Portland Is Burning on the Only Screens That Matter

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It has long been convenient for people opposed to any given protest movement to characterize it as being far more violent and lawless than it actually is. It's just that usually we can be relatively sure that the people doing the characterizing know that they are lying.

On September 27, the president of the United States, who by any reasonable measure has greater access to legitimate information than basically any human in the history of both information and humans, described Portland, Oregon, as "war-ravaged" and "under siege from attack by Antifa." On September 30, Portland "looks like a war zone" and "looks like World War II." October 6, "Portland is on fire."

Things seemed to be getting worse by October 8, depending on what movies the Big Guy has seen: "It's like the movies you see for the kids, I guess not only the kids, adults also, where you have these bombed out cities and these bombed out people. It's like, worse than that." And more from the same event: "I don't know what could be worse than Portland. You don't even have stores anymore. They don't even put glass up. They put plywood on their windows."

This is, obviously, a version of the world that simply does not exist. There have been protests outside an ICE facility in Portland for some time now, but in general they have involved a few dozen people holding some signs. In a city with 650,000 people covering approximately twice the area of Washington DC, they have been confined to a city block or two. Federal officials themselves, in the days before Trump started comparing the scene to the Battle of Stalingrad, have described them as "low energy." There is a thrusting frog prominently involved.

For an administration hell-bent on normalizing the presence of the military on city streets with a year or so to go before the midterms, this is, as it always been, a convenient fiction. And the various ghouls behind the details of that deployment are assuredly well aware of the lies being told, and are using a sort of weaponized reverse Streisand Effect to create a crisis where none previously existed — and it is starting to work, with protests growing in size and volume in recent days. It is less clear, though, that the president himself understands the delusion.

Trump has taken, in recent weeks, to sharing on his social media platform AI-generated videos of various absurdities — himself promoting the "medbed," a long-running fever dream of a conspiracy theory; OMB Director and mass-firings enthusiast Russell Vought as a shutdown-themed grim reaper; and so on. To be fair, he is in fact aware that AI videos are a thing: back in early September he sort of gave the game away, saying "If something happens, it’s really bad, maybe I’ll have to just blame AI."

That said, there has never been a prominent person — like, in human history — so obviously in thrall to what the teevee tells him. Going back to that September 30 speech — the one to the gathered generals and admirals, the one following Pete Hegseth's embarrassing tirade, the one given in front of a giant American flag so they can add "Patton" to the list of movies conservatives fail to understand — Trump's full quote: "Unless they're playing false tapes, this looks like World War II."

It is impossible to say what "tapes" he is talking about here, at least in part because the media with periodic access to Trump don't tend to ask basic follow-ups like "hey what video are you talking about" or "where did you see that?" But there are some pretty good guesses out there — Fox News picking and choosing bits of footage, whether from this year or, more likely, 2020, or some staffer shoving a phone in front of his face with either entirely unrelated footage or literal AI slop aimed at convincing the guy who will sign the order and go on television to justify it himself that a major American city is, in fact, burning to the ground.

And the people around him join the game, themselves appearing on the shows and social media videos with an intended audience of one. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt stands at the podium on October 3, insisting the president "will end the radical left's reign of terror in Portland once and for all," and that he has instructed Hegseth to "provide all necessary troops to protect war-ravaged Portland." Senior advisor and sentient mass of malevolent vapors Stephen Miller has been ubiquitous across the airwaves in recent days, insisting on absurdities like "ICE officers have to street battles against antifa, hand-to-hand combat every night."

Mainstream media hasn't helped much, either with any meaningful pushback on such claims or by doing things like illustrating a post about Trump's potential use of the Insurrection Act in Portland with a burning donut shop in 1992 Los Angeles during the Rodney King riots.

I have long "joked" that Trump lacks both object permanence and theory of mind — other people essentially do not exist to him, and the most true thing in the world is whatever the last person who he does not completely hate told him. The "person" he hates least of all is the television — primarily Fox News, given its complete subservience, but the screen in general is his best and arguably only true friend. That friend, these last few weeks has been telling him One Big Thing: that Portland, Oregon, is on fire, and that he, the President, must act to save it. There is a chance that some part of him knows this is all a lie, but probably some other part that doesn't, or forgets anew each time — he probably saw "plywood on their windows" in some footage, of somewhere, from sometime, but the details aren't really important. It's true, to the person that matters, because his only friend told him so.