When the President called Portland, Oregon “war ravaged,” those in the reality-based community considered it a joke. Not a funny joke, since it was the pretext for invasion by the federal government (perhaps by elite military units ”practicing” urban warfare in blue cities). And not an unfamiliar joke, since local plutocrats have been promoting a similar albeit less hyperbolic story for years now (more about that below).

Not a new or funny joke, then, but a joke, and many responded in kind: even the international press carried stories of social media posts showing the peacefully war-ravaged farmer’s market, pleasantly war-ravaged riverfront park, cozily war-ravaged coffee bars. Posters shared images of the purportedly dangerous (small, peaceful) protests at the Portland ICE facility, including someone in a chicken suit with a sign saying, “Portland Will Outlive Him.”

The humor is more recently superseded by the violence of federal agents, but persists in the protest tactics of folks in inflatable costumes, including a frog who endured federal cops directing pepper spray into the costume’s ventilation intake, but was back the next day, undeterred, still waggling mockingly at the ICE agents. More inflatable animals have joined the frog, an emergency world naked bike ride has been called, and there are plans for a knit-in.

The humor is important. For one thing, the Feds are spoiling for a fight to excuse their violence, and dancing animals are hard to spin as a national threat. For another, everyone knows fascists can’t take a joke, so there’s value in deflating their self-seriousness.

The sunny, charming, Portland-is-just-fine memes are funny because the notion of the city as war-ravaged is so absurd. But asserting the city is just fine is a bit like when Hillary Clinton insisted America was already great. Democrats and liberals trapped in the mirror stage of politics fail to address the real problems, and leave the field clear for fascist approaches.

For instance, housing. Well over half a million people in the US are unhoused, which we might all agree is Not Great. Meanwhile, 16 million homes sit vacant, so the problem is not lack of supply, and pace Ezra Klein and the GOP, deregulation will not help.

Nationwide, as in Portland, half of all renters spend more than 30% of their income on housing. Also not great. Rents nationwide have increased 22% year over year, and problems include declining real wages, speculative investments in real estate, lack of government support, and, in general, billionaire control, as detailed in a 2024 report from the Institute for Policy Studies and Popular Democracy.

Right-wing talking points would have you think the problem is individual laziness or addiction or mental illness, and that punitive, carceral responses are in order. But as with the Hoovervilles of the great depression, the problems are structural rather than individual, and the trauma of houselessness only adds to the burdens of illness. In Multnomah County, for instance, ten years ago 57% of those without housing had a disabling condition, but the pandemic and the continuing difficulty of accessing health care in the US has increased illness and disability across all populations. According to Portland Street Medicine, by 2022, over 80% of unsheltered houseless people were living with a disability. Arresting sick people and forcing them into congregate shelters (where, as in other detention facilities, illness spreads rampantly) will not provide them with housing.

Scientific studies demonstrate that the solution to houselessness is to provide housing. Cities that address houselessness with housing first see a decline in unhoused residents; cities that focus on shelter rather than housing see the problem increase. But of course scientific study is in disfavor, not only with the reigning national administration but also with the preceding and local neoliberal regimes.

Given the facts about the national housing crisis, The New York Times should have no business being snarky about Portland’s City Council exploring social housing–except, of course, that the business of the Times is not facts but business, and they are happy to try to use Portland against Zohran Mamdani (whose name appears in the article URL). But let’s consider what Trump and the Times and their ilk get wrong about Portland, what’s left out of most accounts of the city’s purported leftishness, and why Portland is among MAGA’s favorite targets.

Initial responses to Trump’s assertions that Portland is in flames offered plenty of ironies. Notably, the most prominent rejoinder that things are fine, really, came from the Portland Metro Chamber of Commerce, the business lobby that has spent years promoting the erroneous notion that Portland is caught in an “urban doom loop.” In their (well-funded though not well-founded) arguments, we need to cut taxes some more and fund the police some more and roll back any mildly redistributive, regulatory, or otherwise progressive measures put in place by massive grassroots efforts in recent years.

Regarding housing, the Metro Chamber (aka the Portland Business Association or PBA) and its allies and front groups have for years been complaining that some of our neighbors make the city unlivable, and have been trying to support their complaints with the force of law and the power of policing.

Long before July, when the reigning national executive issued his order to vilify and round up the unhoused; before August, when federal agents began the process of bulldozing the campsites of unhoused people in Washington DC; before September, when ICE began targeting unhoused people for abductions in Chicago; way back in 2022, Portland politicians were already advocating using the National Guard to force unhoused people into internment camps.

The current Portland Mayor is ready to follow through on this plan, though without invoking the National Guard. Portland law allows police to fine or arrest people camping in public only if no alternative shelter exists. Thus, increasing shelter availability will allow more draconian responses, as proposed by Trump. The Mayor is at pains to try to distinguish his approach from the President’s, but as local journalists and advocates have reported, “Federal actions mirror city plan.”

That New York Times piece has more wrong with it than I can detail here, but what it does and doesn’t include is revealing. The out-of-town reporter who dropped in to Portland didn’t talk with anyone unhoused or their advocates, but did sip champagne with a local billionaire and offer comments about the desires of unnamed “residents” (possibly those at the billionaire bash), rather than looking to local reporting.

Certainly many other errors and omissions in that Times article line up with Metro Chamber talking points. To clarify: Portland’s taxes are not especially high and lowering them won’t fix the problems downtown. Oregon’s brief decriminalization of drugs did not cause an increase in overdoses, and was not repealed because it failed but because it was scapegoated for other problems. Those two million dollars “reallocated” from police to parks merely reduced the size of the increase in police funding proposed by the mayor–funding that has nonetheless steadily increased over the years, and constitutes a majority of the city budget’s general (discretionary) fund.

The federal government’s decision to investigate the Portland Police is another point of grim hilarity. In 2012 the Department of Justice sued the City of Portland for the Police Department’s pattern of unconstitutional use of force. For much of the time since, the Portland Police Bureau has operated under a Consent Decree because of its continuing propensity to brutalize and kill residents. (Also the subject of multiple award-winning films including Alien Boy: The Life and Death of James Chasse and Arresting Power: Resisting Police Violence in Portland, Oregon).

The city has had to spend millions on civil claims to people injured by police (by one account, over $9 million in settlements since 2020, though much higher by other reckonings that include costs of legal services for such cases).

Moreover, though the current DoJ is unhappy that the PPB arrested one of their allies, PPB (like police elsewhere in the USA) have a history of collaborating with alt-right militants and making deals not to arrest them despite grounds to do so.

But even the Portland Police have noted that recent violence at the local ICE facility has been instigated not by protesters but by federal agents. Violence–including tear gas, pepper balls, and flash-bangs–ramped up after the Trump-appointed Judge Immergut granted a temporary stay prohibiting the federal government from overriding state lawmakers to send National Guard troops to the city, noting that “The President’s determination was simply untethered to the facts.” As one protester noted, “If there’s a war zone in Portland, it’s because of” the Federal officers.

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s visit to Portland left her as untethered as her boss, doubling–or quadrupling–down on plans to annihilate “Antifa,” represented in this case by “approximately a dozen photographers and protesters on a street corner, including a man in a chicken costume.” Protesters did make dog jokes, throw a Subway sandwich, and blare Yakety Sax at her, though, so one can imagine how those in the nation’s largest law enforcement agency (larger than most militaries) might find that scary.

The ICE facility is owned by a private developer, Stuart Lindquist (Lindquist Development Company, Inc), who leased it to the Department of Homeland Security in 2010. (In 2018 Lindquist admitted to striking an ICE protester with his Mercedes.) Protests there over recent months have been part of a campaign calling on the city to close the facility by revoking its permit. In September, the City issued a land use violation order, threatening to fine the landlord over zoning violations, including holding detainees longer than allowed under the conditional land use approval issued in 2011. Ten days later, Trump called the city “war ravaged” and called for troops to use “Full Force” in the city.

As has been widely noted, his vision of Portland appears to have been shaped by a mistaken belief that footage shown recently on Fox news, but taken in 2020, represented current conditions. A further irony is that it included footage showing a 2020 protester being assaulted by heavily armed federal police, sent in by Trump in round one of his assault on the city.

In the 2020 protests calling for cuts to police funding and an end to police brutality, Portland police had already been saturating neighborhoods with tear gas and firing rubber bullets against protesters. But the addition of Federal agents, as you might expect, did not reduce violence. They tear-gassed the mayor, beat and pepper sprayed a Navy veteran in uniform, shot another protester in the head, critically and permanently injuring him, and grabbed people off the street into unmarked vans.

Portland is a sanctuary city in a sanctuary state, predominantly Democratic, with a tradition of protest (under Bush the first it was called Little Beirut). But it is also a predominantly white city in a predominantly white state, marked by a history of legal segregation, sundown towns, redlining, and white supremacist activity.

As described in the work of Walidah Imarisha or in James Ridgeway’s Blood in the Face (book and movie), white supremacists have long tried to make the Pacific Northwest a white homeland. But their attempts have always been contested. The Southern Poverty Law Center’s successful civil prosecution of the White Aryan Resistance (WAR) for the 1988 killing of Mulugeta Seraw led to the dissolution of WAR and a diminution of white fascist violence in Portland. But after the 2016 elections, right wing militants ramped up their visits to the city.

CounterPunch readers know, although the current DoJ has tried to hide the information, that the vast majority of what’s categorized as extremist violence in the US has come from the right wing. But fascist street violence and antifascist defense led in the 1990s to what might be the first and perhaps only case in which an antifascist killed a fascist in street violence, when Jon Bair shot Erik Banks. The possible second case came in 2020, when Michael Reinoehl was accused of killing Patriot Prayer member Aaron Danielson. Reinoehl was never tried or convicted, because a multi-agency team of federal agents barraged him with 40 bullets as he sat in his car, much to Trump’s delight.

Some of this history may be behind the particular fascination with Portland Trump shares with the far right, though the current story is of course larger than one city. Portland has been a focus of organizing by fascist forces and of vibrant resistance by anti-fascists. It has also been a terrain of struggle for grassroots control in which the frequent complicity of purported liberals with state power has not served us well. Still, for the moment, facing a shared enemy embodied in unpaid and undertrained federal troops, Portland seems to be offering a united front behind the army of frogs.

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