Portland is not on fire.
I know because I’m standing in it. Throat raw, eyes burning, not from riot flames, but from federally sanctioned tear gas. A protester presses a water bottle into my hand and gestures toward the invisible demarcation line ahead. A thin strip divides the public sidewalk from federal property, peaceful protest from violent arrests.
The president calls this a war zone. He would have you believe my city is a battlefield smoldering in anarchy and swarming with “terrorists,” “insurrectionists” and “domestic enemies.” Proof, he says, that America’s enemies live within.
But if the subtext for why I am standing here weren’t so chilling, the scene might pass for satire: Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” drifts from a tinny speaker while a man in an inflatable frog suit dances before a gray building. The city’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility, an otherwise unremarkable structure, is now consecrated as the symbolic front line of America’s ideological war.
Philosopher Guy Debord called it “The Society of the Spectacle”: performance becomes power, and if a lie is staged vividly enough, the audience begins to live in it as though it were true.
President Trump understands this. He is building his reality the way many autocrats have before: through theater. Militarized optics, choreographed menace and the aesthetics of a rebellion. Yet the “battlefield” he describes is a single city block where some 30 protesters have gathered most nights for months — a cross-section of conscience — a nurse, the daughter of a veteran killed in battle, a student with a handmade sign reading “Abolish ICE,” protesting the separation of families.
Still, the spectacle demands soldiers perched on rooftops next to an American flag as Department of Homeland Security helicopters circle with the hum of manufactured danger. The point isn’t to restore order, it’s to perform it, to turn governance into a live-action morality play where the president stars as savior and his critics as insurgents.
As a former CNN journalist, I used to write about tyranny as something distant, an affliction that happens elsewhere, to other nations and other people. Now I fear it has arrived on my doorstep.
Every regime that turned against its citizens began with a justification of order. Every tyrant begins with a sermon. He does not promise cruelty. He promises calm.
In Syria, Bashar Assad spoke of “national security” as he bombed his own cities. In Russia, Vladimir Putin rose to power through the ballot box, then rewrote the constitution to erase dissent. Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, once hailed as a democrat, gutted the judiciary before unleashing troops on protesters. Opposition is recast as treason. Each act is defended as temporary, each abuse wrapped in the language of necessity, until resistance itself becomes a crime.
Americans comfort ourselves with the illusion that our institutions are unbreakable, or at least stronger than the tides that have swept others away. But Viktor Orbán dismantled Hungary’s checks and balances in less than a decade, and Hugo Chávez re-scripted Venezuela’s in even less time.
And now, in America, Trump resurrects the same strongman script: security, stability, law and order. His rebranded “Department of War” and his vows to use U.S. cities as military “training grounds” preview a new pageantry of power: Pick a blue city, declare it fallen, flood it with uniforms and broadcast the response.
In Portland, a small group clustered in front of a single building, yet the White House moved to federalize troops until a judge intervened, noting that the protests were neither widespread nor violent. In Washington, D.C., a so-called “crime emergency” brought 800 National Guard troops into parks and tourist hubs, transforming the capital’s monuments into props of executive power. In Los Angeles, 4,000 Guard troops and 700 Marines were dispatched during protests over ICE raids — a deployment later struck down as unlawful. Now, in Chicago, officials are racing to court to block the next wave of troops.
When Trump orders a military occupation in a liberal-leaning city, he’s not maintaining order; he’s avenging his wounded pride and measuring obedience. The vocabulary shifts, but the staging remains the same: The leader presents himself as the last wall against chaos — a chaos he himself contrives. A Portland protester I spoke with insists his arrest followed government provocation — rubber bullets ricocheting at his feet before he stepped just over the strip dividing sidewalk from government property.
America’s founders feared the moment when a president would turn the military’s machinery inward, using soldiers not to defend citizens but to police them. That’s why later generations wrote the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 to draw a line between the gun abroad and the gavel at home. It is the thin membrane of democracy itself, and this week, that doctrine was invoked to restrain our current sitting president. Authoritarianism doesn’t announce itself with a coup. It creeps in through the normalization of absurdities: troops patrolling playgrounds, judges labeled traitors, journalists branded as enemies.
I moved to Portland because it felt like a refuge for what remains of the American democratic experiment: a place of barefoot activists and of tree-lined streets where individualism is not a defect but a civic virtue. Tonight, watching unarmed citizens peacefully face down camouflaged men with rifles, I see no battle here — only a question. When power turns its guns toward the governed, whom will we protect: those who wield force, or those who still believe in the right to stand before it?
Amy La Porte is an Emmy-nominated writer, producer and former television reporter who now leads a nonprofit organization and teaches journalism and communications theory.
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