President Trump has a rather transparent event on his schedule today around 3:00 p.m. ET: An address on “Operation Legend: Combating Violent Crimes in American Cities.”

Fascinating update here from TPM Reader JW on the Portland situation and the structure of the city government itself …

This pertains to your “More from Portland #2“.

The Fire Bureau will bar both Portland police officers and federal agents from using fire stations for tactical staging.

From TPM Reader AR on how Trump “decided to throw a hand grenade into my city so that he could do a test run on his reelection platform of looking tough by having federal riot police beat up my neighbors.”

I don’t have any searing insight into city government or high-level local politics as the previously published anonymous readers. Instead, I’d like to just briefly expand upon what reader NM wrote.

I’m a fairly progressive liberal. A Warren liberal, though, rather than a Bernie liberal. I work ten minutes from the Federal Courthouse. I live five minutes from the police union headquarters. If you live anywhere in inner Portland, you are effectively living “ten minutes” from everything. That’s just a byproduct of our intentionally dense city planning (stretching back decades). This proximity leads to a general awareness of most things that occurring here in any given moment.

From TPM Reader RK …

Like NM, I haven’t been to the protests (I’m a bit too old for this, having spent some of my youth canvasing for Tom Hayden on the other coast, running from John Mitchell and hanging out with the great Eqbal Ahmad [one of the Harrisburg 8]). But I have been following closely on various Twitter feeds from the marvelous journalists embedded with the resistance (Zane Sparling @PDXzane, Cory Elia @TheRealCoryElia, Everton Bailey Jr. @EvertonBailey, Donovan “It was the blurst of times” Farley @DonovanFarley, Lindsey Smith (she/her) @LindseyPSmith7, Tuck Woodstock @tuckwoodstock, Robert Evans (The Only Robert Evans) @IwriteOK . . . .). I agree with both your anonymous reader from 10 blocks out and with NM (there’s a long history of division and conflict in Portland, and the Feds have really screwed our chances for real police reform, at least in the short run). A couple of additional thoughts:

Pretty predictably the presence of federal forces in Portland and widespread news coverage of the same has triggered big increases in the size of the crowds protesting each night near the federal court house. I’ve had a hard time getting a clear read of the crowd size, other than thousands compared to hundreds or fewer little more than a week ago. But a dramatically larger group of people were out last night, with a heavy presence self-identified “moms” and “dads” joining.

The President’s former lawyer and fixer is claiming he is in the same camp as Mary Trump and John Bolton.

TPM Reader NM checks in with his take from Portland …

For what it’s worth, here’s some perspective from a non-anarchist, protest-sympathizing, typical-liberal Portlander. I get out to a protest of some sort every couple of years, but I stand with the mellow hippy contingent, and I feel liberal guilt because I’ve only been to one BLM protest since George Floyd was killed. So that should give a sense of where I’m coming from on this.

First, you need to be aware of JoAnn Hardesty, a long time police reform activist and now the first black woman to be elected to our small and very oddly constituted city council. Earlier in her term council voted down her package of mild Police reforms, but since the protests began she has started to make some progress. The unprecedented wave of awareness and support in the city may give Hardesty a unique opportunity to do amazing things to transform policing in Portland. The real possibility of meaningful change, enacted now, not punted until after the election, raises the stakes and the urgency.

This TPM Reader who we’ll keep anon even for initials gives what I think is helpful context for the larger situation in Portland …

As a resident who lives 10 blocks from the conflict zone and has long involvement with some of the actors involved I share observations regarding contextual dimensions of current turmoil:

Recent confrontations in downtown Portland and intervention by federal agents capture our attention but obscure broader, extended tensions that shape immediate developments. There have been a series of fatal encounters between Portland police and our minority communities, and these overlie an array of violent responses to people who are mentally ill. These stretch over several years so the George Floyd murder and similar events came not as shocks but as a renewed provocation. This accounts for the persistence and commitment of many Portland protestors. Ironically Portland police and demonstrators have in many respects work out informal “rules of engagement”to reduce property damage, injuries, and arrests only to have federal forces provoke renewed violence, presumably in their effort to dominate the streets.