In his quest for reelection, President Donald Trump has gone hunting for demons. Federal law enforcement officers entered cities including Portland, Oregon; Chicago; Kansas City, Missouri; and Albuquerque at Trumps direction, clearly meant to gin up clashes and disorder between federal officers and the groups disfavored by his core supporters in pursuit of viral online content .

Trump officials deployed Border Patrol officers to suppress a small group of anarchists in Portland inflicting a federal courthouse with graffiti and minor property damage. When officers started snatching people off the streets in unmarked minivans , it provoked a larger protest reaction and a further increase in federal deployment. Some of those officers are now scheduled to leave Portland at the urging of state and local elected officials who called them an occupying force. The Department of Justice plans to surge federal officers into Black and Latino neighborhoods in Chicago, Kansas City, Albuquerque, Milwaukee, Detroit and Cleveland to provoke scenes of racial conflict. Trump suggested he could send up to 75,000 federal officers into American cities this summer.

These conflicts are the reason Trumps most fervent supporters elected him. These voters, most of them white, wanted him to erase the legacy of the first Black president and wage war against the unfavored groups haunting their minds. With the economy cratering, unemployment skyrocketing and an uncontrolled pandemic sweeping the nation, Trumps last hope for reelection is fomenting disorder and division this time, using the power of the presidency.

White Americans have long defined themselves as threatened by racial, ethnic and political minority groups that they believe often based on conspiracy theories will change their way of life. Americans who think their freedom and right to hold on to power are at risk seek to strike down those they think are coming to take it.

American history is normally seen as a history of freedom rather than suppression, political scientist Michael Rogin wrote in his 1987 book, Ronald Reagan, The Movie, but that American racial history suggests that the suppression of people of color outside the normal political system has supported the freedom of the people within it.

This same logic animates Trumps deployment of federal forces to create scenes of disorder involving racial and political groups disfavored by his supporters the most fervent of whom are the white evangelical Protestants whose own political power and freedoms are tied to the suppression of disfavored groups.

Trump proclaimed as much during his Fourth of July speech in front of the Mount Rushmore monument in South Dakota. There he declared a war on a left-wing cultural revolution, emanating from cities that are run by liberal Democrats, that is, designed to overthrow the American Revolution.

Trumps War is waged in defense without apology, he said, of the traditional American mythological history of a people who pursued our Manifest Destiny across the ocean to create the most just and exceptional nation ever to exist on Earth.

This country will be everything that our citizens have hoped for, for so many years, Trump declared, and that our enemies fear.