Portland Is Not Your Punching Bag

I moved to Portland in 2008, just a few years before “Portlandia” premiered, establishing the city’s reputation for being quirky and fun. We had tall bikes, restaurant servers on a first-name basis with chicken, and rents cheap enough for young people to semi-retire and live out the slacker dream of the 90s. I was here too when that image changed in 2020, our weird idyll replaced by scenes of chaos: violent protests, buildings on fire, homeless encampments, drug overdoses, and rampant crime. Despite all that I’m still here in 2025, listening to Donald Trump explain why the 2020 protests justify issuing pardons and commutations to more than 1,500 of his own supporters who rioted at the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021.

“What happened in Portland where they burned down the city every day and people die?” Trump asked in his inauguration speech, drawing false equivalence between the two protests. “Nothing happened to anybody, but they go after these people violently.”

Attempting to fact check the president is a Sisyphean task, but the claim that “nothing happened to anybody” is unequivocally false. The mention of someone dying presumably refers to Aaron “Jay” Danielson, a right-wing counterprotester who was shot and killed by left-wing protester Michael Reinoehl. Reinoehl was himself shot and killed by U.S. Marshalls less than a week later. Approximately 300 other cases related to the protests resulted in criminal charges, at least twenty of them felonies, including one man sentenced to a decade in prison for acts such as throwing Molotov cocktails at police and another sentenced to five years for arson at a police station.

No generalization could accurately characterize the entirety of the Portland protests, which extended for more than 90 days and spanned the city. There were certainly instances of purposeless vandalism that victimized private businesses, as well as acts of destruction against police and court buildings that prompted a ritualized cycle of forceful police response. Mostly, however, the protests were the standard stuff of protected First Amendment activity: gathering in parks, marching in streets, carrying signs, chanting, and playing Nina Simone.

If one insists on drawing comparisons, it’s also worth emphasizing that the 2020 protests in Portland and the January 6 protest at the Capitol differed in their aims. The former were at bottom a response to the homicide of George Floyd at the hands of police; to the extent that protesters were united by any single aim, it was to demand reform to violent policing. The Portland protests were fundamentally democratic, a visible expression of popular sentiment intended to influence elected officials and raise the salience of the issue.

The January 6 protest, in contrast, were explicitly anti-democratic. The aim was not to influence politics through persuasion but rather to forcefully overturn American voters’ decision to elect Joe Biden over Donald Trump. Every legal avenue for challenging the results, no matter how ludicrous or conspiratorial, had already been tried and rejected, often by judges appointed by Trump himself. All that remained was the threat of violence against Congress and the vice president for carrying out their constitutional duties, which the rioters eagerly undertook with actual violence against Capitol Police and threats of hanging for figures like Nancy Pelosi and Mike Pence.

To the extent that the perpetrators of the Capitol riot were punished more harshly than protesters in Portland, the disparity can be justified by both the gravity of their crimes and the degree to which they were documented, often proudly, in footage taken by the rioters themselves. Fourteen of the January 6 criminals pled guilty or were convicted of seditious conspiracy, reflecting that their crimes were directed not simply against politicians, police, or federal property, but rather against the United States itself. When Portland protests got out of hand, the damage was local. The riot at the Capitol was a crime against all Americans, one that attempted to violate their right to self-government through democratic elections. 

As noted this week by the Wall Street Journal editorial board—hardly a bastion of anti-Trumpism—federal prosecutors were often lenient toward Capitol protesters, deciding not to prosecute hundreds of non-violent cases and ending many others with sentences short of imprisonment. Sampling just a few of the criminals who were imprisoned, the Journal highlights Trump supporters who deployed “an ‘electroshock weapon’ against a policeman,” “sprayed streams of Wasp and Hornet Killer spray at multiple police officers on four distinct occasions,” “punched two police officers in the head,” “hit a cop while wearing ‘reinforced brass knuckle gloves,’” and “brought a hockey stick with a TRUMP 2020 flag attached, which he swung ‘over his head and downward at police officers as if he were chopping wood.’” All were set free on Trump’s very first day back in office.

To state the obvious, granting clemency to cop-beating seditionists is incompatible with conservative claims to “back the blue.” It turns out that some conditions apply. Is it acceptable to beat a police officer with a flagpole? Depends what’s on the flag.

The message to left-wing protesters is even clearer. Police crackdowns against peaceful protesters in the 2020 Portland protests included beating and breaking the bones of a Navy veteran, tear gassing a line of protesting moms, and shooting a man in the head with rubber munitions. Rewarding political violence in Trump’s name sends an unambiguous signal to both police and right-wing paramilitary groups, inviting forceful suppression of opposing views. As Grant Tudor notes at The Bulwark:

Nor is it hard to imagine escalating intimidation and violence—directed at Pride events and protests, for example, or at the journalists who cover paramilitary activity—that quiets diversity and dissent. The specter of violence encourages a choice, over time, between civic participation and safety. Most may reasonably choose safety.

The message surely won’t be lost if the second Trump regime inspires the same degree of protest as the first. In 2020, the stated purpose of sending federal law enforcement to Portland over the objections of both the local mayor and governor of Oregon was to restore order. By that standard, the effort backfired terribly, reinvigorating protesters with reports of heavily armed and unidentified federal officers yanking people off the streets. But if the purpose was to use footage of violence for political ends, the strategy makes more sense. I wrote at the time:

The allegation that Trump is using Portland as a prop for his re-election campaign is easier to credit than the idea that this notoriously transactional president actually cares what happens here. He has no shot at winning Oregon, after all, but he may calculate that cracking heads in Portland will play well with voters in other states.

For Trump, the interests of Portland residents are irrelevant. What matters to him is using imagery from blue cities to portray them as dystopian. Portland became shorthand for a city of disorder and decline, a convenient punching bag for the failures of Democratic governance. “Unimaginably bad things would happen to America” if Biden became president, Trump warned in 2020. “Look at Portland, where the pols are just fine with 50 days of anarchy.”

The problems were real enough, such that reporters could parachute in to shoot scenes that made the city look like a bombed out war zone, or “a burned down hulk of a city” as Trump described it in 2023. Yet the whiplash of Portland’s changing portrayal in popular media and Republican politics never quite tracked the experience of actually living here. As a local, there was humorous dissonance between the endless images of tear gas and tents I’d see in the news and the peaceful tree-lined bike paths I rode along to charming coffee shops, breweries, and cocktail bars. 

It would be foolish to deny the misgovernance that has plagued Portland and other major cities in blue states, most egregiously in the failure to build more housing. Homelessness is by far the most visible of our problems. Our downtown, especially, has struggled to recover. People have laid the blame on any number of factors, from COVID to protests to drug decriminalization to remote work, though perhaps the most compelling explanation is just that there aren’t as many people around the urban core as there used to be. Hotel occupancy is still down from pre-pandemic figures and office vacancies are way up. The city simply hasn’t built back the multi-use busyness that makes for a vibrant urban core. 

And yet it’s easy to find green shoots in today’s Portland. Better late than never, we dramatically loosened our density restrictions to make it easier to build new housing. Our new mayor seems committed to finding humane solutions to homelessness. We scrapped our entire city government to bring in a newly structured council elected via ranked choice voting. We’re even doubling our normal number of naked bike rides. If our old municipal motto, 'The City That Works,' came to be seen as an ironic joke, Portland is at least once again credibly a work in progress.

There remains, undoubtedly, a great deal of work to be done, and it was certainly easier to feel optimistic about that work when it seemed that the country had a real shot at finally putting the Trump years behind us for good. When I write now from the sunny corner of my favorite coffee shop, my screens once again deliver an endless stream of dread, of which the sanctioning of political violence is only a punctuation. There’s no escape from the feeling that we are at the precipice of an especially dark era in American politics.

It’s often said of Trump that every one of his accusations is a confession. Portland, in his telling, is a lawless hellhole burned to the ground by violent rioters who escaped unpunished. But what skirmish in Portland can compare to the violent assault on the Capitol on January 6, the perpetrators of which Trump freed en masse on his very first day in office? What masked member of Antifa has gotten away with crimes comparable to those of the new president, convicted of thirty-four felonies, found liable for sexual abuse, so obviously guilty of attempting to overturn a federal election, yet shielded from consequence by loyalist courts and a spinelessly pliable Republican Party? What fire ignited in a Portland protest could possibly compare to the civic arson the MAGA movement now commits against our democracy?

Campaigning for reelection in 2020, Trump warned that if he lost, the left would “make every city look like Democrat-run Portland, Oregon.” Oh, America, how I wish for you that had been true.

Featured image is Portland Skyline, by Jeff Hintzman