Last weekend in Portland was beautiful. Unclouded sky, clear views of Mt. Hood and St. Helens, sunny but not uncomfortably so. Everyone seems to be out and about: at playgrounds and splash pads, taking in the view from one of the bridges, peddling their bikes along the river, and standing in a line down the block to get a matcha drink. After Labor Day, Portland knows its beautiful days are numbered, so making the most of them in whatever way you can is always on the agenda. So you can imagine the collective confusion that followed Donald Trump’s Sept. 26 announcement, via a Truth Social post, that he was “directing Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, to provide all necessary Troops to protect war-ravaged Portland, and any of our ICE Facilities under siege from attack by Antifa, and other domestic terrorists,” authorizing “full force, if necessary,” signing off with his customary, “Thank you for your attention to this matter!”
This is a city that issues Defcon 1-level warnings when there’s a 70% chance of snow; if Portland were at war, a lot fewer people would be lollygagging around the farmers markets.
To be clear: Portland is a big city with big-city problems. It’s a blue dot in a red state. The red state itself was founded by white people, for white people and only white people. So, besides having the same problems as many other American cities — affordable housing, not enough jobs, car-sized potholes — this one also harbors more than 150 years’ worth of white supremacy’s impacts. Many people who move here don’t know Oregon’s history, and most of the people posting memes about the kombucha and emotional-support llamas made Portland look idyllic. It is not. That doesn’t mean there was any justification for Donald Trump to bring martial law here.
This is a city that issues Defcon 1-level warnings when there’s a 70% chance of snow; if Portland were at war, a lot fewer people would be lollygagging around the farmers markets.
There have been protests at the ICE facility in South Portland for about 115 days, ever since the president announced his plans to crack down on illegal immigration. For the most part, the protests have been relatively low-key, their tactics geared toward making ICE officers’ lives more difficult: barricading the entry gate; blocking vehicles from leaving the facility, attempting to remove electronic key-card readers, and disrupting internet service. There have been fewer than 30 arrests made at these protests, a handful of attacks involving sticks and rocks, and a dwindling number of protesters at the facility itself since the largest of the recent protests, in June.
Local politicians held a press conference to urge Portlanders not to take the bait. To wit: “This is the ‘don’t take the bait’ press conference,’ emphasized Senator Jeff Merkley. “President Trump has one goal. He wants to induce a violent exchange. Let us not grant him that wish.” Oregon Governor Tina Kotek spoke by phone with President Trump, in an exchange that by all accounts went smoothly: “My conversation with President Trump was trying to understand his rationale, and I believe it is based on information that is not accurate today,” Kotek said, adding that the president told her they should “keep talking.”
“Information that is not accurate” is a stunning understatement that, again, seems like it should be bigger news: The source of his invasion plan was a September 4 Fox News segment about the anti-ICE protests in Portland. It was edited to present footage from 2020 — when violent protests were happening — without making that clear. It’s already a concern that the nation’s leader gets much of his own news from the television. But beyond that, it is very worrying evidence of the extent to which the president of the United States is being given free rein to run a country at the whims of his own biases, beefs, and desires, and those of a propaganda network.
On Sunday, Kotek received a memo from Hegseth stating that the Trump administration was taking command of 200 Oregon National Guard troops for a period of 60 days, meaning that they would no longer answer to Kotek. The memo stated that this measure was meant to “temporarily protect ICE and other United States Government personnel.” (In a TV show, this memo would have been followed by a smash-cut to the ICE facility, where a few dozen protestors were milling around. There were boxes of donuts. It was shaping up to be a short, uneventful protest day.
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Because, again, Portland is not at war. Portland was also not at war in the summer of 2020, when there were protests that, in a few cases, turned violent and destructive. But in 2025, Portland could not be less at war. The problem is that it’s very hard to explain this to people who have been fed a steady narrative of propaganda painting the picture of a burned-out hellscape of violent gangs terrorizing the city. I know this because, until recently, I spent my weekends working at (extremely Portland alert incoming) my boyfriend’s vermouth-and-furniture shop, which is located just across the river from downtown Portland. The neighborhood attracts a lot of tourists because it boasts an award-winning cheese shop, the biggest vintage mall in the area, and all manner of coffee roasteries. So I have talked to a lot of people who have been surprised to see that Portland is not in any visible sense of the word, at war.
They say things like, “My parents were really worried about me coming here, but it’s so nice!” and, “The city is not at all what I expected — it’s so nice!” The general niceness of Portland comes as a surprise to folks like this because we live in a world of two medias, and the one that gets more engagement online is the one that paints cities like Portland, Chicago and Los Angeles as utterly lawless places overrun by what the president terms “thugs,” “Antifa” and “radical violent leftists.” Portland has the same problems that most large cities have. But we will only be at war if Trump decides to wage war on the people of the city and no one stops him.
Portland could not be less at war. The problem is that it’s very hard to explain this to people who have been fed a steady narrative of propaganda painting the picture of a burned-out hellscape of violent gangs terrorizing the city.
This is, apparently, a big ask given that some of the country’s biggest and formerly most trusted media outlets are now manufacturing consent for invading cities that Trump is mad about for reasons that most of the time begin and end with the fact that a lot of people just don’t like him. These outlets manufacture consent for pulling brown people off the streets because they “don’t look American.” Consent for treating protestors as “bad actors” and “enemies of the state.”
And the reason he and his Secretary of War are ramping it up now is that earlier this month, the Supreme Court gave them yet another gift. Overturning an earlier decision by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals that reiterated that, yes, racial profiling is illegal, the Supreme Court rolled out a red carpet that allows the President of the United States to wage war on it “from the inside.” This decision isn’t final, but it’s a pretty clear sign that a majority of SCOTUS is telling Trump that he can invade any city he wants, racially profile as many U.S. citizens as he wants, and spill the blood of Americans in the street whenever he wants. He’s starting with Portland because he doesn’t like Portland, and he doesn’t like Portland because Portland doesn’t like him.
It would be great if anyone in the Democratic party could come right out and say it, rather than use diplomatic wording like “bad intel” to refer to a man who believes whatever Fox News and Truth Social put in front of him. It really is this simple. He said as much himself to NBC White House Correspondent Yamiche Alcindor in a phone interview on Sunday morning in which he recapped his call. Here is the quote in full:
“I spoke to the governor, and she was very nice…. but I said, ‘Well, wait a minute, am I watching things on television that are different from what’s happening? My people tell me different. They are literally attacking, and there are fires all over the place . . . it looks . . . terrible.’” This utterance should have been in 80-point type at the top of every single newspaper and news vertical that night, and on the news crawl every day since. It should have been much, much bigger news that the man with the nuclear codes said out loud that he believes whatever “his people” tell him and authorizes full force before doing even a bit of due diligence. That quote is evidence for being, at best, far too credulous, and at worst, willfully detached from reality. Given his announcement Tuesday morning of the other cities currently on his kill list, this seems like pretty important context for national media and elected Democrats to not let slip through their fingers.
It does look terrible in Portland, but not for the reasons Donald Trump thinks. A president who wages war on the states that didn’t elect him is a dangerous president. Media and the Democrats need to stop catering to his whims and stating what he wants as what he can have, because what he wants, right now and this minute, is blood in the streets.
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