass.

You don’t need to be a constitutional scholar to know that Chad Wolf is not serving illegally.  Federal statutes impost strict limits on who may serve as acting federal officials and for how long.

An acting official may not serve for more than “210 days beginning on the date the vacancy occurs.”

The vacancy in Homeland Security occurred when Kirstjen Nielsen resigned on April 10, 2019. You can do the math.

The law means that the position of Secretary of Homeland Security could not be filled by an acting official after November 6, 2019.

In political terms, there are almost two many ironies to stomach.

For generations, the conservative political movement and the Republican Party have claimed the rise of the federal bureaucracy has threatened state and local autonomy and would one day be a threat to the nation.

Conservatives and Republicans have fought for years to pare down the size and scope of the federal government. One day, they warned, we would regret it getting so big.

How about today?

Just when they are proven right, they are too afraid of their leader to speak out. Donald  Trump’s enablers are knee-deep in shame, and a lot of people mean to see that isn’t forgotten.

Democrats, almost always quick to expand the size, cost, and scope of government to take on and solve social programs, have supported dramatic federal expansions like the Department of Homeland Security, which now has more than 240,000 employees.

There were all kinds of warnings about taking all those law enforcement agencies and fusing them under one roof.

Under Trump, the department has just transformed itself into an unaccountable and quite possibly unconstitutional personal police force of the President.

This is both dangerous and short-sighted. Wait until budget time next year.

The newly re-cast Trump conservatives are cheering what many scholars claim is an alarming overreach by federal police, most of whom never even existed a generation or two ago.

The idea of a  militarized federal police, reporting only to a President seeking re-election is, without a doubt, among the worst fears of the Founding Fathers: a private army answering to a king, not a nation.

During the initial protests about the death of George Floyd, Trump tried to enlist the Army in his effort to quell the mostly, but not entirely peaceful protests in Washington, D.C.

The Pentagon and the Army balked – openly and decisively – against being used against domestic protesters, so Trump turned to his very loyal new Acting Homeland Security Head to gather elite units from the Border Patrol, DEA,  ICE, the Federal Protective Service,  and even the U.S. Park Service.

Finally, he has an army to do his bidding.

Nobody – not Trump or his acting director – talks to Congress, to the mayors, the governors, or the people of Portland to see if they are needed or if their intrusion is welcome. And the conservatives are cheering in the streets and all over TV and the Internet.

Wow.

The roving bands of genuine anarchists protesting and smashing winds- small in number but large in creating damage – was the opening they needed.

Nothing terrifies white and rural Trump supporters more than people causing trouble in cities that are far away, especially if they are black,  brown, young, or yellow.

The Republican Party has used this delusion for years, often with great success. Since most of them don’t around or with “anarchists” or immigrants or dread liberals or people of color, they have no idea what they are like and can be easily manipulated into fearing them.

Before these militarized federal police forces existed – and we see they have been beefing themselves up with camo, tear gas, fancy guns and rifles,  and all the trappings of professional soldiers – there were no such federal agencies to send soldiers into cities and towns to tell them how they must live.

The Army was off-limits. People governed themselves, for better or worse.

The head of the agency is an acting head, like so many of Trump’s appointees.  The President knows he can’t get many of his fanatically loyal but poorly qualified candidates past even his Republican Senate, so has used a loophole – acting appointees – to skip this process.

Chad Wolf is one of the most conspicuous and also the most arrogant of the acting officials who now litter the government.

Wolf, this fierce defender of law and order, is breaking the law every day.

He has not been confirmed by the President, has never been questioned or examined by Congress, and thus has loyalty only to the President, not the Constitution.

If you step back a bit, it’s nothing short of astonishing that an acting federal cabinet-level official responsible for fighting terrorism and known for his incompetence would be lecturing a state governor and a local mayor on how to govern their state and city.

Every single preceding head of Homeland Security – and a busload of constitutional scholars – has said the federal intervention into Portland is unprecedented and far beyond the scope of the agency or the intention of Congress.

That’s where we are in the political campaign, with a President who has deteriorating mental health and too much power to abuse.

Is it scary? Sure.

Will it work? I don’t think so.

I’ve written many times about the need to be calm and keep perspective.

Media feeds on fear and hysteria. So do demagogues.

Of course, Trump and his army of grumpy white men will fight hard to stay in power.

For me, the Portland invasion is another disaster, and of course, the conservative media will support it. Like Trump, they lurch from one hysteria to the other. Time is running out.

My sense is that most people are sick of it, they’ve seen it for four years now, and their ears ache. People now mistrust Trump, even if they like him.

Wolf and Trump have two huge problems, neither one foresaw and both of which will make this soon- to -be -notorious abuse of power difficult, if not impossible, to maintain.

One is the pandemic.

The other is the moms, who have ignited a movement a lot more frightening to Trump and his Homeland Security adviser than a bunch of young anarchists from Portland.

The mothers have changed the narrative.

I don’t care how Trump and Chad Wolf cast it, images of those moms standing in front of their sons and daughters, the husbands and fathers marching behind them with leaf blowers to push back the tear gas, is much more potent than any of Trump or Wolf’s angry ranting.

What Trump has done is dangerous, although typically, he doesn’t seem to grasp it.

You have scores of heavily combat armed federal police, almost none of whom have been trained for urban riot or population control, with weapons of war. Because of the clumsy and imperious way, they were introduced, and their arrogance when they showed up, they find themselves in a civil war, not a cleanup.

They are facing off against thousands of civilians who now see them, rather than one another, as the enemy. You don’t win friends by driving around a city in unmarked cars and pulling suspects – some of whom are innocent – off of the streets.

The protest was sputtering until Chad Wolf arrived to reinvigorate it and quadruple the number of people who want to tear the federal courthouse down.

Is that the lesson Chad Wolf came to Portland to teach? Make it worse?

Trump has united a divided community, although not in the way he imagined.

Some of the protesters really are threatening and dangerous, throwing rocks and bricks and fireworks at the federal agents, whom the city has now come to hate and fear.

They see them as an occupying Army because that is how they look and act. Do we ever learn? Chad Wolf has just spawned a guerrilla army fighting on its own turf.

When the President vows to “go in and clean up the mess” because the mayor and governor won’t or can’t, he is seizing power from an elected civil leadership that has not sought his help and doesn’t want it.

I can’t say if it’s unconstitutional, I don’t know. I can say it’s one of the dumbest things I’ve ever seen.

Now, Trump and his appointed Patton have also ignited a civilian citizen uprising against a heavily armed paramilitary force. That is truly dangerous; it is an irresponsible and poorly thought out confrontation that is very likely to get people seriously injured or even killed.

If the first fatalities come about because Trump sent in those soldiers -that’s what heavily armed people with guns are – he will damage himself even more.

If he stays much longer or expands this detested practice into other cities, he significantly increases the odds he will get people killed and endanger those soldiers as well as civilians.

And steer a lot of voters to Joe Biden at the worst possible time for him.

We already know from his response to the pandemic that he doesn’t care if his policies endanger or kill people.

Still, if the pandemic should have taught him anything, it’s that the American people do care if people get killed due to misguided government policies or the lack of government policies.

They care about the insertion of federal soldiers into a complex civil conflict that was being brought under control and no longer is.

Every day he behaves in this out-of-control, chaotic and disturbing way, he strengthens the image of Joe Biden as a rational, reasonable, and empathetic leader.

The coronavirus challenges him to do something he simply can’t do – organize, direct and explain a coherent federal response to a disease that is wreaking havoc with ordinary people, the elderly,  businesses, his re-election,  and his economy, the only real accomplishment of his Presidency.

Sorry to dampen hysteria or outrage, but without controlling the pandemic, he cannot win the November election, not even if he invades every Democratic city in the country with his new and militarized federal police squads.

This kind of operation goes against the grain of almost every American’s ideas about America.

The same gene that has the anti-maskers showing up at statehouses with rifles and moms with gas masks will spark a revulsion and social revolution that will dwarf his uninvited excursions into American cities with Democratic mayors.

It reminds me to listen more closely to genuine conservatives when they warn of runaway federal growth.

Even some leading white nationalists have balked at the idea of sending federal soldiers into a community that has not asked for them to quell a dangerous riot that is not perilous at all, at least not until it is turned into one.

This is even more foolish for the President when you throw in the imagery and verve of the mothers, all of whom are a lot braver and tougher than he is.

He can call the moms thugs and anarchists all he wants, it won’t go well.

We are in a war to see who blinks first – Trump’s slavish acolyte, Chad Wolf, and his master, or the moms.

I’m with the moms.

In just a few days, they have stymied the big men in the camo clothes and boots with their big guns and tear gas canisters.

The image of those women standing up to the big men with guns and masks is iconic; it is right up there with the lone Chinese protestor who stood in front of those tanks in Tiananmen Square.

They brought the federal police force to a standstill, ran them off of the streets of Portland, protected their sons and daughters from being grabbed and thrown into vans, chased them behind fences, and have cornered them like rats.

Once or twice a night, they rush out of hiding and fire some tear gas cannisters and run back inside. It doesn’t look like the insurgency has been vanquished, there were 2,000 protesters out last night in Portland, more than any other night since the protests started.

Like the brave man in Tiananmen Square, they stood off the vans.

I don’t know what goes on in Donald Trump’s head; I can’t claim to know his motives. He might well be hoping for a takeover of our country or even the November election.

Watching his bloodless and pointless pandemic press conference Tuesday evening, in which he pushed aside all of the doctor’s people wanted to hear to mumble insincere platitudes about what a great job he was doing, this is what I thought:

This sorry man is too pathetic and clumsy to take over anything, let alone a country crammed with millions of people eager and willing to stand up to him.

He started out as a fiery meteor, he is turning into an empty shell. This is a leader who has no idea what he is doing.

It’s too late for him. He waited too long. He doesn’t have the moves. The pandemic is kicking his butt. The moms are exposing his weakness and dysfunction, just as the Tik-Tok kids did.

One of the many beautiful things I love about our country is that somebody always comes out and stands up for the rest of us when we most need them. That doesn’t happen in China.