Dangled by right-wing media, Portland protests prove too tempting for the president to ignore.
Compounding matters is the fact that the idea of a supposed godless communist queer anarchist wasteland makes for a powerful tool in a media ecosystem drawn to money and attention. The rightward realm of that ecosystem is multivariate—consisting of not just the big guns like Fox News, but YouTube streamers, podcasters, and local TV operators like Sinclair Broadcast Group. When the narrative line gets muddled, “Portland” remains a kind of greatest hit, sure to attract eyeballs and garner attention.
To the extent this is the case, Ellis says, the effort to prove that the president’s account of Portland is factually incorrect is simply the wrong road to go down, just as monotonous discussions of fake news and alternative facts during the first Trump administration never got to the matter at hand.
“It doesn’t matter,” Ellis says. “It’s never mattered. What matters is the feeling of the truth of one’s experience.” Trump’s invocation of Portland is not about facts, he adds, but about reopening the wound. “When they hear that word”—Portland—“it brings up the fantasies, I think, of what one can do about it, what should happen to Portland.”
As it happens, Trump was discussing exactly this question in early September after, he recalled at the time, he’d seen a segment on TV that struck him. Trump hadn’t been aware, he said, that Portland remained such a terrible place; it had not “been on my list” before he watched television the previous night and he learned of the “paid terrorists” and agitators, the people “throwing smoke bombs” into stores.
“When we go there, if we go to Portland, we’re going to wipe them out,” Trump said. “They’re going to be gone.”
As the state argued in its lawsuit several weeks later, the previous night’s Fox News programming featured a “misleading” segment on the ICE facility in Portland that mixed in old footage from the protests that rocked the city years ago. To those who dislike the president, the detail is a basis to mock a vision of a man who is in essence a Fox News grandpa with a minute attention span who can’t be bothered to read briefings.
In reality, of course, Trump is not merely this man. He has not just a huge megaphone, but a massive apparatus of state power that surrounds him. Trump and his advisers have been looking for revenge since the assassination of Charlie Kirk. The administration has identified “anti-capitalism,” “anti-Christianity,” and “extremism on migration, race and gender” among the views tied to “domestic terrorist” networks. And right-wing media influencers have fixated on the sometimes disruptive exponents of such views at Portland’s ICE facility.
What has been happening there really? Some neighbors have indeed been deeply irritated by the noise. (One sued the city; the case was dismissed.) A handful of arrests have occurred. A photographer who has been on the scene on and off since June described the cadence of the place: the legal observers in their green hats documenting who is going in and out of the building, the eclectic mix of protesters, from the impassioned regulars, who seem to find community via the act of showing their disgust with ICE, to the so-called normies who show up en masse when the news cycle features some Trump provocation.
The crowd ebbs and flows in this way. But certain rhythms are “as stylized as a minuet,” the frequent attendee says. Evening descends. Federal law enforcement stands guard as sentries above. Protesters gather around the ICE building’s driveway. Sometimes they block a vehicle attempting to leave—or sometimes not. Either way, the agents above might fire down some nonlethal munitions. Perhaps, at the ground level, a phalanx of muscled federal agents rushes out in their riot gear, ready to tangle. Other times, not much happens at all.
In reality, the state argues, most of the protesting is perfectly lawful activity protected by the First Amendment, and a military presence is likely to make the situation more volatile, not less. “History shows that surging federal officials to Portland in response to protests shifts the temperature of those protests up, not down,” it argues in court.
Trump did not dispel this concern Tuesday, when he mused to military leaders that U.S. cities would be good training grounds for the troops. The risk that tensions could escalate is real. “It can get very messy very fast,” says David Janovsky of the Project on Government Oversight.
Still, he adds, any troops in Portland would be bound by a venerable law restricting actions the military may take on U.S. soil. If and when they arrive, the Oregon National Guard members, who are Oregonians themselves, may end up simply standing around federal buildings as objects to be photographed and filmed and yelled at and saluted—or functioning, as they have at times in Washington, D.C., another city that Trump has targeted for improvement, as a high-priced and heavily scrutinized litter patrol.
