Trump's Troops Return to a City That Moved On: Dispatch From Portland

Five years after the city’s fiery 2020 protests, Portland is mostly calm. That hasn’t stopped Trump from reviving old battles, fueled by false memories and made-for-TV outrage.

The last 40 times or so that I was at the federal courthouse in Portland, Oregon, some portion of it was being set on fire, pummeled with debris and homemade explosive devices, or both. It was also surrounded by a chain-link fence, which hundreds of people would nightly try to shake off its moorings. This was because President Donald Trump had, in the summer of 2020, federal troops occupying the Mark O. Hatfield United States Courthouse for more than a month.

Five years later, all is quiet on the morning of October 3, with fewer than a dozen protesters outside the newly sleek courthouse, holding small pre-made signs that read, "GUARD: GO HOME!"

Now, Trump is once again sending federal troops to Portland—and locals are still objecting. But whereas Portland's 2020 summer of rage, which I covered extensively for Reason, was in many ways a lawless place—including the murder in cold blood of a Trump supporter by an antifa activist (himself shot dead by federal officers five days later)—the pretext this time is thin to nonexistent. A few dozen people have been protesting nightly outside the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility two miles south of downtown—so uneventfully that one reporter (not naming names) nearly resorted to playing Wordle on her phone.

This is not to say there have not been fracases; there have been rocks and sticks thrown at ICE agents and the shining of lasers into officers' eyes. According to recent reporting in The Oregonian, there have been 29 arrests during ICE protests this year, 18 of them in June. Still, most nights see a few dozen protesters at most. Comparing this to the 2,000-plus nightly protesters in 2020 is not just apples to oranges; it's apples to an apple-flavored sugar crystal on an Apple Jack.

This clearly doesn't matter to Trump, who has shown little to no interest in what's actually happening, instead relying on historical memory of the city's fiery days to animate the proposition that "war-ravaged" Portland must be made to heel.

"Unless they're playing false tapes, this looks like World War II. Your place is burning down," Trump claims to have told Oregon's Democratic Gov. Tina Kotek when she asked him not to federalize and deploy 200 members of the Oregon National Guard.

It would be easy to find rough images from 2020 and pretend they were taken yesterday. But there are also people willing to provide current images and distort them for dramatic effect. Fox News correspondent Bill Melugin was on the ground last week and zoomed in on a protester lighting a small American flag on fire, the implication being: anarchy reigns in Portland. Melugin went on to show independent journalist and reliable Trump-stan Nick Sortor grabbing that burning flag from the protester and stomping out the flames.

The Portland police arrested Sortor, he claimed for no reason (one might surmise for grabbing someone's property from them), which was enough for Attorney General Pam Bondi, who somehow immediately knew about Sortor's arrest, to demand an investigation of the Portland Police Bureau. Dutiful Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon got right on that, posting on X, "Portland: it's FO time. Buckle up." Sortor also posted that Bondi "personally called me to deliver this news." Maybe she made him some milk and cookies, too?

Back to the courthouse, where the Oregon Department of Justice asked federal Judge Karin Immergut (who, strangely, I attended kindergarten with but have not seen since) to temporarily block Trump from federalizing and deploying Oregon National Guard troops. The courtroom and an overflow room were filled with hundreds of spectators as the state argued that sending troops to Oregon violated both the Tenth Amendment and the Posse Comitatus Act, which forbids members of the military from conducting domestic law enforcement. 

Trump's lawyers claimed that the response was "a tailored federalization that is proportionate to the threat here in the Portland area." Each side debated the meaning of "rebellion" and whether it mattered if it were already happening or if "a danger of a rebellion is enough" to merit sending troops. The state provided data that showed the Portland police did not need assistance and that ICE agents had not requested back-up. Trump's lawyers mentioned the tragic recent shooting at the ICE field office in Dallas, Texas, and wondered why Oregon was uppity about 200 Guards; it's not like when Trump sent 4,000 Guards to Los Angeles.

"This case involves one of the most dramatic infringements on state sovereignty in Oregon's history. And in our view," the state concluded, "it is based largely on a fictional narrative." Immergut granted the state's motion for a temporary restraining order for 14 days. 

On Sunday morning, Trump ordered the deployment of the California National Guard to Portland, which California Gov. Gavin Newsom condemned and threatened legal action against. When Trump announced he would also deploy the Texas National Guard, Immergut had had enough, calling the move a "direct contravention" of her ruling and broadening her order to forbid "the relocation, federalization or deployment of members of the National Guard of any state or the District of Columbia in the state of Oregon." 

I left the courthouse on Friday thinking about the distinction between fictional narratives and reality, about how far some journalists, including those I'd previously respected, seemed willing to go to distort the narrative, and how eager they were to actively cheer for a side.

"Who are you?" a woman outside the courthouse asked. She'd seen my press pass and wanted to know if I knew what the courthouse looked like five years ago (boy, did I). She talked about how nobody wanted a repeat of 2020, and told me her concern was federal forces returning, which is why she was out there holding a "GUARD: GO HOME!" sign.

She was nevertheless optimistic—cheerful even—and asked if I'd heard about the emergency Naked Bike Ride Portlanders were planning as a form of protest. 

"It's nice now, isn't it?" she said of the courthouse. Maybe it was latent PTSD on my part, but I thought I heard a note of wistfulness—as if she were willing it to stay that way.