Trump renewed his calls for the National Guard to enter the city to temper increasingly violent protests, which have gone on for nearly 100 days. Wheeler has denied the federal assistance and warned them to stay out.

"He has an opportunity to uplift us and bring us together and help us move through this difficult situation in our nation's history and instead he chooses to play petty politics and divide us," the mayor said.

"The only way you will stop the violence in the high crime Democrat run cities is through strength!" Trump added.

Many conservatives blasted Wheeler for his handling of protests in the city, where the county district attorney said he would not prosecute most of those apprehended amid the unrest.

"After the rally had finished, I was saying goodbye to people. I was just looking around thinking I had better go now, and then they [the police] just grabbed me from behind.

"I was not expecting it at all. They frogmarched me - they didn't handcuff me - and told me they were arresting me for contravening the coronavirus regulations for organising a gathering of more than 30 people."

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Russia may be responsible for the deadly unrest in American cities, CNN host Dana Bash has implied during an interview with Democrats' top Russiagate figure, Adam Schiff, proving that red-baiting never goes out of vogue.

Schiff, the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, came to CNN for a round of Trump-bashing over the President's remarks on how Director of National Intelligence (DNI) John Ratcliffe "got tired of" classified information being leaked from Congress. The DNI wrote last week to the California representative and his Senate counterpart, Marco Rubio, that his office will be informing lawmakers on election security through written reports rather than in-person briefings.

During the interview Schiff took time to denounce the President for what he described as an attempt to hide "the fact that the Russians are helping Donald Trump again" and declared that US intel "belongs to the American people". With the election-meddling Ruskie bad guys introduced into the conversation, host Dana Bash mused on what other evil deeds they may be up to.

There were shooting deaths in Kenosha, Wisconsin and Portland, Oregon amid continued race protests in those cities, she said. "Do you have any reason to believe that Russia is trying to fuel some of the civil unrest in these cities via social media or other methods?" she wondered.

Schiff, who played a leading role in peddling the theory that the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian government to win the 2016 election, obliged to confirm that yes, the Russians "are once again doing their best in social media, in the overt media and other means to grow this division again."

Blaming Russia for racial problems in the US is a time-honored tradition, so the CNN-Schiff duet hardly discovered new territory there. And the fact that the collusion theory crumbled after the Robert Mueller investigation failed to find evidence of it doesn't seem to hurt his credibility with the sympathetic media.

Interestingly however CNN apparently didn't find this last part of Russia scaremongering good enough to post it on its own website, cutting the interview short.

The channel's coverage of the latest disturbances in the US has shown a lot of mental gymnastics. Last week's caption on screen described the situation in Kenosha as "fiery, but mostly peaceful protests", clashing spectacularly with the image of a reporter standing in front of burning cars and explaining how the night riots in the city differed from peaceful demonstrations during the day.

On Sunday, CNN analyst Chris Cillizza posted a piece explaining how Trump was disingenuous in calling the events in Kenosha and Portland riots rather than protests. A photo of riot police officers standing in front of a major blaze was chosen as a cover picture.

If the interview with Schiff is any indicator, people on CNN have found a way to explain away the inconvenient violence: Russia did it with memes.

Governor Kate Brown announced that she would authorize more police from several local agencies to staff protests in Portland and call for more arrests for destructive or violent crimes. The announcement came less than 24 hours after a fatal shooting during downtown demonstrations.

The six-point plan, laid out in a news release from Brown's office on Sunday evening, also included plans for several local law enforcement agencies to assist Portland Police Bureau in follow-up investigations, and it listed specific types of crimes that the district attorney's office will prosecute related to the protests.

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