[What follows is one of the many merry articles in the Mercury's Winter Guide 2025. Find a print copy here, subscribe to get a copy mailed to you here, and if you're feeling generous this holiday season, support us here.—eds.]

This just in: 2025 has been a real shit show.

Trump’s reign of incompetent terror has already eclipsed the ham-fisted attempts of his first presidency—which was a dictatorship on training wheels. But! There is a weird silver lining here: Thanks largely to the recent thoughtless actions of King Fool, Portland is suddenly feeling itself again.

Apparently it took a demented despot to get everybody in Portland back on the same page, following a pandemic and a summer-long series of racial justice protests that caused the city’s millionaire class to lose their got-damned minds. If you’ll remember—and I’ll never forget—the city’s right-leaning business leaders, politicians, and other self-proclaimed “centrists” spent the better part of the early 2020s forming cynical political action committees, writing disparaging op-eds in national publications, concocting slanted push polls, and basically doing everything in their power to convince the world that Portland was a shithole.

But now? These same people—including the terminally tone-deaf Oregonian editorial board—suddenly just looooooove Portland again, and are even showing begrudging support for shutting down the city’s ICE facility and protecting immigrants from Trump and his masked kidnappers. The anti-Portland rants have slowed, the tourists (no longer scared for their lives) are returning, and for the first time since before the pandemic, these same millionaires (who love tax breaks more than their grandmothers) are exhibiting a smidgen of civic pride.

Okay… so are we supposed to be grateful now?

While it’s a slight relief not to be fighting enemies from without and within, there is one truth in the universe: I’m an unforgiving, vengeful bastard when crossed. I will never forget (or forgive) the havoc these wealthy, self-centered “leaders” manufactured and then unleashed on our city. I mean, c’mon… where do you think Trump got the idea to label Portland a “burning hell hole”? It didn’t just pop into his disintegrating mind, it was handed to him on a silver platter, courtesy of two straight years of local crybabies and their incessant belly-aching about tax hikes, boarded up windows, houseless people, and any attempts at police reform.

It’s so tempting to imagine or hope that these same crybabies have finally recognized the error of their ways—that they are finally ready to “Say Nice Things About Portland” and ask for a kumbaya moment.

Unfortunately for them, we’re not so gullible.

The same unbridled greed that capitalized on the Portlandia trend of the mid-2010s, building unsustainably expensive apartments, thereby forcing artists and creatives into the burbs or completely out of town (or onto the streets) is absolutely still there, bubbling beneath the surface. 

You see it in misleading headlines disparaging our new 12-person city council. You see it in ridiculous attempts to blame a county commissioner for an attack outside a public library. You see it in Mayor Wilson bowing to the pressure to criminalize houselessness. You see it in the words written by former alternative weeklies that increasingly endorse candidates who lean more to the right than left. You see it in the Portland Metro Chamber’s (FKA Portland Business Alliance) efforts to endanger our city by enabling Zenith to store their explosive oil and fuel next to the waterfront (an environmental disaster waiting to happen when the Big One hits).

My point is this: We need to be less worried about the incoherent blatherings and threats of the president, and more alert to the enemies within. Trump will eventually be gone, one way or another. Despots come and go. But the bad actors of capitalism have been working their asses off in Portland since the city was founded, and their greed and self-obsession will remain long after all of us are gone. Don’t let their sudden, lovesick proclamations of “Portland is BACK!” fool you—because it was their actions that got us into this mess in the first place.

Keep fighting for your neighbors and Portland. And if a local millionaire is suddenly patting you on the back? Be on the lookout for a knife.