The president’s pretend enemy

There is no crisis of unrest in Portland, Oregon.

One way I know this to be true is that President Trump — who is insistent that Portland faces just such a crisis — doesn’t offer any evidence of it. At some point last month, he may have seen old footage from 2020 on Fox News and decided to declare that the city needed the intervention of federal or federalized troops. (We don’t know that he was watching Fox but he did offer the governor the bemused observation that what she was telling him about Portland didn’t match what he saw on TV.)

On Sept. 27, he declared that the city was “War ravaged,” demanding military presence. A few days later, he claimed that “conditions continue to deteriorate into lawless mayhem,” with “ANTIFA and the Radical Left Anarchists … viciously attacking our Federal Law Enforcement Officers.” He insisted that “[w]e will never allow MOBS to take over our streets, burn our Cities, or destroy America.” That same day, Oct. 1, he insisted that “Portland is a NEVER-ENDING DISASTER. Many people have been badly hurt, and even killed.”

But he hasn’t presented any videos or photos showing this mayhem and murder. No social media clips of rioters running through the streets. No citizens cowering in terror. His social media guru Dan Scavino did post a video showing protesters outside an ICE facility in the city clashing with police and ICE officers. Other than that? You just have to take Trump’s word for it. As when he claimed during a recent White House event that the city “[doesn’t] even have stores anymore. They don’t even put glass up. They put plywood on their windows.”

No wonder a federal judge (appointed by Trump in his first term) described the president’s push to deploy National Guard troops to the city as being “simply untethered to the facts.”

“You look at what’s happened with Portland over the years; it’s a burning hellhole,” he said this week, disparaging that judge (who had “lost her way,” he said). “There’s a huge problem in Portland. I’ll tell you what the problem is: Crime.”

So let’s look at crime data. The Portland Police Bureau reports that reported incidents of vandalism in the city were down in August — the most recent month for which data is available — relative to the recent average for that month. Assaults were up slightly and homicides down, while reported incidents of arson were up. But bear in mind that there aren’t that many incidents of arson in the city; there were 41 in August 2024 and 46 in August 2025.

This approach of claiming that soldiers are needed to quell unrest while not showing any evidence for that need does not seem to be convincing many Americans. Polling conducted by Ipsos for Reuters found that most Americans, including most Republicans, think that Trump should only deploy troops to counter external threats. A plurality thought that Trump should not be allowed to send troops over the objection of state governors.

One group that Trump has convinced, though, is Republican legislators. The president recently signed a memorandum centered on “countering domestic terrorism and organized political violence.” He invoked “riots in … Portland” among evidence of what he described as “sophisticated, organized campaigns of targeted intimidation, radicalization, threats, and violence designed to silence opposing speech, limit political activity, change or direct policy outcomes, and prevent the functioning of a democratic society.”

The memo claimed that “domestic terrorists” were waging an assault on the country “under the umbrella of self-described ‘anti-fascism.’ “

“Common threads animating this violent conduct include anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”

Again, this is predicated, in part, on the fiction about Portland that Donald Trump has created. Leaders in his party have nonetheless embraced it.

On Friday morning, a number of senior elected Republicans claimed that the upcoming “No Kings” protest in D.C. was an arm of this anti-American hostility. It was a “hate-America rally” involving “antifa people,” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said on Fox News. House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-Minn.) said this “hate-America rally” was being held by the “terrorist wing of their party.” On Newsmax, Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) described it as a “Soros paid-for protest for his professional protesters,” indicating that the National Guard would be needed.

“Hopefully it’ll be peaceful,” he added. “I doubt it.”

There is a throughline here, and it isn’t that the president is taking necessary steps to keep Americans safe. It is that Trump frames dissent — at Portland’s ICE facility, in the streets of Washington, even simply in the abstract — as a threat that demands a governmental and/or military response. He and his allies have gone from describing Portland’s anti-ICE protests (which now regularly feature people wearing inflatable animal costumes) as a danger demanding armed response to preemptively framing an anti-Trump protest as the work of people the president has defined as domestic terrorists.

For his allies and many of his supporters, it seems, his word on the subject is more than enough.

Photo: Trump at Fort Liberty in June. (White House/Flickr)