As Trumps targets Portland, the MAGA war on blue America turns increasingly literal
Conjuring fantasies of mayhem and anarchy to justify the latest domestic troop deployments, MAGA cites an "enemy within" that turns out to be. . . ordinary Americans just living their lives
Last weekend, President Trump escalated his martial assault on liberal American cities with an announcement that troops would be sent to Portland, Oregon. Describing Portland as “war ravaged” and ICE facilities in the city as “under siege from attack by Antifa,” he authorized the use of “Full Force, if necessary.” As with similar military deployments in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., his claims of mass violence and mayhem do not withstand the barest contact with reality. Americans had not previously heard of war in Portland because no war exists; the ICE facilities and their heavily-armed occupants have no more been “under siege” by small numbers of protestors than the city of Portland is “under siege” when the autumn rain begins to fall.
The real reasons for the threatened deployment are both fantastical and opportunistic. President Trump apparently watched or heard of a news clip on Fox News that intercut footage of recent Portland protests with video of 2020 demonstrations — demonstrations that had previously led to much right-wing “news” coverage that falsely portrayed Portland as a city of mass lawlessness and anarchism. The presence of relatively large numbers of Antifa participants helped drive the previous right-wing frenzy, with such protestors identified as insurrectionary enemies of the American people.
But apart from Portland’s outsized place in the paranoid MAGA-verse, the targeting of Portland is also a classic case of bullying. A relatively small city in a relatively small state, Trump and his advisors likely think of Portland as an easy target, requiring fewer resources to intimidate and possessing fewer resources to resist through legal avenues. There is also the fact that Oregon and Portland’s leaders had chosen not to warn Trump off in any determined fashion, in contrast with Illinois Governor JB Pritzker’s avowal to hold to account anyone who harmed Chicago residents when Trump began focusing on that city. Oregon Governor Tina Kotek and Portland Mayor Keith Wilson chose to keep their heads down, which may not have invited MAGA aggression but certainly did nothing to deter it.
So what is the purpose of this armed escalation? As with the L.A. and D.C. deployments, the Trump administration is pretty clearly aiming to provoke violence from protestors that would in turn provide justification for a harsher crackdown. This urge, in turn, is part of an increasingly literal war that MAGA is waging on Blue America; as Will Stancil puts it, “Trump is trying to cause political violence and domestic unrest, because he wants an excuse to massacre Democrats and liberals who have rightfully accused him of being a tyrant, a criminal, a liar, and a deviant.” Similiarly, journalist Ronald Brownstein, who has written extensively about Trump’s push to dominate vast swathes of blue America, was quick to note that the “Portland deployment is the latest proof [that] [h]aving defined blue states and cities as something apart from, and threatening to, the American mainstream, the Trump admin is now subjecting them to tactics appropriate to an enemy force.”
The idea that punishment of MAGA’s perceived enemies involves no clear stopping point received substantial support from the president himself shortly after his Portland announcement, as he gave a deranged speech to top military leaders summoned to Quantico, Virginia that raised the specter of still harsher repression to come. Here’s a sampling of some of his most shocking declarations:
We’re under invasion from within. No different than a foreign enemy, but more difficult in many ways because they don’t wear uniforms [. . .] In our inner cities – which we’re going to be talking about because it’s a big part of war now. It’s a big part of war.
[. . .]
We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military – National Guard, but military. Because we’re going into Chicago very soon.
[. . .]
San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles. They’re very unsafe places. And we’re gonna straighten them out one-by-one. It this is gonna be a major part for some of the people in this room. It’s a war, too. It’s a war from within.
As many have pointed out, the targeting of a supposed “enemy within” is a central tenet of fascistic thinking; in this, Trump’s comments may as well have been cribbed from a textbook on right-wing political movements. For a U.S. president to embrace such a political strategy is breathtakingly sinister, as is his imagined response to this supposed threat: to deploy the American military against its own citizenry, as some of its number are re-conceived as actual enemies of the republic. Suggesting that American cities are “training grounds for our military” is about as heinous a statement as one can imagine being uttered by a U.S. president: a de facto renunciation of his oath of office, and a depraved embrace of authoritarian misrule that should make the founding fathers roll over in their graves.
In fact, the president’s assertions are so outlandish, so bizarre and contradictory to long-standing American political rhetoric, that some might be tempted to dismiss them simply as red meat for his die-hard base. Others might comfort themselves by holding to a belief that he really must be talking only about taking on hardened criminals too tough for municipal police forces or even the FBI to handle. But these would be evasions of reality. MAGA’s war against blue America, as described by Brownstein and others, has long encompassed cultural and economic lines of attack; what we are seeing now is the attack escalating into an all-too literal assault on the citizenry.
And despite the fig leaf of rhetorical cover meant to convey that the administration is seeking only select enemies of the republic, the plain truth is that MAGA defines the “enemy within” as anyone who either opposes or simply fails to support MAGA — which is to say, most Americans. The announced intention to dominate its political opponents and cultural enemies through force of arms could hardly be more explicit; a combination of disbelief, ragged faith in a more rational politics, and despair at countering a president committed to violence have so far prevented those thus targeted from fully reckoning with the danger they are all in. The wild rhetoric is validated by dystopian reality: the deployments to L.A., D.C., Portland, and elsewhere are early evidence of this scheme to visit militarized oppression upon areas of the country opposed to Trumpist rule. Occupations initially justified by the need to support mass deportations have seamlessly transformed into occupations justified by the need to dominate MAGA’s domestic enemies, who turn out to be most of us.
This MAGA desire to dominate is essential context for viewing events in Portland and other Democratic Party-governed cities.
In their response to Trump’s announcement, Oregon’s political leaders have valiantly appealed to reality, and specifically to the capacity of local authorities to address the state’s various challenges. They promoted videos and images of an idyllic Portland of farmers’ markets and bustling restaurants; in doing so, they attempted to undercut the president’s slander of riots and bloodletting. Governor Kotek bluntly stated that “There is no insurrection. There is no threat to national security. There is no need or legal justification for military troops in our major city.” And they have spoken honestly of the city’s real challenges; Mayor Wilson, in a Time magazine editorial, enumerated the various needs (social workers, teachers, etc.) that soldiers in Portland streets would do nothing to meet.
Such appeals to rationality and reality are necessary to resisting, as are the efforts to mock Trump’s claims with vivid documentation of Portland’s overwhelmingly pacific and often-charming reality. Yet they are also badly insufficient on their own. The deployment of federal agents, federalized National Guard troops, and other security forces to American cities is justified not only by a mountain of lies and propaganda issued by the Trump administration and its far-right allies, but in the name of a desire by Trump and the larger MAGA movement to punish, and even destroy, those who oppose or otherwise lie beyond those they consider to be “real” Americans. A refusal to believe this basic fact, or a fear that admitting or confronting it will lead to an accelerated effort of repression by Trump and MAGA, are self-defeating evasions of the basic terrain of our current politics. The American majority is under increasingly literal attack; to recognize this is not, as some would claim, to somehow embrace violence, but to possess a basic understanding of reality without which no adequate political response is possible. And by adequate, I mean a politics that has a reasonable chance of not simply stopping MAGA in 2026 and 2028, but of eroding its political, economic, and cultural pillars over the longer term so that it can no longer threaten American democracy and American freedom.
Citizens need to recognize that Trump sends troops to liberal U.S. cities not because they are hellholes, but because they are actually successful examples of Democratic and liberal governance, despite their very real flaws. Telling Trump that Portland and other cities are doing fine will not deter him; the very fact that they are doing fine, and the challenge this poses to MAGA’s predatory, retrograde worldview, are the real “problems” that the crackdowns aim to remedy.