Ex-Republican National Committee spokesperson Tim Miller on Monday said President Donald Trump’s plan to send federal troops to Portland, Oregon, is “a little bit more ominous” than similar threats to other U.S. cities like New Orleans.
“I do wonder if they’re champing at the bit for a conflict here and maybe see Portland as an opportunity for that,” said Miller on a recent episode of the anti-Trump conservative site The Bulwark’s podcast.
Trump expanded his push to deploy federal troops to American cities over the weekend, announcing on his Truth Social platform that his administration would send “all necessary” troops to protect what he called “war ravaged” Portland and any U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities “under siege” from “domestic terrorists.”
The ICE facility in Portland has been at the center of protests against Trump’s immigration agenda.
Trump’s plan has since sparked a lawsuit from the city of Portland as well as the state of Oregon in an attempt to block the president from sending hundreds of National Guard troops to the city.
Oregon Democrats have described Trump’s plan as an “authoritarian takeover” of the city and an attempt to incite violence, with Sen. Jeff Merkley warning residents not to “take the bait.”
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Miller — while speaking with The Bulwark’s editor-at-large Bill Kristol — argued that Portland was the site of some of the “most intense skirmishes” between law enforcement and demonstrators during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests.
He later pointed to Monday morning’s edition of Politico Playbook describing the Portland plan as having the “makings of a ‘heads, I win; tails, you lose’ situation” for the administration.
“If the protests deescalate, if there’s nothing there, then Trump can say, ‘Oh, it’s another success. When we send the military in, that brings peace and quiet so we should send it to more places,’” he explained.
“If there’s an escalation of violence, then he also gets to say, ‘Oh, we need to send more troops to do this.’”
He continued, “And to me, I just thought that’s kind of an obvious point that that’s what they want, but just in a sensibly, sort of neutral reporting effort of the administration … [they’d] see it as a victory for there to be more civil unrest so they could used the military to crack down more. It’s pretty astonishing.”