In his nomination acceptance speech Thursday night, Donald Trump gave our city a special shout-out that challenges the old saying that there’s no such thing as bad publicity; forecasting the national doom sure to follow the election of Joe Biden, he warned that the “Radical Left” “will make every city look like Democrat-run Portland, Oregon.” Trump, of course, was not alluding to the illicit deployment of federal forces to the city in an effort to “quell” Black Lives Matter protests — deployments that resulted in widespread civil rights violations and serious injuries to peaceful protestors, and which are now the subject of lawsuits against the Department of Homeland Security and the Trump administration. Instead, his appeal was to the propaganda effort of right-wing media and the administration itself to transform the junior league antifa fringes of the Portland protestors — adept deployers of fireworks and water bottles — into the most profound danger to American society since forever and ever.
Donald Trump’s inclusion of Portland in his acceptance speech is both sinister and absurd — sinister for the belief that he has the resources to conjure into at least media reality an utterly distorted vision of this city, and absurd for these very same easily disproven distortions.
To hang your re-election on maintaining the fiction that Portland is a city threatened by antifa armies is deeply weird — some might even say, Portland weird. Props to The Oregonian’s Lizzy Acker for a rapid and tart response to the president’s remarks; in dedicated service to the public good, she enumerates the various warning signs that your city is becoming the next Portland (the presence of flowers and multiple rivers are two key ways to tell it’s too late to escape the transformation of your town into a communistic hellhole).
Contrary to Donald Trump’s desire to impose his self-serving visions on the rest of us, we are all free to draw our own conclusions about the nature of our current reality, and to vote accordingly. Portlanders, and in fact most Americans, understand that they are under assault — not from yellow-shirted momtifa or protesting veterans who get their bones broken by police, but by a pandemic that the president’s incompetence has allowed to kill more than 180,000 of our fellow Americans; by a white nationalist movement headquartered in the White House; and by an accompanying movement willing to embrace authoritarianism and discard democracy if that means keeping non-whites out of power. All the propaganda in the world can’t hide a triple plague.