The demonstrations highlighted a mass execution overseen by President Lincoln and also targeted Theodore Roosevelt.
Protesters in Portland, Ore., swept through the city on Sunday night, toppling statues of Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt and damaging the entrance to the Oregon Historical Society in a demonstration against colonization and the treatment of Native Americans. Protests around the country this year have mainly targeted statues featuring slave owners and symbols of the Confederacy, but the demonstrators in Portland focused on the former presidents as part of a protest billed as an “Indigenous Peoples Day of Rage.” President Trump seized on the toppling of the statues on Monday morning, citing the destruction as a reason to vote for him next month. “The Radical Left fools in Portland don’t want any help from real Law Enforcement which we will provide instantaneously,” he wrote on Twitter. “Vote!” Lincoln has long been celebrated as the president who brought an end to slavery in the United States, but the protesters sprayed the base of his statute in Portland with “Dakota 38” — a reference to the largest mass execution in U.
