Trump's Portland 'battlefield'? It doesn't actually exist

The president is building his reality the way many autocrats have before: through theater.

- AMY LA PORTE GUEST CONTRIBUTOR

PORTLAND IS NOT on fire.

I know because I'm standing in it. Throat raw, eyes burning, not from riot 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 have you believe my city is a battlefield smoldering in anarchy and swarming with “terrorists,” “insurrectionists” and “domestic enemies.” Proof, he says, that America’s enemies live within.

But if the subtext for why I am standing here weren't so chilling, the scene might pass for satire: Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” drifts from a tinny speaker while a man in an inflatable frog suit dances before a gray building. The city’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility, an otherwise unremarkable structure, is now consecrated as the symbolic front line of America’s ideological war.

Philosopher Guy Debord called it “The Society of the Spectacle”: performance becomes power, and if a lie is staged vividly enough, the audience begins to live in it as though it were true.

President Trump understands this. He is building his reality the way many autocrats have before: through theater. Militarized optics, choreographed menace and the aesthetics of a rebellion. Yet the “battlefield” he describes is a single city block where some 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 reading “Abolish ICE,” protesting the separation of families.