28 United States The EconomistJuly 25th 2020
I
n “imagined frontiers”, a book about the role of lines on maps
in American art and culture, the historian Carl Abbott notes that
because “they mark difference, they are also edgy places where
change can happen—like the spark that rebalances electrical po-
tential.” This is Donald Trump’s main political insight.
The wall that the president promised to build along the south-
ern border was always more about defining differences—and mak-
ing sparks fly—than immigration control. It marked who he and
his voters were against: explicitly “rapist” migrants, but implicitly
diversity, the Republican leaders who took a relaxed view of it, the
liberals who celebrated it. This is why hardly any of the president’s
fans seem to mind that he has not laid a brick of his promised wall
(though he is extending a pre-existing border fence).
Ahead of the 2018 mid-terms, Mr Trump reimagined the same
political frontier, this time making an approaching column of
Central American asylum-seekers emblematic of it. Now in need
of another burst of electoral rebalancing, with Joe Biden far ahead
in the polls, he has reconfigured his frontier more audaciously. By
deploying immigration law enforcers—trained for shoot-outs
with Mexican gangsters on the southern border—against racial
justice protesters in Mr Abbott’s hometown of Portland, Oregon,
he has moved his dividing line 1,100 miles north of San Diego. This
has made explicit what was previously implied: that his and his
supporters’ enemies are already within. It is the apogee of Mr
Trump’s divisive method and, for rule-of-law implications alone,
one of his most reckless moves yet.
The context in Portland is somewhat peculiar. Even so, this
should be understood as a rerun of the stunt Mr Trump attempted
last month in Lafayette Square, when federal police and troops
tear-gassed peaceful protesters to clear a space for him to brandish
a Bible outside a nearby church. That gambit failed for two rea-
sons. Executed on hallowed terrain—a park dedicated to the revo-
lution upon which Americans’ freedoms are founded—it was too
prominent and egregious for even timorous Republican lawmak-
ers to stomach. And the pushback from the embarrassed Pentagon
was even stronger. The country’s foremost military officer, General
Mark Milley, apologised for having been involved in the charade,
thus condemning it. In the rerun playing out in Portland, whereparamilitary-style operatives have been filmed hustling peaceful
protesters into unmarked cars even as the president denounces
them as “anarchists”, neither safety-check applies.
First, because of the city’s circumstances. Most urban places
are liberal citadels with conservative peripheries; Portland, a place
of vegan strip-bars with a reactionary hinterland, is an extreme
case. This made it a magnet for far-left anarchists and far-right
white thugs, often leading to rowdy and occasionally violent con-
frontations, even before Mr Trump’s election further raised the
temperature on its streets. The nationwide race protests that
erupted in May, following the police killing of George Floyd, have
been predictably angry and sustained in the city. Though still
largely peaceful, and confined to a few blocks around its federal
courthouse, they have provided images of vandalism and bottle-
throwing for conservative media to fume about, yet another no-
win situation for the city’s police, and, for those who believe the
answer to civil unrest is always cracking heads, a case for action.
Second, in the Department of Homeland Security Mr Trump
has found a more malleable agency. Founded in 2002 with a man-
date to prevent another 9/11, it had a callow institutional culture
even before he got to work on it. The agency has had five secretar-
ies in the past three years, only two of them Senate-confirmed. Al-
most half its top 27 managers are temporaries. The current acting
secretary, Chad Wolf, is a former lobbyist with no qualifying expe-
rience. This has made the agency supine before an administration
that has used it for its dirtiest work. dhshas separated migrant
families, stepped up arrests of long-stay undocumented migrants
and now, on the pretext of protecting federal property in Portland,
its paramilitaries appear to be intimidating lawful protesters in a
bid to score electoral points for the president. That is anyway how
it looks todhs’s founding secretary, Tom Ridge, a former Republi-
can governor of Pennsylvania. Its mission, he said this week, is not
“to be the president’s personal militia”.
That is not a warning to take lightly. The risks of a mishap are
obvious. The dhsoperatives are untrained for civil policing, ag-
gressive and their presence has already made a fraught situation
worse. Portland was seeing a hundred or so nightly protesters two
weeks ago and is now seeing thousands. Mr Trump is meanwhile
raising the prospect of more federal interventions, for example in
Albuquerque and Chicago, to support local crime-fighting.Moms’ the word
Mr Ridge’s is not the only pushback, however. Mark Esper, the sec-
retary of defence, has expressed concern about the military ap-
pearance of the dhsshock troops. Most important, the swollen
crowds in Portland are still mostly peaceful—in part thanks to the
addition of a throng of self-declared “Moms”, mostly first-time ac-
tivists, who wear yellow t-shirts and have declared it their mission
to protect the protesters. So long as that remains the case, it may
prove hard for Mr Trump to escalate the situation even further.
It is also unclear that it would be in his interests to do so. By giv-
ing conservative outlets a distraction from the coronavirus, and so
ginning up his base, he has achieved his primary objective. And it
is not obvious that by stoking more violence in more cities he
would expand his support. Most Americans support the protests.
Most also consider him largely responsible for the disorderly state
of the country—so would logically blame him if it worsens.
This is the fundamental problem with Mr Trump’s dividing
line. He has set a minority of Americans against the majority. It
does not look like a tenable frontier. 7Lexington Trouble in Trumplandia
The president’s growing authoritarianism is a sign of weakness not strength