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If you feel at a loss for words after the events of the past week, you’re in good company. Dictators have a way of making language feel useless. Put another way, a tyrant is “the incarnate negation of a poet.”
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That’s how polyglot writer Vladimir Nabokov characterized the fictional ruler in the short story “Tyrants Destroyed,” where he also manages to find his tongue for some delightful Nabokovian insults for the big guy:
“Limited, coarse, little-educated.”
“A pigheaded, brutal, and gloomy vulgarian full of morbid ambition.”
Born in Czarist Russia, Nabokov fled to Germany to escape the Bolsheviks, and then to America to escape the Nazis (his wife, Vera, was Jewish). So, he knew something about tyrants. Now, so do we.
During the past month, President Donald Trump has grown obsessed with the handful of protesters gathered around the Portland outpost of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. He has conjured a ludicrous fantasy of leftist terrorists holding the federal government hostage, and has now tried to summon National Guard members from Oregon, California and Texas to quell the imaginary insurrection. A federal judge he appointed has blocked him at every turn, saying the president’s characterization of Portland is “untethered to facts.”
Like the tyrants that Nabokov tangled with and lampooned, Trump is, by his own admission, a lousy reader. He doesn’t read literature. He barely reads briefing memos. Some of the resulting antics beg for satire; others portend the end of tolerant democracy.
Trump’s invasion of Portland lands somewhere in between. If he did read things, he might know that violent crime in Portland fell by 17% in the first half of this year. And that homicides fell from 35 in the first half of 2024 to 17 through June of this year. That decline, at 51%, was the largest decrease among 68 metro areas surveyed by the Major Cities Chiefs Association.
If Trump read WW or The Oregonian, he’d learn that any skirmishes between protesters and ICE are confined to two blocks in Southwest Portland, and that the “Radical Left’s reign of terror” is being waged in no small part by families with children and retirees pushing walkers, while Portland police wait patiently on bicycles for Trump’s “hell” to break loose.
In short, we find it hard to take seriously anyone who takes this charade seriously. That means both Trump—a draft dodger trying to dodge his old pedophile friend Jeffrey Epstein—and any hothead who thinks this is going to be Stumptown’s storming of the Bastille or the overthrow of the Okhrana, the Czarist secret police.
The best advice we’ve heard comes from Gov. Tina Kotek and Mayor Keith Wilson, who tell us not to give Trump exactly what he wants: footage on Fox News that features tear gas, Molotov cocktails, burning tires and green lasers.
Portland singer and actor Storm Large puts a finer point on that advice. She suggests we refrain from being as sensitive as a “peeled clitoris,” as is sometimes our wont, and instead host a welcoming ceremony for the National Guard with civic leaders, faith leaders and cheering crowds. We should buy troops lunch at Mother’s or take them to Mary’s, Large’s favorite strip club. We should bring them coffee and doughnuts shaped like dicks, two things we know well.
Guard members are pawns, says Large, who comes from a military family.
“They’re not some bully arm of the federal government, but they’re being used as such, and it’s not cool,” Large says. “We need to say, ‘We know why you’re here, and we’re so sorry. You’re welcome here, and we’ll look after you, but we don’t really need you.’”
Best case, says Large, is that Portland finds a strategy for other cities targeted by Trump and his toadies, like Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and New Orleans.
“Trump wants us to be the bad place that blue states are supposed to be,” Large says. “If we do something that works—something simple, actionable and authentic—we could become a great model for other blue cities to do the same.”
It’s been a minute since Portland has been a model city. That’s the strangest thing about Trump’s farcical military campaign: The Rose City could actually use plenty of assistance, just not any of the kind he wants to provide.
It’s with that disconnect in mind that we’re suggesting 47 ways that National Guard troops could actually help the Rose City, sprinkled with some snark inspired by Nabokov and others who have skewered earlier power-mad narcissists with bad hair. We asked readers to contribute ideas—more than 200 did. You’ll find some useful tasks for the troops, along with an explainer of who the guard members are and a guidebook to the South Waterfront for all the newbies dropping in to taste the tear gas.
We hope what follows provides you with a chuckle, some useful context amid the absurdity, and a reminder of what Portland can work on together when the soldiers get the hell out of town.
Maybe somebody can read it to the president.
