In the days since Donald Trump directed his “Secretary of War” to marshal troops against “domestic terrorists” in Portland, Oregon, encouraging the use of “full force” in a city he likened to a “war zone,” I have been hanging around the demonstration that the president wants to crush. What I’ve found is an atmosphere that is more like a carnival than combat.

By some accounts, this all started back in June, when a group of friends decided to pitch a tent outside an ICE facility in the city. “I was like, ‘Oh, hell yeah! Occupation against deportation! Let it begin, bitches!’” Andy Siebe, who has cropped, caramel-color hair and thin, rounded stumps for teeth, told me when I got to the encampment site, which consists of a heap of cots and tents and medical supplies.

The action, Siebe told me, quickly gained the notice of Andy Ngo, a social-media influencer famous in right-wing circles for highlighting social unrest in the city, originally as a student at Portland State University and now as a regular guest on Fox News. The attention Ngo directed to the protest prompted more people to join it. “That’s what we call unintended consequences,” Siebe said.

Except that it wasn’t unintended. A frenzy of protest was probably just what Ngo wanted to see. Action, reaction; everyone has a part to play. Now Trump is playing his. The president’s promised deployment follows similar mobilizations in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., but Portland is the first place where Trump has ordered up troops in explicit reference to “antifa,” a contraction of the word anti-fascist that has become associated with a diffuse group of left-wing protesters, some of whom use militant tactics such as vandalism and arson. Trump recently sought to label antifa a “domestic terrorist organization”—a designation that doesn’t exist in American law. Portland could also see the first deployment of troops to a U.S. city since the assassination of Charlie Kirk, which inflamed political divisions and fueled calls on the right for reprisal.

Read: Why is the National Guard in D.C.? Even they don’t know.

The protest that provoked the president is occurring in a neighborhood known as the South Waterfront, a high-rise retail and residential area on the site of a former industrial brownfield. On one side is the Willamette River; on the other, Interstate 5, with the West Hills in the distance. It’s a narrow strip of land, claustrophobic. Over the past several days, the protests have been small, usually involving no more than a few dozen people, but when the assembly grows, it gets crowded quickly. Some of the protesters cover their face, but their masks are more likely to have sparkles and streamers than the insignia of any particular warring faction. The weapon they wield is the iPhone—to document, to provoke, to stir up outrage on X or TikTok.

Even the sporadic violence outside the ICE facility seems ritualized.