October 09, 2025 01:13 PM UTC

Trump's Fictional "War-Torn Portland" A Familiar Farce

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• by: Colorado Pols

We take you to the streets of Portland, Oregon, where we’re told the once-beautiful City of Roses is burning to the ground as the Antifa domestic terrorist onslaught continues unchecked:

Hold on, folks, we must be running the wrong tape, because as KGW-TV in Portland reports, the situation is so bad that local police are…yes, we’re supposed to relay this with a straight face, lying to everyone about how bad it is:

A day after her surprise visit to Portland, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem criticized elected city and state leaders while blaming antifa for political violence on Wednesday. Noem accused the Portland mayor and the Oregon governor of “covering up the terrorism that is hitting their streets.”

Noem made the remark during a roundtable meeting on antifa with President Donald Trump, held in the White House State Dining Room. They were joined by a number of administration officials, including Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI director Kash Patel, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller and White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt…

“I was in Portland yesterday and had the chance to visit with the governor of Oregon and also the mayor. They’re in town and they are absolutely covering up the terrorism that is hitting their streets,” Noem said. [Pols emphasis]

DHS Secretary Kristi Noem even suggested that Portland Police were “cheering on” supposed threats of violence against federal officers:

“In Portland — I was there yesterday — some of the ICE officers were telling me that as they drove by the rioters that were saying ‘kill ICE agents, Molotov cocktails, melt ICE,’ that the Portland police were cheering them on,” Noem said.

At yesterday’s White House “roundtable” with a crew of right-wing social media influencers and protest provocateurs supposedly devoted to “exposing” the truth about the leaderless Antifa movement’s reign of meticulously organized and well-funded terror, President Donald Trump painted a picture of Portland that no one who has ever set foot in the city would recognize.

“You look at Portland and you see fires all over the place,” Trump said. “You see fights, I mean, just violence. It’s so crazy. And then you talk to the governor, and she acts like everything is totally normal. There’s nothing wrong. Are you waking up from a dream or something? You see it on your network, you see it all over the place, and it’s so bad. It’s so crazy. It’s like the movies you see for the kids, where you have these bombed-out cities and these bombed-out people.”

The Portland Chief of Police Bob Day responded to these slanderous allegations with more professionalism than we could muster, which we suppose is why we are not the chief of police:

“While we do not wish to engage in a back-and-forth with officials, the accusation that Portland Police officers would celebrate violence against fellow law enforcement officers is an abhorrent allegation,” Bob Day said. [Pols emphasis] “Since the secretary had several people documenting her movements, we urge her to provide video evidence to support this claim. Such inflammatory rhetoric undermines trust and distracts from our goal to ensure safety in the South Waterfront area. Our officers remain professional, dedicated, and committed to serving the people of Portland with integrity.”

The situation has direct parallels to the Trump’s fictional narrative about conditions in Aurora, Colorado during the 2024 campaign, featuring outrageously exaggerated claims that the entire city of 400,000 residents had been “overrun” by Venezuelan gangs–falsehoods that the city’s Republican mayor meekly tried to push back against without running afoul of Trump by directly calling him a liar. Trump’s description of Portland as a “bombed-out city” is nonsense to the people who live there, just like it was to Aurora residents when Trump and Gabe Evans claimed “Aurora has fallen.”

But as nonsensical as Trump’s lies about Portland seem to anyone who’s been there, they serve an important purpose: pretext for further militarization of the nation’s cities in support of Trump’s declared war on the vaguely-defined “enemy within,” increasingly indistinguishable from any political opposition. Trump’s core base of support believe without question what he says about American cities overrun and burning, and are so hostile to attempting to fact-check the President that doing do only validates their belief. In this fact-averse environment, Trump can claim basically anything and justify anything, and no one in his orbit dares dispute a word.

That is why we laugh at the rank absurdity of Trump’s lies about Portland, and also worry greatly about what comes next.

Because absurdity won. Absurdity is in power. And absurdity backed by the deadly force of government is no laughing matter.