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Trump Troops ‘Deliberately Attacking Peaceful Protesters’ in US Cities, Senator Says
"The goal is to generate riots to justify the expansion of authoritarian measures and to strengthen the case for the troop deployments," said Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley.
Oct 06, 2025
A US senator is warning that acts of unprovoked violence against protesters from troops deployed to American cities by President Donald Trump are part of a "deliberate" strategy to provoke backlash and justify further crackdowns on civil liberties.
"Trump's troops are deliberately attacking peaceful protesters to incite violence," said Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), who has watched as the city of Portland in his home state has been swarmed by federal police in recent days as part of an effort by the Trump administration to crack down on protests at Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention centers.
"The goal is to generate riots to justify the expansion of authoritarian measures and to strengthen the case for the troop deployments," Merkley continued. "Let me be emphatically clear: There is no 'invasion' or 'rebellion' that justifies the federalization of the National Guard."
"Unlike former deployments in support of citizens' rights like attending school—this is about attacking citizens' right to peacefully protest," he said. "Our republic is in big trouble."
Last week, Trump ordered Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to “provide all necessary troops” to Portland, which he described as "war-ravaged" and "under siege from attack by Antifa, and other domestic terrorists." Trump authorized the military to use "full force, if necessary.”
Portland residents and police have found Trump's description of their city laughable. As Portland police official Craig Dobson testified last week, "For the most part, nightly ICE-Facility protests since July 18, 2025, have been limited to fewer than thirty participants. The protests have been largely sedate during this time."
On Saturday, Trump made the similarly fanciful claim that "Portland is burning to the ground" at the hands of "paid insurrectionists," and said he was deploying 200 Oregon National Guard troops to the city to patrol the protests.
In a ruling Saturday night, a federal judge agreed that Trump's descriptions of Portland were "untethered to facts," ruling that the protests outside ICE facilities there did not meet the high legal standard for Trump to deploy the National Guard.
As The Oregonian pointed out, his description of Saturday's protests "contrasted sharply with scenes unfolding simultaneously outside the city's ICE facility and ignored decisions by the federal government to promote and, in fact, create images of disorder around the ICE building." The report continued:
At protests on Saturday, it was federal law enforcement agents who escalated tensions in South Portland, according to Portland residents, reporters on the ground and videos on social media.
Hundreds of demonstrators gathered at the ICE facility on Saturday afternoon to protest immigration enforcement and Trump’s planned deployment of Oregon National Guard troops to monitor the Portland protests. They heckled agents, shouted and carried signs.
They also formed a line in front of the building on a public sidewalk, so every time a car left the building’s garage, dozens of federal agents walked out of the building and moved protesters away from the driveway.
But by mid-afternoon, federal agents began using chemical crowd control on the protesters, pointing less-lethal guns that sprayed pepper balls into the crowd and throwing tear gas canisters.
Merkley highlighted one particularly egregious case in which a 19-year-old protester, identified as Leilani, was shown arguing with a federal police officer in riot gear.
(Video: The Oregonian)
After being ordered to move away from the building to allow a car to exit the garage, The Oregonian reports that "she complied but was hurling curse words and insults at the two officers in front of her when a third agent wearing a gas mask approached her. Within 10 seconds, the officer directed a canister at the 19-year-old’s face and doused her with chemical spray."
Other similar cases were documented at protests over the past month in which federal police have responded with violence to protesters who posed no clear threat.
Another video from Portland Friday night shows federal officers pushing protesters who blocked the building's driveway into an intersection before hitting them with volleys of tear gas, smoke, and pepper balls.
Troy Brynelson, a reporter on the scene from Oregon Public Broadcasting, said: "You can see what almost looked like fireworks, those are flash bangs from federal officers. It wasn't clear what the crowd did to provoke this. OPB reporters didn't observe anything before the officers started using the gas."
(Video: Oregon Public Media)
"You're gassing an entire neighborhood for nothing!" one protester is heard shouting.
In another video from Friday, an agent is shown shooting pepper spray into the air intake vent of an inflatable frog costume worn by a protester, which activist Joe Gallina pointed out was "a major health risk." A video from the next night shows the same frog alongside dozens of other protesters standing across from a line of riot police several yards away. As they heckled police, they were blasted with another round of pepper balls.
These sorts of scenes have played out in other places where Trump has launched militarized crackdowns. Last week, in Chicago, a man on a bicycle was chased by several federal agents after shouting, "Fuck Trump" to them at an intersection.
At protests outside Chicago's Broadview facility last weekend, peaceful protesters and journalists were hit with pepper spray and rubber bullets, while one reporter was briefly taken into custody. Another journalist for Chicago's CBS News affiliate was blasted with a pepper ball as she was driving with the window down outside the facility on Sunday, with no protesters in the area.
On Monday, attorneys representing journalists and protesters who were attacked filed a lawsuit alleging that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was committing the "illegal and brutal suppression of First Amendment rights."
"Never in modern times has the federal government undermined bedrock constitutional protections on this scale, or usurped states’ police power by directing federal agents to carry out an illegal mission against the people for the government’s own benefit,” the complaint states.
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What To Do About 3 Authoritarian Trump Admin Memos? Keep Protesting
The admin definitely doesn’t like anyone using constitutionally-protected rights of freedom of speech and assembly to protest in defense of several increasingly oppressed “out groups” and democracy in general. So keep at it.
Oct 04, 2025
President Donald Trump is obviously unhappy with the resistance from a broad and growing protest movement against much of his administration’s agenda. Which goes at least part of the way toward explaining why he and his allies have just passed an executive order, a national security presidential memo, and an attorney general’s order aimed squarely at suppressing the free speech of a very poorly defined host of millions of people in the United States.
First, on September 22, Trump issued the executive order “DESIGNATING ANTIFA AS A DOMESTIC TERRORIST ORGANIZATION.” According to National Public Radio, while federal law does allow the State Department to designate “foreign terrorist organizations,” no “similar list or process exists for domestic groups.”
The fact that “antifa”—short for anti-fascism—is a political stance against the takeover of government by oligarchs and their servants, not a literal organization, clearly matters not at all to Trump given that he tried and failed to do the same thing in 2020 in the wake of the second wave of Black Lives Matter protests. Nor does the fact that there are anti-fascists across the political spectrum, since conservatives can also be anti-fascist … not just liberals and leftists.
Second, on September 25, Trump issued “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” the seventh national security presidential memo of his current term.
My suggestion to people using their First Amendment rights? Keep it up! Once again, it’s a “use ‘em or lose ‘em” period in American history.
The difference between an executive order and a national security presidential memo is that while the former are edicts to federal agencies on how to interpret and carry out federal law that also can govern the operation of the executive branch, the latter have heretofore been more narrowly focused on national security and foreign and military policy issues. Problematically, though executive orders have to be published in the Federal Register, national security presidential memos can be classified and kept out of the public eye. Making it especially interesting that Trump published his latest such memo in the light of day.
NSPM-7, as it is commonly known (not to be confused with the NSPM-7 of Trump’s first term) can be looked at in many different ways, but I agree with other critics that call it a direct attack on the First Amendment. The document takes wild swings at anyone with “anti-fascist,” “anti-capitalist,” “anti-Christian,” and “anti-American” beliefs as it attempts to draw lines between Charlie Kirk’s evidently ideologically confused assassin Tyler Robinson, the imaginary antifa-as-organization, and a wide array of individuals and nonprofit groups—then orders “National Joint Terrorism Task Force and its local offices (collectively, ‘JTTFs’),” the Attorney General, the Secretary of the Treasury, and the Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service to go get those supposed evildoers.
Possibly to give Trump’s executive order against “antifa” more legal standing (and probably to forestall any potential blocking action from the Supreme Court), NSPM-7 indicates that “the Attorney General may recommend that any group or entity whose members are engaged in activities meeting the definition of ‘domestic terrorism’ in 18 U.S.C. 2331(5) merits designation as a ‘domestic terrorist organization.’” And then states that the “Attorney General and the Secretary of Homeland Security shall designate domestic terrorism a national priority area and develop appropriate grant programs to allocate funding for law enforcement partners to detect, prevent, and protect against threats arising from this area.”
Third, the icing on this disturbing cake came on September 29, when Attorney General Pam Bondi issued her own memorandum “ENDING POLITICAL VIOLENCE AGAINST ICE”—which once again tries to connect another individual with muddled-to-nonexistent political motivations, in this case Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Dallas shooter Joshua Jahn, with protests against ICE in Chicago, Illinois and Portland, Oregon and tries to style it as some kind of grand “well-organized” and “well-funded” conspiracy. Rather than a bunch of grassroots activists who think it’s undemocratic to send heavily-armed, masked ICE agents into American cities to terrorize both documented and undocumented immigrants (plus a growing number of citizens) and sometimes follow that up with potentially illegal (and unequivocally reactionary) military occupations.
The AG’s memo then directs “the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the United States Marshals Service, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to immediately direct all necessary officers and agents to defend ICE facilities and personnel whenever and wherever they come under attack, including in Portland and Chicago.” And orders them “to suppress all unlawful rioting and arrest every person suspected of threatening or assaulting a federal law enforcement officer or interfering with federal law enforcement operations.”
It goes on with more related orders from there.
The upshot of all these Trump administration edicts is that the federal powers-that-be don’t like being called fascists. And they definitely don’t like anyone using constitutionally-protected rights of freedom of speech and assembly to protest in defense of several increasingly oppressed “out groups” and democracy in general. Any more than they enjoy journalists like my colleagues and I here at the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism using our right to freedom of the press to report and comment on such political developments. As witnessed by the vicious ICE attack on three fellow reporters in New York City this week—demonstrating just how much the feds care about that at present.
My suggestion to people using their First Amendment rights? Keep it up! Once again, it’s a “use ‘em or lose ‘em” period in American history. A situation that Native Americans, immigrants, and Black, Latino/a, Asian, feminist, GLBT, and left-wing Americans have, tragically, all faced before. And have beaten back time and time again through concerted political activism of the type that is so exercising the federal government of today.
Whether you consider Trump and company to be authoritarians or literally fascists, our basic democratic rights are plainly under threat from this administration. If that doesn’t ring true to you, read through the three memos in question; fact check their many unsubstantiated assertions, propagandistic misuse of the English language, and highly questionable reinterpretations of longstanding legal and regulatory practices; and then see how you feel about it.
If you agree with the interpretation of commentators like me, look for individuals and organizations peacefully and nonviolently protesting government overreach and outright abuse of power and join them.
The free press, BINJ included, will continue to cover the ideas, opinions, and actions of the growing popular movement for civil liberties and basic justice until our political establishment arrives at some new and more democratic equilibrium.
This editorial was originally produced for HorizonMass, the independent, student-driven news outlet of the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism, and is syndicated by BINJ’s MassWire news service.
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Trump's Latest Big Lie: 'Radical Left Violence'
The GOP is using this lie to censor speech, ban comedians and commentators, prosecute people who’ve spoken out against Trump, violently attack protesters, and to justify the monopolization of our media by right-wing billionaires.
Sep 30, 2025
US President Donald Trump’s assault on our elections system and the GOP’s successful 2024 effort to deny at least (according to official US government statistics) 4.2 million Americans their right to vote (which gave Trump the election and Republicans the House and Senate) was based on his 2020 Big Lie that our elections were corrupted by “millions” of “illegals” voting, along with “massive” voter fraud.
They’re continuing that Big Lie (which the GOP first embraced in the 1960s with Operation Eagle Eye that intimidated mostly Hispanic and Native American voters) going forward, with some observers expecting as many as 10 million Americans being denied their vote in 2028.
But corrupting and stealing elections was just their first effort, starting back in the 1960s, the one that brought them to power. Now, with that power, they’re doing their best to gut the basic guardrails of our 250-year-old constitutional system with brand-new Big Lies.
The newest Big Lie for 2025 is that America is racked by “radical left violence” leading to the disintegration of law and order in our cities and the spread of terror among politicians and anybody else who dares speak out about the issues of our day.
Republican Big Lies have caused enormous damage, from FDR’s era through Joe McCarthy’s witch hunts to George W. Bush lying us into two illegal and unnecessary wars to today.
They’re using this to censor speech, ban comedians and commentators, prosecute people (including lifelong Republicans like Comey, Krebs, and Taylor) who’ve spoken out against Trump, violently attack protesters, and to justify the monopolization of our media by right-wing billionaires.
Most recently, when a Trump-supporting (Trump sign in his yard, Trump “Make Liberals Cry Again” T-shirt) straight, white, self-proclaimed Christian who thought Mormons were the anti-Christ murdered worshipers in a Latter Day Saints church in Michigan, Trump’s first response was to claim it was “anti-Christian violence.”
Instead, it appears this former Marine war vet with PTSD thought he was defending Christianity. But instead of asking if he was “radicalized” by preachers like Trump’s guy “Pastor” Robert Jeffress (who goes on and on about how the LDS Church is a “false religion”) or the algorithms on YouTube, Facebook, or X, right-wing media is today filled with rants about “attacks on Christianity,” blaming “the left” even for this attack.
It echo’s the GOP’s efforts to portray the two people who tried to assassinate Trump, Charlie Kirk’s killer, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) shooter last week, and other political violence as originating from the “radical left.”
Which is really and truly another Big Lie.
First, there’s basically no “radical left” in America anymore. The anti-capitalist pro-violence subset of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) that I knew back in the 1960s when I was part of Michigan State University’s SDS are long gone and well discredited (and a few imprisoned).
Second, the “far left” folks who are still around aren’t violent, by and large. Lefties are more interested in protecting Social Security, getting a national healthcare system into place, raising taxes on the morbidly rich, and getting guns off the streets instead of pointing them at people. The last high-profile “leftie” shooter was the mentally ill guy who took a shot at Republican Congressman Steve Scalise back in 2017.
Even the FBI and the Department of Justice themselves had acknowledged the fact that the vast majority of politically-inspired violence in America was coming from the right, at least until puppy-killer Kristi Noem or one of her lickspittles (or her boyfriend) ordered the reports removed from the government websites.
The independent and nonpartisan Center for Strategic and International Studies analyzed 893 terrorist plots that took place between 1994 and 2020. Their report concluded:
Right-wing attacks and plots account for the majority of all terrorist incidents in the United States since 1994.
But don’t expect to hear that from anybody in the administration or on Fox “News” or other right-wing media outlets. Instead, they’re using “far left violence” as their excuse to dismantle our rights, impose soldiers on cities run by Democrats, and pour your tax dollars into extreme policing and militarization of our society.
This isn’t the first time the GOP has used the Big Lie technique to sway public opinion in a way that demonizes Democrats. On September 23, 1944 President Franklin D. Roosevelt addressed the Teamsters and said:
“he opposition in this year has already imported into this campaign a very interesting thing, because it is foreign. They have imported the propaganda technique invented by the dictators abroad.
Remember, a number of years ago, there was a book, Mein Kampf, written by Hitler himself. The technique was all set out in Hitler’s book—and it was copied by the aggressors of Italy and Japan.
According to that technique, you should never use a small falsehood; always a big one, for its very fantastic nature would make it more credible, if only you keep repeating it over and over and over again.
He then did what Democrats—and what honest news media we have left—need to be doing today: He called out their lies and exposed their technique:
Well, let us take some simple illustrations that come to mind. For example, although I rubbed my eyes when I read it, we have been told that it was not a Republican depression, but a Democratic depression from which this Nation was saved in 1933.
That this Administration—this one today—is responsible for all the suffering and misery that the history books and the American people have always thought had been brought about during the twelve ill-fated years when the Republican party was in power.
He followed that with a list of four other Republican lies, including their assertion that he’d tried to get America into WWII, that he was secretly planning to prevent GIs from leaving the service when the war was over, and even a lie about his dog (Fala, after which his speech was named in the press). He summed it up:
Well, I think we all recognize the old technique. The people of this country know the past too well to be deceived into forgetting. Too much is at stake to forget.
They’re still doing it. Which raises the question: What will be Trump’s and the GOP’s next Big Lie?
They’ve already tried convincing Americans that:
- Immigrants are a major source of crime (when crime rates regarding immigrants are about half that of natural born Americans);
- Democrats are the party of rapists and pedophiles (ahem…Trump’s “best friend” Jeffrey Epstein, E Jean Carroll);
- Democrats want to defund the police (when they’re fighting for more cops in virtually every city in America);
- Are in favor of abortion “after birth”;
- That former President Joe Biden wanted to ban gas stoves and gasoline cars;
- Biden wanted to “ban meat";
- Democrats plan on huge tax increases on the middle class;
- "Antifa” (“Anti-Fascist”) is a domestic terrorist organization;
- Democrats are “deranged pieces of shit"; and
- Liberals want to “force taxpayers to fund transgender surgeries for minors’ nationwide” and, yesterday, Trump said Democrats want to “reopen the wall.“
This after promoting the Big Lie that got three police officers killed and 140 hospitalized on January 6 about the 2020 election was “stolen” and their Big Lie about immigrants voting that resulted in over 4 million citizens being denied their right to vote last year.
Republican Big Lies have caused enormous damage, from FDR’s era through Joe McCarthy’s witch hunts to George W. Bush lying us into two illegal and unnecessary wars to today.
It’s way past time that Democrats and the media start calling these Big Lies exactly what they are, and pointing out that the strategy originated in the modern era with Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Hitler.
Enough is enough.
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