Washington DC may have been packed with tens of thousands of National Guardsmen, some forced – as we learned this week – to sleep in a freezing parking garage.
But the first shots in a militant assault on the legitimacy of Joe Biden were fired thousands of miles away on the other side of the country. And from the other side of the ideological spectrum too.
The question now is what is the man whom Donald Trump once dubbed “Sleepy Joe” going to do about it?
We know his camp is a hornet’s nest of competing interests, of conflicting narratives. Some within it will no doubt counsel restraint against the Far Left forces that seek to undermine his tenure of power at the very outset of his presidency. Better to save the rhetorical fire for the bogeymen on the Right, they will argue.
Those of a more centrist bent, however, may urge the new President to get tough on the kind of disorder seen in Portland, and to do it fast.
Only time will tell which path Biden chooses, and, indeed, whether it is really him that does the choosing.
Certainly, the facts of what happened this week are chilling.
Demonstrators in Portland, Oregon, on Wednesday vandalized the state Democratic Party headquarters and a federal US Immigration and Customs Enforcement building, according to police. Four people have been charged Thursday in connection with those demonstrations.
At least four demonstrations were planned in the city, Sgt. Kevin Allen, spokesman for the Portland Police Bureau, said in a video statement early Thursday.
Two remained peaceful, but the others resulted in “property damage and arrests,” he said.
A group of about 150 people converged on the ICE building in the South Waterfront neighborhood Wednesday evening around 9 p.m., Allen said.
Some demonstrators were carrying pepper ball guns, fireworks, shields, rocks and “electronic control weapons similar to Tasers.”
In an updated statement, police said many in the crowd wore gas masks and helmets, and within a few minutes, people began tagging the ICE building with graffiti.
The graffiti included messages like, “Reunite families now” — a possible reference to the separation of migrant children from their parents. There were other messages with an anti-law enforcement sentiment, calling on the abolition of ICE with another anarchy symbol. One message read, “Kill cops!!!”
Federal officials declared it an unlawful assembly after demonstrators started throwing rocks and vandalizing the building, Allen said.
Federal law enforcement officers deployed “crowd control munitions,” Allen said, though he did not say what kind, deferring to federal officials. Portland police did not deploy CS gas (commonly referred to as tear gas), Allen added.
Allen said that police were in the surrounding neighborhood and “some arrests were made.”
The city and the ICE building have been the sites of repeated clashes between protesters and federal authorities in recent months. Police did not characterize the makeup of the groups involved in Wednesday’s protests.
The demonstration at the ICE building followed another earlier in the day, when a crowd of about 150 people gathered at Revolution Hall before marching to the Oregon state Democratic Party headquarters.
Officers on bicycles encountered the protesters in a parking lot at Revolution Hall, where “(d)ozens of people pressed in on the officers and then took one of the officers’ bicycles,” Portland Police said in a statement. More officers arrived to help and managed to get the bicycle back. The crowd blocked officers’ way as they tried to leave.