President Trump discusses failure of Portland’s Dem leadership with Andy Ngo in the face of Antifa violence

Ngo recounted growing up in Portland, saying that it had always been "left wing, very progressive." As a student at Portland State in 2016, Ngo was the editor at a student paper and saw firsthand the riots that occurred in Portland during the night of the election in which Trump won the first time. "It was the first time that I saw groups dressed in black with their faces covered. This was four years before Covid. Some of them were waving the black flag of anarchism, some the red flag of Marxism."

"Within seconds, they would ravage one street to another, to another, to another. And the next day I would read the legacy media, which I still read at that time," and he was "shocked to see that the narrative was that these, in my view, anti-democratic political violence was legitimate acts of protest because people were" concerned about "racism or all these other lies." This led him to continue going out with a camera over the next years to document.

"And in 2019, it led to me nearly losing my life." While out covering "another Antifa protest-turned-riot," he was ambushed in a mob beating. "I had never been in a fight. I didn’t even realize that I was being assaulted until seconds in, and the punches came from everywhere." He was left bloodied by the mob "and then they threw all the drinks in my eyes to humiliate me further and to laugh at me."

Ngo was rushed to the hospital at the time and a CT scan discovered a subarachnoid hemorrhage, or bleeding in the brain, "and [he] nearly died." He said that after the attack, some "seemed to suggest that I had deserved it, because they branded me far-right."

"It’s like because I didn’t die in that attack, there was another round of people who wanted to finish me off, but I continued." He said when he returned to cover unrest in 2021 undercover, "naively thinking that enough time had passed," he was "chased through the streets of downtown and beaten, nearly choked out." He was choked so hard that the blood vessels in his eyes burst, and was hospitalized again."

Ngo told Trump, "Thank you so much for acknowledging Antifa and for directing your administration to treat them as domestic terrorists. It’s going to be really challenging, because how they organize is that they are decentralized, autonomous, and they operate on deception, and we’re still, to this day, told that they don’t exist, that it’s a figment of our imagination."

Trump noted local and state leadership, saying, "the amazing thing is, you look at Portland and you see fires all over the place. You see fights and, I mean, just violence. It’s just so crazy. And then you talk to the governor, and she acts like everything is totally normal. There’s nothing wrong."

He later added, "and the amazing thing is, the people want us to be there. The people, when they get the real people that live there, many of them have left, but the real people want us to—the same thing in Chicago."