Bluesky

Donald Trump wants the world to think that Portland is a veritable hell-on-earth—so scary and out of control that the National Guard needs to step in and bring peace.

On Wednesday, Trump told reporters, “The amazing thing is, you look at Portland and you see fires all over the place. You see fights, and I mean just violence. It’s just so crazy.” The president went on to compare Portland to a postapocalyptic movie that features “bombed out cities.” He added, “I don’t know what could be worse than Portland. You don’t even have sewers anymore. They don’t even put glass up. They put plywood on their windows. But most of the retailers have left.”

Needless to say, these are all ridiculous lies. The thankless task of correcting Trump has been left to journalists, local officials in Oregon, and even a Trump-appointed federal judge. But many residents in Portland have taken a more creative approach to combating Trump’s dishonesty.

Trump is a sinister buffoon, a menacing clown. His prevarications about Portland are motivated by political malice but also show his characteristic detachment from reality. Perhaps deciding that it’s best to fight fire with fire, Portlanders have deployed a more joyful form of protest: wearing animal costumes while dancing in the streets in front of Trump’s heavily armed ICE troops. The protests have the dual effect of refuting Trump’s fearmongering while also showing that no one is intimidated by him. They are a way of countering Trump’s nasty clowning with giddy clowning.

Both responses —fact-checking and satire—are necessary. The fact-checking won’t convince any MAGA cultist, but it’s still important, in the face of authoritarian deception, to keep as close a record of history as possible. On Wednesday, The New York Times reported that documents from the Federal Protective Services, the agency that monitors the safety of government buildings, showed that Trump’s core claims about Portland were untrue. According to these documents, in the two days before September 27, when Trump described Portland as “war ravaged,” the Federal Protective Services characterized protests as “low energy.” Far from being an apocalyptic hellscape, police reports described the protests outside of an ICE building as “uneventful.”

According to the Times, “Internal reports from the week before Mr. Trump ordered troops into Portland show that, by and large, the officers observed displays of civil disobedience, including protesters standing in front of vehicles on the road, playing loud music and ‘flipping a bird,’ and an older woman using chalk to write on a wall.”

Loud music, graffiti written with chalk, and a bird flip are hardly grounds for sending in the military.

Local officials have rightly called out Trump’s fabulations. On Wednesday, Portland Mayor Keith Wilson said, “Portland continues to manage public safety professionally and responsibly, irrespective of the claims of out-of-state social media influencers.” Oregon Governor Tina Kotek said she supported Wilson’s efforts to “to hold the line in response to the Trump administration’s lies and aggressive tactics.” Last Saturday, US District Judge Karin Immergut, a Trump appointee, blocked his deployment of National Guard troops to Portland and declared that the president’s comments about the city were “untethered to the facts.”