Portland is not on fire.
I know because I'm standing in it. Raw throat, burning eyes, not from riot police 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 make you believe that my city is a battlefield burning in anarchy and the swarm of “terrorists”, “insurrectionists” and “domestic enemies”. Proof, he says, that the enemies of the United States live inside.
But if the subtext of why I'm standing here wasn't so chilling, the scene could pass for satire: Woody Guthrie's “This Land Is Your Land” scrolls from a tinny speaker as a man in an inflatable frog suit dances in front of a gray building. The city's immigration and customs compliance facility, an otherwise unremarkable structure, is now enshrined as the symbolic front line of America's ideological war.
Philosopher Dependent He called it “the society of the spectacle”: performance becomes power, and if a lie is organized vividly enough, the audience begins to live in it as if it were true.
President Trump understands this. He is constructing his reality like many autocrats before: through theater. Militarized optics, choreographed threat and the aesthetics of a rebellion. But the “battlefield” he describes is a single city block where about 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 that reads “abolish ice,” protesting the separation of families.
Still, the spectacle calls for soldiers perched on rooftops next to an American flag as a circle of national security helicopters with the drone of manufactured danger. The point isn't to restore order, it's to realize it, to turn government into a live-action morality play where the president plays 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'm afraid it has arrived at my door.
Each regime That turned against its citizens began with a justification of the order. Every tyrant begins with a sermon. It does not promise cruelty. It promises calm.
In Syria, Bashar Assad he talked about “national security” while bombing his own cities. In Russia, Vladimir Putin He rose to power through the ballot box, then rewrote the constitution to erase dissent. Türkiye Recep Tayyip Erdoganonce hailed as a democrat, he eviscerated the judiciary before unleashing troops on protesters. Opposition is recast as treason. Every act is defended as temporary, every abuse wrapped in the language of necessity, until resistance itself becomes a crime.
Americans comfort us with the illusion that our institutions are unbreakable, or at least stronger than the tides that have swept away others. But Viktor Orbán dismantled Hungary's checks and balances in less than a decade, and Hugo Chavez Venezuela rewritten in even less time.
And now, in the United States, Trump resurrects the same strongman script: Security, stability, law and order. His renamed “War Department” and his vows to use American cities as military “Training training” Preview a new pageantry of power: choose a blue city, declare it falls, flooded with uniforms and broadcast the answer.
In Portland, a small group gathered in front of a single building, however, the White House moved federalized troops until a judge intervened, noting that the protests were neither widespread nor violent. In Washington, DC., A so-called “crime emergency” brought 800 National Guard troops to parks and resorts, transforming the capital's monuments into fixtures of executive power. In Los Angeles4,000 guard troops and 700 marines were sent during protests over the ice raids, a deployment later found to be illegal. Now, in Chicagoofficials are rushing to court to block the next wave of troops.
When Trump orders a military occupation of a liberal city, he is not maintaining order; He is avenging his wounded pride and measuring obedience. The vocabulary changes, but the staging remains the same: the leader is presented as the last wall against chaos, a chaos that he himself enters. One Portland protester I spoke to insists that his arrest followed government provocation: rubber bullets bouncing at his feet before going over the sidewalk dividing the sidewalk from government property.
America's founders feared the moment when a president would turn the military machine inward, using soldiers not to defend citizens but to police them. That is why later generations wrote the Posse Comitatus Law of 1878 to draw a line between the gun abroad and the sledgehammer at home. It is the thin membrane of democracy itself, and this week, that doctrine was invoked to contain our current sitting president. Authoritarianism is not announced with a coup d'état. It crawls through the standardization of absurdities: troops patrolling playgrounds, judges labeled traitors, journalists marked as enemies.
I moved to Portland because it felt like a refuge for what's left of the American democratic experiment: a place of barefoot activists and tree-lined streets where individualism is not a flaw but a civic virtue. Tonight, watching unarmed citizens peacefully confront camouflaged men with rifles, I don't see any battle here, just a question. When power turns its weapons toward the governed, who 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 runs a nonprofit organization and teaches journalism and communications theory.
