President Trump Sends Federal Agents to Cities Facing Violence

Federal officers walk through tear gas while dispersing a crowd of about a thousand people during a protest at Mark O. Hatfield U.S. Courthouse on July 21, 2020 in Portland, Oregon.
Nathan Howard/Getty Images

President Trump Sends Federal Agents to Cities Facing Violence

Rioting in America’s cities is moving the nation toward civil war.

The city of Portland, Oregon, has suffered nightly riots for two months. These riots are allegedly over the murder of George Floyd, a black man who died on May 25 after a Minneapolis police officer held him down with a knee on the neck. The officer has been arrested and charged with third-degree murder, but the riots continue. After they caused $23 million in damages, President Donald Trump decided enough was enough. He sent in federal agents from the United States Marshals Service and the Department of Homeland Security.

Videos shared on social media show these federal officers making arrests and using tear gas to disperse protesters. This has prompted local government officials to decry excessive use of force by federal police. The mayor of Portland accused federal officers of abusive tactics against demonstrators and renewed his call for the federal officers to leave his city.

“They are sharply escalating the situation,” Mayor Ted Wheeler told cnn on July 19. “Their presence here is actually leading to more violence and more vandalism.”

Some conservatives, such as Fox News judicial analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano and Sen. Rand Paul, have condemned the deployment of federal agents to Portland as an unconstitutional move. Yet Article ii, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution imposes a duty on the president to execute federal law. The rioters in Portland set fire to a federal courthouse and are violating the rights of U.S. citizens. So President Trump has sent officers to protect federal property and execute laws that Congress has enacted to address violent crime.

“Enforcing federal law is an independent obligation of the chief executive,” explained Andrew McCarthy in a Fox News opinion piece. “Consequently, the president and the Justice Department never have to wait for a state to ask for federal intervention. Federal law enforcement agencies may and routinely do take investigative and enforcement action within the territorial jurisdiction of the states. They need not provide notice to, much less a request for permission from, the state government and its police agencies.”

On July 21, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany told reporters that the Homeland Security Act of 2002 gives President Trump the authority to send agents to cities that do not want them—if federal buildings are under threat. The same day, President Trump ordered 175 agents of Homeland Security Investigations to Chicago to deal with the crime spike there, even though Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot does not want the help.

And federal agents may soon be deployed to Baltimore, Detroit, New York City, Philadelphia and Oakland as well. “I’m gonna do something, that I can tell you,” the president told reporters on July 20. “Because we are not gonna let New York and Chicago and Philadelphia and Detroit and Baltimore, and all of these—Oakland is a mess—we’re not gonna let this happen in our country. All run by liberal Democrats.”

President Trump has declared himself a “law and order” president, and many Americans take comfort in his pledges to stop the rioting.

Democratic Party governors, mayors and police chiefs have allowed rioters to loot and burn for weeks without stopping them. And now Democratic politicians like Rep. Don Beyer and Sen. Richard Blumenthal have accused President Trump of behaving like a dictator for attempting to enforce federal law. It almost seems like they are glad rioting has gotten so bad that they can criticize President Trump for sending in federal forces.

In 2017, one of the most influential newspapers in Iran published an interview with Moscow-based political analyst Andrew Korybko. The Oriental Review translated it into English.

When the interviewer asked about the likelihood of a civil war in the United States, Korybko answered: “When ‘Antifa’ is heralded as ‘heroes’ despite their wanton destruction and actual fascist-like violent intolerance for any dissenting views, this lends ‘legitimacy’ to their tactics and ‘normalizes’ them, essentially turning far-left street destabilizations into an accepted part of life for the elite because of their weaponized instrumentalization in intimidating the vast majority of Trump’s non-racist, non-fascist base. In turn, this can only provoke a defensive reaction from these people, which spikes the chances of left-right clashes becoming as common in the future in America’s cities as gangland shootings are today. [T]he reason why the ‘deep state’ and Soros-affiliated alt-left groups want to spark such pronounced disorder and chaos in the U.S. is to fuel a color revolution, which would then rapidly descend into an unconventional war of urban terrorism and political killings, all with the intent of driving Trump to become the ‘fascist dictator’ that they fear-mongered he’d become, so as to have a basis for pushing through impeachment proceedings against him should racial minorities be killed if he implements limited martial law in response.”

In other words, Korybko predicted the radical left would use the killing of a minority to stir up riots in America. And he predicted that Democrats would accuse the president of being a dictator when he sent in federal forces to put down the riots. Almost every aspect of his prediction has come true. The radical left used the killing of George Floyd to stir up protests in over 2,000 cities and towns. Now that President Trump has sent federal agents to restore order in two of those cities, they condemn him as a dictator who wants to implement martial law. If they can bait him into actually declaring martial law in a U.S. city, they might just get the “unconventional war of urban terrorism and political killings” they need to force President Trump out of office.

But Korybko was not the first person to warn that the radical left was stirring up violence in America. During the civil rights movement in the 1960s, renowned educator Herbert W. Armstrong wrote from a unique perspective—neither white nor black, Republican nor Democratic, but based on the Holy Bible’s eternal truths. He taught the way to true peace and correctly identified the problems plaguing race relations. He also understood what the Bible prophesied for the near future. Basing his predictions on these prophecies, he wrote in the October 1963 Plain Truth, “Make no mistake! This is no light matter to pass over casually! Race war is coming! Racial tensions, passions and hatreds are being deliberately stirred by organized planning. It will explode into mass violence that will stagger the imagination! It will be whipped into an accelerating crescendo until human blood runs like rivers!”

His warning highlighted the fact that racial violence in America is not happening because of an innate hatred between races. It is being stirred up by politicians, many of whom are trying to scare people into voting for them. In the 1960s, this tactic spiraled out of control as hundreds of people took to the streets to riot. And it is about to spiral out of control again; only this time the death toll will be several orders of magnitude higher.

In The United States and Britain in Prophecy, Mr. Armstrong proved that the biblical book of Isaiah is primarily a book of prophecy about end-time Israel (mainly the United States and Britain). Isaiah 1:7 states: “Your country is desolate, your cities are burned with fire: your land, strangers devour it in your presence, and it is desolate, as overthrown by strangers.”

This verse is about a time when “strangers,” or non-Israelites, burn down the cities of the land. The racial rhetoric being hurled by radical politicians is stirring up negative emotions and anger. And it is forcing those who want peace in the land to take more and more draconian steps to maintain this peace. The nation stands on the cusp of civil war, but only God, who prophesied this war in the first place, can solve this conflict. And He says that He is allowing it to happen because His people have forgotten Him. America’s problems are spiritual and require spiritual solutions.

To learn more about these spiritual solutions, please read Great Again, by Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry. It reveals the real reason why America is falling fast, and it shows how God will restore America to its greatest glory ever!