A year ago, Trump tried to invade my hometown. We beat him.

This week marked one year since the Trump administration tried to invade Portland with armed thugs.

Throughout the spring, summer, and early fall of 2025, the administration put a lot of PR effort into portraying our city as full of violent insurrectionists who pose a clear and present danger to the republic. It insisted on deploying Trump's personal Gestapo into Portland to "protect" the city from these "insurrectionists" who'd been protesting ICE and various Trump administration policies:

We weren't going to take a lecture about law and order from the administration that pardoned the thousands who attacked the Capitol on January 6.

We fought the illegal plan to deploy troops in court, and we won. The fine people of our city — whether in plain clothes or in frog, chicken, and capybara costumes — continued to peacefully protest, denying Trump the opportunity he so craved to justify expanding his power.

What Portland showed over the past year is that truth, solidarity, and relentless organizing are more powerful than the propaganda spewed by a senile authoritarian. Truly, I've never been prouder to be an Oregonian.

I'm under no illusion that the threats this administration poses to our freedom have ended. But we have roadmaps now to overcome them.

So to Donald Trump, Kristi Noem (good riddance!), Pam Bondi (good riddance too!), Stephen Miller, and the whole cabal who tried to overrun us: you lost. You're going to lose again on November 3. And none of you are going to escape accountability for all your abuses of power (even if Trump fired you in the interim).

More soon,

Ron