The National Guard troops dispatched by President Trump to fight “domestic terrorists” in this “war-ravaged” city of Portland, Ore., will face an unexpected challenge: naked bicycle riders.
Cycling in the buff is a Portland specialty, and one organization has announced a naked ride “in response to the militarization of our city.”
Such is the war zone here.
Indignant Portlanders have been sharing Instagram photos of lovely city scenes to counter Trump’s description of Portland as “hell.” As an Oregonian who lives outside Portland, I can testify that the city has heavenly qualities, with a setting that is divine and food catered by angels, but in fairness, it also has significant problems. Homelessness has been intractable, the murder rate last year was more than twice New York City’s (although so far this year, homicides are down 41 percent from the same period last year), and the downtown has one of the highest office vacancy rates in the country — as businesses leave and create long-term economic challenges.
National Guard troops could help Portland, if they rented office space. But the way Trump dispatches troops to fight a “war from within” won’t solve the city’s problems and may inflame them.
Indeed, my hunch is that Trump’s main aim in sending troops to Portland is to provoke street violence and bolster his narrative as a leader who’s tough on crime while distracting voters from the Jeffrey Epstein files, the weakening economy and rising prices.
Trump’s plan may succeed: It’s entirely possible that he will incite young hotheads into fighting back. Oregon leaders keep calling on citizens not to let themselves be manipulated into reacting. “Don’t take the bait” has been the refrain from Democratic officials.
In 2020 too many Portlanders did take the bait when Trump sent in federal forces to confront protesters in the aftermath of the George Floyd killing, leading to violent clashes. In retrospect, those well-meaning protests didn’t advance racial justice, but they did damage both Portland and the Democratic brand. Lawlessness took hold, and homicides soared through 2022.
Crime in Portland, while still too high, has come down since then. And while there have been protests and skirmishes this year outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in Portland — this is apparently what alarmed Trump — these subsided in recent weeks (until he announced the deployment).
“Is Portland doomed to be treated like a rebellious territory, regardless of whether anyone is rebelling?” asked a writer for Willamette Week, a Portland newspaper.
It’s also exasperating that the Trump administration, as it cites tight budgets as the reason to push people off health insurance, is ready to spend $10 million to deploy troops in Portland, where they are unwanted and unneeded.
Portland’s new reform-minded mayor, a businessman named Keith Wilson, said that he would be happy to have federal help where it’s actually needed.
“Imagine the federal government sent instead 100 teachers or 100 engineers or 100 addiction specialists,” Wilson said wistfully at a news conference.
Because I’ve spent much of my career covering authoritarian governments, I’m particularly alarmed by Trump’s attempt to create, in effect, his own Praetorian Guard, available to punish critics or Democratic cities. That is standard autocratic behavior, and in extreme cases — such as at Tiananmen Square in 1989 — I’ve seen such troops used to massacre protesters.
I don’t think that will happen here, but Trump has long had an interest in marshaling military force to suppress opponents. “Can’t you just shoot them?” former Defense Secretary Mark Esper recalled Trump asking in 2020, speaking of people protesting racial injustice. “Just shoot them in the legs or something?” And a federal judge, William G. Young, already found that the Trump administration used his immigration enforcers to systematically silence immigrants’ speech in support of Palestinians and chill campus activism.
It astonishes me that conservatives, who denounced what they saw as overreach by federal forces in confrontations in the 1990s at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and Waco, Texas, now cheer Trump as he sends federal forces across the country. And of course, if he wants to find real-live insurrectionists in Oregon, I can tell him where to find them: Several were convicted of joining the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and are now enjoying the impunity they gained from their presidential pardon.
Trump is turning ICE, in particular, into a powerful armed force, its agents often masked and refusing to show IDs, snatching people off the street into unmarked cars. Judge Young, a Reagan appointee, warned that the mask-wearing by agents evoked “cowardly desperadoes and the despised Ku Klux Klan” and was meant “to terrorize Americans into quiescence.”
Trump is enormously expanding these shadowy forces operating domestically. ICE’s budget will exceed the combined budgets of the F.B.I., the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Bureau of Prisons and other federal agencies.
Trump in September issued a national security presidential memorandum to use federal antiterrorism authority to crush domestic threats, which the directive suggests include those who embrace “anti-Americanism, anticapitalism and anti-Christianity” or “extremism on migration, race and gender.”
All this is accompanied by Trump’s effort to politicize the U.S. military and seemingly turn it into a more personal force. This summer he deployed 700 Marines to Los Angeles, in the first deployment of active-duty troops — not National Guard units — domestically in more than three decades. His secretary of homeland security, Kristi Noem, seemed to indicate that the aim was political, asserting that the intention was “to liberate the city from the socialists.”
Trump has floated the idea of invoking the Insurrection Act, allowing him to use the armed forces domestically. By dispatching the National Guard to Portland, he is inching in that direction — and it’s particularly offensive that he recommended using American cities as military “training grounds.”
“This dangerous pattern of politicizing our military and forcing our troops to intimidate their fellow Americans in their communities is as un-American as it gets,” wrote Senator Tammy Duckworth, a veteran.
So, President Trump, instead of tugging us toward authoritarianism, can I suggest that you instead cool down by pursuing a different path — perhaps a naked bike ride in Portland?
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Nicholas Kristof became a columnist for The Times Opinion desk in 2001 and has won two Pulitzer Prizes. His new memoir is “Chasing Hope: A Reporter’s Life.” @NickKristof
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