In recent days, activists in Portland have been abducted off the streets and brutally beaten by police and military personnel. And Donald Trump is insisting he will deploy these paramilitary groups to still more cities.

For many, this brutality can conjure up images of foreign dictatorships, hellbent on suppressing any form of dissent. Yet we don’t have to look so far afield. Trump’s cops are a homegrown phenomenon, the culmination of three decades of increasingly militarized police that have made it a point to crack down on leftists — beginning with the global justice movement of the late 1990s.

A useful starting point is the 1990 creation of the 1033 Program, a Department of Defense initiative that puts surplus military equipment in the hands of state and local police departments — stuff like grenade launchers, assault rifles, bomb-detonating robots, body armor, machine guns, bomb suits, and forced-entry tools. Though the program was originally intended to fight a “drug war,” Bill Clinton expanded it in 1997 to allow “all law enforcement agencies to acquire property for . . . purposes that assist in their arrest and apprehension mission.”