As a Portland conservative, I feel obligated to weigh in on President Trump’s recent decision to deploy National Guard troops to end the unrest that’s plagued the ICE offices downtown on and off since the pandemic. Other federal buildings were targeted by agitators during the Covid years; now the focus of the unruly, potentially destructive civil disobedience is mostly confined to the ICE offices.
That’s not to say that there aren’t numerous peaceful demonstrations across the city, with street corners and arterial approaches regularly thronged with anti-Trump resisters. In my own neighborhood, a sign depicting Trump as Hitler was waved in an intersection by an older man. There were 15-20 protesters with him. Honk if you hate Trump?
Though I don’t agree with the peaceful protesters, and have voted for Trump three times, I support their right to demonstrate. I also support the President’s right to confront the troublemakers downtown. Trump has characterized them as “paid agitators,” and there’s little reason to doubt that.
Portland’s one of the most radically progressive cities in the country. Just thinking of the competition for that designation provides a clue about how progressive-minded the Rose City’s civic population is. Trump’s lived in the minds of the collective body politic since it mistakenly laughed off his chances in 2016. Conservatives, not to mention right-leaning or moderate Independents, reside in a political shadowland here. They know that even if the deployed troops prove successful in suppressing the perpetual ICE street fight, after those troops go home, nothing will change. Ironically, Portland is a bastion of the brand of often counterintuitive progressivism that right-to-center political pundits cite as a major factor in Trump’s victory last November.
Even before the Guard deployment, local rage over Republican national governmental hegemony was palpable, lurking within every interaction, every encounter, every chance meeting with a potential “other.” Many of the hard-left among the citizenry won’t allow themselves to be happy, or even able to muster—with a nod to John Knowles—a separate peace, until Trump leaves office.
Now, with the militarized dictum of the president they revile in process, the municipal kettle simmers hotter. In a presser decrying the deployment, Oregon Gov. Kotek, Portland Mayor Wilson, and other elected officials proclaimed Trump’s move performative, unnecessarily provocative, and unnecessary. In a moment of unintentional comic relief, they asked that instead of the deployment why couldn’t the federal government consider helping them with “real” problems like health care funding, transportation funding, and homelessness, intractable problems hereabouts that’ve evaded meaningful solvation since long before Trump’s first term.
Portland conservatives will watch this 60-day deployment with interest, disconnected from the governance of the city, hoping the skirmishes will be subdued, and knowing that nothing will change. A helicopter has flown over my house several times this week, on the way downtown, no doubt.