Trump’s Portland Troops

Today Antifa. Tomorrow any opposition. Military power as political weapon.

A president put soldiers on city streets to solve a political problem and the bill will come due in court.

On September 27 2025 Donald Trump told his Secretary of War Pete Hegseth to send troops to Portland with full force if necessary. Armored vehicles were already rolling the night before. The Washington Post traced the call and its scope.

Days earlier the White House stamped Antifa as domestic terrorists in the Federal Register. The legal footing is flimsy and the politics are obvious. Attach the T word to a loose protest scene and First Amendment rights start to look like loopholes to be closed. Add the Dallas ICE shooting and the assassination of Charlie Kirk even though neither ties to Portland and you have a portable crisis that justifies soldiers wherever the cameras point.

→ The designation sits here.

There is a reason administrations that conduct real domestic deployments use the Insurrection Act and eat the political cost. The Posse Comitatus Act makes using the Army or Air Force to execute the laws a crime unless Congress has opened a door.

You do not fix that with euphemisms. Either you have statutory authority or you do not.

A federal judge just ripped the curtain. In Newsom v. Trump a court held that sending federalized Guard and active duty Marines to handle traffic control crowd control and street patrols in Los Angeles violated Posse Comitatus. The opinion said the administration acted willfully and contradicted its own training rules. Oregon now has a roadmap signed by Article Three. The California attorney general posted the ruling.

→ Read it yourself.

So why not invoke the Insurrection Act. Because that is a flare gun. It declares civil authority has failed and puts the president on the hook for the mess that follows. The play here is ambiguity. Call it protection of federal property. Recycle the federal facilities script. Pretend crowd control is not law enforcement.

Do not take the bait.

We have seen this script. In 2020 Operation Diligent Valor in Portland escalated nightly clashes put unmarked agents on streets and produced the footage the White House wanted. Chaos on one side and authority on the other and a story that sells.

The facts in 2025 are thinner. Protests are smaller often dozens at most and away from downtown. Governor Tina Kotek and Mayor Keith Wilson say the city is calm.

Outcomes on the ground are secondary. Optics in the feed are the prize. Display dominance. Flex jurisdiction. Put a blue city in its place. The muscle is the same across states while the wrapper changes. Where governors are Democrats Washington asserts supremacy and invites a court fight. Where governors are Republicans the feds coordinate a Guard presence and normalize it through consent.

Let me steelman the counter. Federal property is federal responsibility. In 2020 the courthouse took real damage and 40 U S C section 1315 authorizes protection. If Portland leaders will not police the perimeter the feds must.

Fair in theory.

But 2025 is not 2020 and we now have a federal ruling that says patrols perimeters and crowd control by troops run straight into Posse Comitatus. Call it protection all day. If you detain people off federal lines you are doing law enforcement.

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What would prove me wrong:

• A public threat brief that names Portland targets and timelines tied to real people not hashtags

• A formal Insurrection Act proclamation with narrow findings limited geography and a short clock

• Strict confinement of troops to clearly marked federal property with no crowd control and no off property detentions

• Independent after action reports showing measurable crime reduction attributable to military presence rather than state and local policing

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If the White House had the law it would cite the law. If it had the facts it would show them. Instead it revived a nineteenth century cabinet title issued a made for TV command and rolled cameras on a city its own leaders call quiet.

Portland is the warning label. Ignore it and the next president of any party with any grievance will decide that city streets make good stages and the military makes compelling theater.