Portland’s Dancing Protesters Are Showing Us How to Stand Up to Trump

Donald Trump wants the world to think that Portland is a living hell on earth, so scary and so out of control that the National Guard must step in and bring peace.

On Wednesday, Trump told reporters: “What’s amazing is you look at Portland and you see fires everywhere. You see fighting, and I mean just violence. It’s so crazy.” The president then compared Portland to a post-apocalyptic movie featuring “bombed 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 in. They put plywood on their windows. But most of the retailers are gone.”

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

Trump is a sinister buffoon, a menacing clown. His prevarication about Portland is motivated by political malice but also shows his characteristic detachment from reality. Perhaps deciding it’s best to fight fire with fire, Portland residents deployed a more joyous 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 alarmist remarks while showing that no one is intimidated by him. It’s a way of countering Trump’s ugly clowning with dizzying clowning.

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

According to The times,

Internal reports from the week before Trump sent troops to Portland show that, overall, officers observed demonstrations of civil disobedience, including demonstrators 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, chalk graffiti and a flying bird are hardly grounds for sending in the army.

Local officials have rightly denounced Trump’s fabrications. On Wednesday, Portland Mayor Keith Wilson said, “Portland continues to manage public safety professionally and responsibly, regardless of the claims of out-of-state social media influencers. » Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek said she supported Wilson’s efforts to “hold the line in response to the lies and aggressive tactics of the Trump administration.” Last Saturday, Trump-appointed U.S. District Judge Karin Immergut blocked the deployment of National Guard troops to Portland and said the president’s comments about the city were “irrelevant to the facts.”

But the political battle against Trump’s authoritarianism will not be won by fact-checking. Trump and his acolytes are accustomed to responding to facts with more lies. Right on cue, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem claimed that Wilson and Kotek were “covering up the terrorism that hits their streets.”

Trump’s lies are a political problem and require a political response. Only popular mobilization will give Trump and his allies pause and facilitate the formation of a political majority capable of defeating his policies.