100 Cups of Coffee in a City on Fire

By Jacob Grier
Sept 27, 2025
11:00 AM

... I especially like biking to coffee, which is one of the things that drew me to moving to Portland, Oregon, many years ago ...

... in 2023 ... biking to 100 coffee shops appealed to me as a way of getting back in touch with the city after the tumult and isolation of the pandemic years ... The project was also a kind of personal repudiation of the right-wing portrayal of the city as urban hellscape. At the same time that I was cruising along Portland’s river-spanning bridges and tree-lined streets, then-candidate Donald Trump was describing it as a “shambles” and “a burned-down hulk of a city.” Earlier this month, responding to something he saw on television, he insisted that “paid terrorists” are ruining the city, making it “like living in Hell.” As with other blue cities he’s targeting, the allegation of violent chaos is intended to establish a pretext for policing with the National Guard over the objections of local leaders—or as he put it on Thursday, “to do a pretty big number on those people in Portland that are doing that” ...

...Trump’s brand of politics feeds on the lie that multicultural cities are frightening and chaotic. If he follows through on his threats to deploy National Guard troops to Portland, it won’t be for the benefit of the people who call the city home. The intent will be to incite a spectacle of chaos, manufacturing a crisis to retroactively justify the belief that Democrat-run cities are in need of forceful takeover. The provocation will be the point.

Don’t fall for it. The Portland of right-wing imagination is a city engulfed by flames and violence, a vivid warning of what will befall other places if they vote for Democrats. “Unimaginably bad things would happen to America” if Biden were elected, Trump posted in 2020, specifically citing the “anarchy” of Portland. (As it happened, the only scene of mass anarchic violence following Biden’s election was enacted by Trump’s own supporters at the Capitol.) ...

https://slate.com/life/2025/09/portland-oregon-trump-national-guard-best-coffee-shops.html