For the moment, we will ignore the fact that large swathes of Portland are trash-ridden homeless encampments filled with dying drug addicts, or that businesses are fleeing the city center because they cannot guarantee the safety of their employees.
Those are, for the most part, local problems that require local solutions, you could argue. Or not, given that Portland actually matters as a semi-major city.
Let’s just stick to the recent argument made by the Portland Police Chief Bob Day, who is telling the world that Donald Trump shouldn’t deploy the National Guard to his city because the current insurrection against the federal government is limited to “one city block.”
If it’s one city block, then it shouldn’t require much in the way of police resources to make an arrest for every single crime committed on that block
But of course @portlandpolice aren’t doing that. Are they cowards? Are they complicit? Are they lying? Does it matter which? https://t.co/UZhrcKLaT9
— Will Chamberlain (@willchamberlain) September 30, 2025
Portland is a haven for violent Antifa terrorists, and has been for a very long time. And, over the years, the result has been a drastic decline in the quality of life for Portland residents, a troubling rise in political violence, and a hollowing out of the city center. There remain beautiful and quite livable quarters of the city, and I am reliably informed by Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times that the Pinot Noir remains excellent, but objectively speaking, the city is a dumpster fire.
Trump is deploying the National Guard not because that is the case–he would probably not have spent time on cleaning it up, but for the fact that, pretty much every night for months, violent protesters have been attacking federal officers and a federal ICE facility, and the Portland Police have done little to stop it.
Not that liberals would admit this unless they were talking about January 6th, but this is very illegal, and amounts to much more than the misdemeanor trespass that the FBI spent four years devoting 1/5th of their resources to tracking down and prosecuting.
Chief Day’s comments have more than a bit of the Martha Raddatz odor:
NEW: JD Vance torches ABC’s Martha Raddatz after she minimized the illegal immigrant gang takeovers because “only a handful” of apartments complexes have been seized.
Raddatz: “The incidents were limited to a handful of apartment complexes…”
Vance: “Do you hear yourself? Only… pic.twitter.com/TPXdNTD5UH
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) October 13, 2024
Raddatz: “The incidents were limited to a handful of apartment complexes…”
Vance: “Do you hear yourself? Only a handful of apartment complexes were taken over by Venezuelan gangs and Donald Trump is the problem and not Kamala Harris’ open border?”
Day may think that the Antifa activity being limited to attacking federal officers and facilities makes it all right–it’s only one city block!–but that merely shows that his understanding of his job is very flawed.
It also begs the question: if the problem is only one city block, why is it so difficult to control the area, as is the job of the Portland Police Department?
Far be it from me to suggest that the Portland City Fathers are just fine with attacking federal officers and that they are quite tolerant of the right kind of domestic terrorists, but somebody more cynical than I might come to that conclusion.
Perhaps Chief Day would be inclined to police his entire city, and not just the parts that the liberals in charge of it want him to. After all, the police, as with the military, are supposed to stay out of politics. I can’t say what is going on in his head, and neither can Trump.
But Trump, as the Chief Executive, has a responsibility to defend federal officers and federal facilities, and local officials’ tolerance of terrorists does not oblige him to defer to their wishes.
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