This past weekend was a typical one in this urban American milieu: There was a street “faire” with local vendors, face-painting, live music, and Bard-inspired story telling; a free performance of classical music; the standing up of a special fall produce market featuring local fresh apples and pears, just now ripe; a design month exhibition staged at various locations across the city; a grand reopening of an independent science fiction bookstore; a show bringing together more than 100 local artists to display their work; and of course a lot more in the way of concerts, readings, political gatherings, and so on.
What’s the locale? Here, in my city of Washington, D.C.? Maybe in a nice safe, “real American” place like Tulsa or Boise? Or some Trumpy retirement village like, well, The Villages, Florida?
No, no, and no. This was in war-ravaged Portland, Oregon. And the fact that these events somehow miraculously managed to go off without dozens of people being assaulted by those ISIS-like zealots of antifa tells us what a sick, disgusting pack of lies Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem, and the rest of them have been peddling about the city.
The weekend prior, Trump had infamously and preposterously said that Portland was “burning down to the ground.” The only real mayhem in Portland, though, is that which Trump and his hench people have created. Their twisted tale has been amplified by Fox News and other propaganda outlets and fed to a gullible army of people across the country for the purpose of manufacturing an excuse to create a quasi-police state.
A Washington Post headline over the weekend made a useful and long-overdue point. It read: “Inside the online battles streaming from a single block in Portland.” The story itself elaborated: “Much of the footage from Portland doesn’t originate from traditional TV networks but from a phalanx of activist-journalists, on both the right and the left, filming on their phones. Despite the protests largely being confined to one city block, it has resulted in a cascade of videos that has bolstered the conservative depiction of Portland as a city under siege by left-wing terrorists — video the White House has cited to justify and build support for deploying the National Guard to cities across the country.”
I don’t know Portland well, but I’ve visited there twice, the most recent visit just a few months ago. I stayed in a hotel along the Willamette River maybe three-quarters of a mile south of downtown. On a tasty Saturday afternoon, I walked along the river through a lovely riverfront park, cut over to Chapman Square, walked up past the Pioneer Place shopping center, and then zipped a few blocks north to the amazing Powell’s bookstore. I ate lunch in a charming little middle Eastern restaurant not far from Powell’s, walked part of the way back, got a little tired, and ordered up an Uber.
What did I see? Not very much. Downtown was pretty deserted. To the extent that there was activity, mostly around Powell’s, it was very urban-normal: groups of Millennial friends lingering, a couple of street guitarists busking. Did I ever sense the vaguest whiff of trouble? Not in the slightest. There was a small pro-Palestinian demonstration going on in Chapman Square. I took the heedless risk of walking within about 10 feet of these unwashed ruffians, but lo and behold no one so much as sneezed on me.
Oh, and that one block to which The Washington Post refers? Well, according to Google maps, the Portland ICE facility is a little more than a mile south of my hotel—which, remember, was south of downtown to begin with—and it’s wedged between the river and Interstate 5. Pretty cut off, in other words. There’s a small residential neighborhood there, but for the vast majority of the people, you have to want to go there—and go out of your way to do so. To put it in, say, New York terms, its location is roughly equivalent to a place like the East 20s over by FDR Drive: A place where, yes, a few people live, but no one else ever goes. I lived in New York for 20 years and don’t think I ever went there once.
Portland, like any city, has its problems. A woman was found dead in a parked car over the weekend, the apparent victim of a shooting. However, homicides are down by more than half for the first half of 2025 compared to 2024. They’ve dropped from 35 to 17. That’s in a city of 635,000 people. The city has a homicide rate of 10.75 per 100,000 people, which ranks it 69th nationally. That’s less than Chattanooga, Tennessee, and Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and about the same as Oklahoma City.
But Portland is a useful symbol to our American neofascists in a way those cities are not. It is, to be sure, pretty left-wing—another activity this past weekend involved Gaza food drives, and the weekend culminated in an “emergency” Naked Bike Ride, a summer ritual that organizers called for Sunday to protest the attempt to bring the National Guard into the city.
The city did have those troubles with antifa protestors in the wake of the George Floyd murder, when a number of protests did reach the downtown core and did devolve into violence. That was five years ago now, but Trump and Miller want us to think it never ended and is worse today and has engulfed the entire city.
Why would a president and his top aides lie so nakedly about an American city? For one thing, because they hate it and what it represents—heterodoxy, counter-culturism, the questioning of authority. But mostly, because they want to make this nation a fearful one. They want people, in blue places especially, to be afraid.
By my reckoning, they are actually attempting to instill two distinct types of fear. They want liberals and immigrants and people of color and trans people especially to live in literal fear of the state. And they want their people to live in fear of liberals and immigrants and people of color and trans people. They want half the country to hate the other half. It’s a morally unconscionable thing for a presidential administration to do.
I used the term “quasi-police state” above. When I think of police states, I think of places like North Korea and Turkmenistan. We’re a long way from those. But Trump’s impulses and instincts are all running in that direction. That’s why he lies the way he does about Portland. And while I think our laws and traditions are strong enough that he and Miller will never be able to execute the worst of their plans, with this Supreme Court, who knows? I can’t believe I’m writing this about the United States of America.
