Quite a lot happened over the weekend in Portland, Oregon. I’ll likely have a few posts and TPM Reader accounts to share with you over the course of the day. But first a bit of overview. I’m no expert on Portland. And I’d want ask TPM Readers in the city and region to keep sending me their accounts to help me and our team deepen our understanding of the situation and on-going developments.

The following gives, I believe, a good overview of the basic dynamics of what’s happening and the latest events.

It remains important to understand that quite apart from all the Trump shenanigans, there really is an issue in Portland. There have been on-going protests in the city since the nationwide protests starting in late May. But as the protests have dissipated nationwide they’ve continued, albeit in smaller numbers, in Portland. As the protests in Portland have gotten smaller they’ve also become more militant. There’s a subset of the protestors who have repeatedly over the last six weeks resorted to low level violence (throwing objects at police), minor vandalism and even arson, all focused on this one federal court house complex.

Congress is back in session and if lawmakers are able to band together to pass some sort of COVID-19 relief package in coming weeks, it might be the last major piece of legislation we see before the 2020 election.

Which means: things could get ridiculous. There’s too much at risk to expect any different.

Here are a couple more articles worth your time to read if you’re trying to make sense of the federal deployment in Portland. One is from The Nation and details a memo from Customs and Border Protection detailing the operation and how to discuss it with the public. The other is from the Times and provides an overview and range of details about the operation. (A bigfoot news organization can break facts free.) The upshot is that we should see this deployment in Portland and other cities as a continuation of the incident in Lafayette Park more than six weeks ago.

It seems increasingly clear that President Trump is trying to use the most politicized and violent agencies of federal law enforcement to provoke confrontations in American cities to push his ‘law and order’ campaign message. Zoë Richards gave us an overview this morning of what we know so far.

There are on-going protests in Portland focused especially around the Mark O. Hatfield Federal Courthouse and a faction of people committing low-level acts of vandalism tied to those protests. Local police say they are trying to separate the two groups. Tim Dickinson has a deep dive here in Rolling Stone on how this is proving difficult for a number of reasons, not least of which is deep-seated suspicion of the city police force in what is after all a very progressive city.

You have likely seen the growing clinical evidence that COVID is not only a respiratory disease but frequently strikes at the brain and nervous system. A group of new studies out of Spain provide more detailed evidence. Our Spanish correspondent TPM Reader SH sent me this article in El Pais (English language version). The headline is that over half of COVID patients in Spain developed neurological problems of one sort of another.

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Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s remarks about human rights yesterday are among the most disturbing utterances I’ve heard come out of this administration thus far.

You saw Gov. Kemp’s (R-GA) order prohibiting cities and counties in Georgia from requiring people to wear masks. Look at this chart – apologies in advance that it’s a bit messy.

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Let me direct your attention to this very important photo:

Congratulations to Dr Fauci on his @InStyle cover???? pic.twitter.com/eaoFzMf8Hx

— Priyanka Aribindi (@priaribi) July 16, 2020

As was reported yesterday, the White House has taken the collection of COVID data out of the hands of the CDC and given it over to a private medical data company in Pittsburgh. On its face the company doesn’t seem obviously scammy. It’s not some fly-by-night set up by Brad Parscale’s uncle. So we don’t know quite what the angle to this is, not the specifics. My best guess is that it is simply to maintain a tighter hold on information and keep it out of the hands of the CDC, which even under its stalwartly Trumpian current leadership has shown some recent signs of bucking the President’s demands for COVID denial and no-holds-barred school reopenings.

What we can say more definitively is that at the moment the full weight of the federal government appears harnessed toward covering up and denying the bad news about the resurgent epidemic and force-marching the economy and the nation’s schools into a dead cat bounce that will salvage the President’s flagging reelection prospects.