Alas, it turned out there were only a few protesters milling around far in the distance, including one man in a chicken suit. Intense online mockery ensued, and this buffoonish display is now at the center of a good New York Times piece, which details how the White House is relying on MAGA media personalities to spread the deceptive impression of a city in large-scale civil collapse.
This may seem like a churlish objection given that the Times piece is well reported and informative. But this euphemistic “provocateur” language risks diminishing the force and quality of the paper’s own reporting. The piece notes that federal and state law enforcement have reported that protests there are small-scale, and nothing like the civil breakdown depicted by Trump to create a rationale to federalize Oregon’s National Guard (that’s temporarily blocked in court). Then it reports this:
The piece also refers to “dueling visions of reality.” But this isn’t a case of one side genuinely seeing things one way (as “comparative calm”) and the other side genuinely seeing them differently (as a “hellscape”). It’s a case of one side (law enforcement, local journalists) trying to faithfully depict what’s really happening, and the other side (MAGA) concertedly lying about it to serve corrupt ends that are comprehensively, even intentionally disconnected from facts on the ground.
Other MAGA figures have described the city as a “war zone” and “under siege by antifa” or “fallen to antifa” and even in a “state of open insurrection.”
The point is not that there are zero examples of leftist protesters getting violent—as the Times notes, a handful of leftists are getting prosecuted for just that. Rather, it’s that none of this remotely matches what Trump and MAGA are conjuring into being.
Some of these personalities probably do see themselves, to some degree, as putting on a show. But the broader aim of all this agitprop is far uglier. Trump has employed a form of state propaganda that may be unrivaled by any presidency in modern memory, and these MAGA influencers are generating material for that vile effort.
?BREAKING: DHS Sec. @KristiNoem just stared down violently Antifa rioters on the roof of a Portland ICE facility. pic.twitter.com/bwkX1yzEjD
— Bo Loudon (@BoLoudon) October 7, 2025Yet as Aaron Reichlin-Melnick points out, all of two people were identified as possible members of the gang, per CNN. While some others reportedly had criminal histories (some just involving drug possession), surely that doesn’t justify a massive hypermilitarized operation that terrorized scores or hundreds of people (the building has 130 units) and dragged children into the street.
If inflicting these operations on civilian populations incites violence in return, from Miller’s perspective that’s surely all the better. Asawin Suebsaeng reports for Zeteo that Trump advisers are nudging him to invoke the Insurrection Act if necessary to circumvent judicial checks on these authorities. That’s plainly what Miller hopes for.
Headlines in the Times, for instance, regularly fall short in just this way. They treat Trump and his administration’s stated rationales as things they authentically believe, whether it’s the claim that Harvard violates students’ civil rights to justify his state crackdown on academic freedom:
In these cases, casual readers will have zero inkling that these are bad-faith pretexts as opposed to genuinely held positions. The media needs to find new tools to convey these basic realities.
Propagandists are not “provocateurs.” Trump’s stated grounds for his abuses of power are not actual reasons, they are pretexts created for purely instrumental ends. And Kristi Noem did not “stare down” mobs of antifa terrorists in Portland. That’s because there isn’t any serious network of organized leftist violence in the United States, no matter how loudly Miller shrieks otherwise. Grasping how committed MAGA is to such industrial-scale deceptions is critical to getting this broader moment right.
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