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Zero response from the network’s PR team.

But as you know, we have to be invited in.I asked Fox News multiple times about claims that were made on its air and by its personalities suggesting Antifa was perhaps responsible for the mayhem at the US Capitol. And they are strong, tough, and we can solve these problems so fast.

We’ll put in 50,000, 60,000 people that really know what they are doing. “We’ll go into all the cities, any of the cities. “We want to go in and help the cities, we want to help Chicago, we want to help all of them,” Trump told Sean Hannity on Fox News recently. Meanwhile, Trump has portrayed the interventions as just an offer to re-establish order. “So while they’re wearing badges and while they’re wearing camo fatigues, they still look like militias.” “At this point, people are just looking at that and saying, this is just Patriot Prayer with a semblance of legitimacy,” Ross said. In particular, the federal officers reminded locals of the far-right militias, like Patriot Prayer, that had previously descended on the city. “All this rage bait coming out of Portland, getting right-wing audiences all hyped up and twisted out of sorts about antifa - now we’re at a turning point in the equation where the Trump administration is using the force of the government to get involved in this sort of outrage cycle.”Īlexander Reid Ross, an adjunct professor at Portland State University and the author of “Against the Fascist Creep,” added that Trump’s intercession was viewed on the ground as an escalation. The 2019 assault of conservative journalist and Quillette writer Andy Ngo introduced the Portland narrative to a wider conservative audience, said Holt. While the city’s protests had been dying down before Trump sent in federal troops, the region already had a reputation in conservative circles as a hotbed of antifa violence - primarily due to the presence of far-right militia groups protesting there over the years, and the media coverage of their subsequent clashes with left-wing protesters and antifa groups. The recent rise in protests has only given more fuel for the right to portray city leaders as complicit with antifa or unable to stand up to violence.Īnd Portland has become the perfect staging ground. “We may do something to get that whole thing cleaned up.” “We may intercede,” Trump told Fox News host Tucker Carlson in 2019. In his description of Portland and other cities, Trump is also adding to a long-running attempt to demonize American cities as lawless pits, from tweeting about “sanctuary cities” being overrun with immigrants and threatening to send undocumented migrants to San Francisco, to his claim that homelessness only started two years ago due to “liberal mayors” running these cities. He attempted to portray Seattle’s Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone - a six-block zone overtaken by anti-policing activists - as a breeding ground for mass antifa violence, only to see it dismantled without much incident by local officials. He has called the Black Lives Matter movement “a symbol of hate,” focused intensely on protesters defacing and pulling down statues and repeatedly called for the amorphous concept of “antifa” to be classified as a domestic terrorist group despite having no clear authority to do so. Over the past month, as unemployment claims rose again, new coronavirus hotspots emerged, and Biden pulled further ahead in the polls, Trump has turned to several different culture war issues to agitate his base. “Instances where we see anarchist or anti-fascist demonstrators taking to the streets to oppose what they believe to be bigoted or fascistic political movements or actors, has been spun and regurgitated to right-wing audiences as a imminent threat against any Trump supporter or conservative who loves the country.”Īnd Trump is trying to use that division to his advantage. “This kind of messaging has been going on for years, whether it was in Berkeley or in the streets of New York City,” he said. It’s the latest split-screen reality of the last four years.Īnd it’s the culmination of years of GOP narrative-building, said Jared Holt, a reporter at Right Wing Watch, a nonprofit that tracks conservative media and far-right groups. A protester flies an American flag while walking through tear gas fired by federal officers during a protest in Portland, Ore.