I happened to visit Portland, Ore. to help celebrate a good friend’s birthday last December.
A dozen years ago John Harrison decamped from Southern California and moved into a high-ceilinged two-story loft in the arty Pearl district, the walls filled with framed posters from the many TV movies he directed over a long career.
During his wedding ceremony to the lovely Gretchen Miller, co-founder of a Portland visual effects company, in their living room, I choked up reading a Walt Whitman poem to the assembled guests. John’s first film — not for TV — was “Beautiful Dreamers,” starring Rip Torn as Whitman, based on a true story about Whitman’s 1880 visit to a hospital for people with intellectual disabilities in John’s hometown of London, Ontario.
I just sentimentally lost it for a bit, thinking of John’s sweet film, once described as about a doctor who “defies his superiors by treating his patients as human beings rather than animals. When Whitman champions his cause, the doctor is ostracized by those who fear the poet’s reputation as a freethinking radical.”
There are several freethinking radicals in Portland; always have been. But the green, cold, water-logged city is by no means the one that the almost entirely delusional President Donald Trump pretended it is when making excuses for his dictatorial fantasies recently.
Trump described Portland as “on fire for years,” adding, “I think that’s all insurrection, really criminal insurrection.”
Last December, Portland certainly wasn’t on fire. There was way too much rain for that. Out of doors, it was so damp that you could barely light a match.
What our purely vindictive president was remembering was the 100 days of protests there five years ago after the murder of George Floyd. Peaceful in the daytime, they indeed devolved into violence and arson at night. One evening in the Pearl, John watched from his balcony as a joker prepared to light a bonfire in the middle of his street. He walked downstairs and told the guy, “Man, you may think this is just asphalt, but there’s a gas main right underneath here. Go away.” The guy went away.
Now, in his simple, lying way, Trump is conflating 2020 with 2025. He says people are dying at Portland protests, and that protesters are trying to burn down federal buildings.
Five years ago, a counter-protester with the group Patriot Prayer was shot and killed. Since then, no. One small fire was set this year at an ICE building with a flare; it was immediately extinguished.
Portland is no threat to national security. Its leaders say they need no federal help in keeping the hundred or so remaining daily protesters in hand.
But Trump last week said the situation is so bad that he’s considering invoking the Insurrection Act — an 1807 law giving presidents emergency powers to bring in federal troops on U.S. soil — to “get around” courts blocking his desire to deploy the National Guard in American cities.
Portland has its crazies. Washington, D.C. has more: the dangerous despot-supporting members of the Trump administration.
Mostly, Portland is made up of very normal people, such as federal Judge Karin Immergut, appointed by Trump, who followed the law by first stopping his deployment of the military forces two Saturdays ago and then enlarging her order on Sunday after Trump tried to get around it. She told Justice Department lawyers the president was “in direct contravention” of her order following federal law by preventing the use of federal troops when there is no insurrection.
Trump and his lackey Stephen Miller insist for their own perverse, entirely political reasons that there is indeed an insurrection and are just jonesing to invoke their favorite act.
That’s why Miller said on CNN the other day that the president has “plenary authority” — defined as “power … almost limitless for all practical purposes” — to deploy troops against Americans to serve their desire for autocracy.
Citizens, stand in unison against this.
Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com.