Portland’s Theater-of-the-Absurd Protests Reflect the Ridiculousness of Trump’s Lies

Protesters in Portland are honing their theatrical response to the deployment of military personnel in their city. While ICE officers used chemical agents, rubber bullets, pepper balls and other “non-lethal” munitions against protesters, Portlanders were put on dinosaur costumes, clown outfits and rat catcher paraphernalia, or shed their clothes and cycling naked in front of government thugs in camouflage. Others donned pajamas and handed out donuts to stunned home front defenders in the early morning hours. They even wear protest costumes gave it away for free on the streets. And now ideas from Portland are starting to spread: Similar scenes are being played out at the ICE base in Broadview, Illinois.

Images of playful protest go viral, along with slogans like “From war-torn Portland…”. Meanwhile, the Oregon Republican Party began publishing decades-old photos from urban unrest in Latin Americais a clumsy attempt to convince viewers that these apocalyptic images are scenes from modern-day Portland and that they deserve a military response.

By and large, the national media ignored the emergence of this absurd protest movement. This does not fit the narrative of the conflict and is not easily reconciled with the idea that violent power struggles are taking place in metropolitan areas across the country. But now a remarkable act of political jiu-jitsu is emerging. If you can't beat MAGA and the evil federal administration at its own cruel game, at least you can make the troops look stupid, and in doing so you can become a moral witness to the unfolding disaster.

Last week, Greg Ewer, a 50-year-old violinist with the Oregon Symphony, felt compelled to bring his instrument into the ICE building, and as ICE agents looked down from their perches, he played stunningly beautiful soundtrack from the film Schindler's List. Ever is Jewish and his grandparents fled Nazi Germany for the United States in the 1930s. Today he says he fears what country his 11-year-old son and 7-year-old daughter will grow up in.

Ever told me that he went to an ICE facility to play music and hoped that it would encourage ICE agents to think about the cruelty of their actions. “I went there as an American,” he told me. “Not necessarily as a person of Jewish descent – although my grandparents came from Germany in the 1930s. It's about people being taken off the streets, families being broken up. I felt like I had to do something. Even if no one noticed, I had to try.”

The violinist, who has lived in the city for half his life, says Portlanders have a long history of creative, unconventional protest. “There’s a softness to Portland. It's stupid, zany, and “Portland.” There is an instinct here not to be warlike and cruel. It's less in our DNA than humor and levity.”

The more the feds attack Portland and call it a “terrorist-infested war zone,” the more people like Ewer find ways to make that label irrelevant, and it begins to get under the Republican lizard's skin. The federal government has been shut down for over two weeks, with the GOP determined to protect ACA health care subsidies for tens of millions of Americans, but for GOP leadership committed to Trump's implausible narrative of Democratic cities in chaos, what really drives them away is the display of genitalia at anti-ICE protests in Portland, as well as protesters exercising their First Amendment rights at No Kings. rallies.

Last week, House Speaker Mike Johnson, who went AWOL while trying to reopen the government, let it be known how concerned he is about the “very ugly” naked bike protests and accused No Kings organizers and those planning to participate in Saturday's nationwide protests are Hamas supporters and Antifa terrorists. Considering the new Presidential Memorandum on National Security and related executive orders calling on federal agencies to crack down on so-called domestic leftist terrorists, and given Stephen Miller's stated goal of using the full power of the federal government to bankrupt and jail those who oppose the government's authoritarian repression, this is a frightening development suggesting that the GOP leadership in Congress is fully supportive of mass criminalization dissent.

But it also signals that a new resistance movement is finally coming of age. Even as the administration dismantles the social contract and a Trumpified Supreme Court greenlights increasingly outrageous actions, resistance to authoritarianism is growing, both from grassroots activists like those in suits in Portland and from highly mainstream organizations.

Kristi Noem's Department of Homeland Security propagandists released a video this week that will be shown to captive audiences in TSA security lines at airports blaming Democrats for the government shutdown. The video, which blatantly violates the Hatch Act, which prohibits government officials from using their positions to promote political dogma, was immediately rejected many of the country's largest airports.

The administration announced that as the quarantine continues, there will be shooting by the hundreds public health workers, many of whom are working to contain the measles outbreak and prepare the country for pandemic threats. Faced with immediate public outcry, the administration backed down, reinstating more than half of the laid-off workers. Days later, a federal judge ruled temporary restraining order against the dismissal of any unionized government employees during the quarantine.

Meanwhile, the media, ranging from New York Times on Murdoch's Fox News and MAGA-focused Newsmax refused to subscribe to a new censorship regime pushed by War Secretary Pete Hegseth's Trumpified Pentagon, in which veteran journalists instead surrender their credentials to the Pentagon press. In a week in which the administration blew up another civilian ship allegedly used by drug traffickers in the Caribbean, killing everyone on board, and in which the president and his Pentagon aides boasted of successfully committing what is considered a war crime under international law, refusing to comply with Pentagon information control rules is surely a good thing.

Likewise, the administration waved a stick at a number of leading universities, promising easier access to government grants for institutions that had shaped their academic cultures around MAGA priorities. This week, MIT paved the way in refusing this Faustian bargain. Brown University followed suit, as did the University of Pennsylvania, and it looks like other universities will do the same.

Add it all up, and the evidence is that, even if the Supreme Court and Republicans in Congress do not resist authoritarianism, ordinary Americans who respect the Constitution and civil institutions are straining their nerves and starting to look for ways to spoil the work of this dystopian project.

“When you feel surrounded by moral failure,” Ever explained to me, “the only thing you can hope for is that someone in the quiet moments—an ICE agent—will see it.” [the video of Ewer playing his violin] online—calmly reflecting on the intense personal suffering that, if it happened to me, would be absolutely, excruciatingly bad. I want to inspire thinking on a human level: Is this behavior something we want done in our name, something we want to participate in and give political cover for?”