So Donald Trump Is Declaring War On US Cities Based On Fake Fox News Footage And Nonsense His ‘People’ Tell Him

from the this-all-seems-bad dept

Who’s running the country?

That question became terrifyingly urgent this weekend when the President of the United States admitted he was preparing to send US military forces into an American city based entirely on old Fox News footage and lies from his advisors.

Tim Cushing had a story yesterday about Trump’s bizarre declaration of war on Portland, threatening to deploy the US military against a city experiencing nothing more than a few tame protests. But the most alarming detail emerged later: in a conversation with Oregon’s governor, Tina Kotek, Trump admitted he had no idea what was actually happening in Portland:

“I spoke to the governor, she was very nice,” Trump said. “But I said, ‘Well wait a minute, am I watching things on television that are different from what’s happening? My people tell me different.’ They are literally attacking and there are fires all over the place…it looks like terrible.”

Read that again. The President of the United States—who has access to better intelligence than anyone on Earth—is moving to deploy military forces against American citizens based on what he saw on TV and what his “people” told him, without bothering to verify whether any of it was real.

As for what he was watching on television, it didn’t take long to figure out what he likely saw, as reporter Phil Bump highlighted on his blog: Fox News spent Friday showing five-year-old b-roll of footage from protests in 2020.

So what had Trump seen? Given his tendency to stay tuned to Fox News we can make some educated guesses.

Trump made his pledge to send troops to Portland on Saturday morning. On Friday, Fox News had several segments in which purported violence in the city was shown.

One featured Tricia McLaughlin, a Homeland Security official who often appears on cable shows. As she was discussing an executive order Trump signed, the channel showed b-roll of events in Portland.

Sept. 26, 2025. (Internet Archive)

You will notice, though, that the footage was not timestamped for any date in September. Instead, they showed an encounter apparently involving tear gas that occurred back in June … and footage from protests in July 2020.

In the next hour, they ran the same playbook. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich was on, talking about how dangerous the left was next to footage of Portland violence from July 2020.

Sept. 26, 2025. (Internet Archive)

If this is what Trump was seeing, one can see how he might have been confused about the timeline (particularly if he wasn’t wearing his glasses). You can also see how the average Fox News viewer might be under the impression that Portland is a violent hellscape.

There’s a lot more in Bump’s piece about how the White House seems to be living in a fantasy world of their own making.

Dan Froomkin at Press Watch notes that it probably wasn’t just the Friday coverage that caused Trump to do this, because Fox News has been playing similar b-roll clips for weeks now, and Trump seems obsessed with these five-year-old videos that keep replaying, thinking that they’re live.

And yet ever since Trump watched a Sept. 4 segment on Fox News’s “Special Report with Bret Baier,” he’s been spouting outrageous fever dreams about the place.

Here’s the segment. It includes at least two scenes that date back to the much more widespread and aggressive Black Lives Matter protests of five years ago. One of the scenes from 2020 shows a man getting tear-gassed in the face; the other shows the burning of the base of a downtown fountain.

But Trump fell for it bigly – and then ran with it. (The Guardian’s Robert Mackey, to his credit, reported it at the time.)

Here’s what Trump said. I’m quoting him at length because the White House no longer posts transcripts of his comments:

Trump: But I will say this, I watched today and I didn’t know that was continuing to go on, but Portland is unbelievable. What’s going on in Portland, the destruction of the city.

Q. Are you going into Portland?

Trump: Well I’m gonna look at it now because I didn’t know that was still going on. This has been going on for years. So we’ll be able to stop that very easily, we’ll be able to stop, but you know, that was not on my list, Portland, but when I watched television last night, this has been going on –you wouldn’t be standing, if you were the mayor, you wouldn’t be, can you imagine what they’re doing? They’re walking and throwing smoke bombs into stores. These are paid terrorists, OK? These are paid agitators, these are profess — I watched that last night. I’m very good at this stuff — these are paid agitators.”…

These are paid agitators and they’re very dangerous for our country, and when we go there, if we go to Portland, we’re gonna wipe ’em out. They’re gonna be gone and they’re gonna be gone fast — they won’t even stand to fight. They will not stay there. They’ve ruined that city. I have people that used to live in Portland, they’ve left, most of them have left, but what they’ve done to that place is just, it’s like living in hell.

On September 25, he was at it again, this time with vice president JD Vance nodding along:

Trump: When you go out to Portland and you see what’s happening in Portland, this is like —

Vance: Crazy.

Trump: — nobody’s ever seen anything like it every night and this has gone on for years. They just burned the place down and, you know, the shop owners, most of them have left. But the few shops that are open, they just use plywood and just like, three quarter inch plywood. They don’t put storefronts up because they know it’s going to be burned down. These are professional agitators.

Vance: That’s right.

So this started a few weeks ago due to Fox News playing b-roll from years ago, Trump thinks it’s live shots… and no one ever bothers to correct him, because no one corrects the mad king.

Even if the conversation with the governor made him think twice, he still moved to mobilize 200 National Guard members to go to Portland to fight a domestic war that doesn’t exist. Oregon quickly filed for an injunction blocking this nonsense, and it also suggests that Trump appears to making decisions based on believing that Fox News’ background b-roll from five years ago is happening now:

Nonetheless, on September 5, 2025, Fox News aired a report on Portland ICE protests that included misleading clips from Portland protests in 2020

Shortly thereafter, President Trump appeared to reference events in the same misleading FoxNews report when speaking to the press. A reporter asked which city President Trump planned to send troops to next, and he said he was considering targeting Portland because of news coverage the night before. President Trump alleged that “paid terrorists” and “paid agitators” were making the city unlivable, further stating “[a]nd when we go there, if we go to Portland, we’re gonna wipe them out. They’re going to be gone and they’re going to be gone fast. They won’t even stand the fight.”

President Trump later designated Antifa a terrorist organization on September 19, 2025. Afterward, he described a plan to insert federal personnel in cities such as Chicago, Memphis, and Portland. He stated “Have you seen Portland at all? You take a look what’s happening in Portland. It’s uh I mean, this has been going on for years. It’s just people out of control. Crazy. We’re going to stop that very soon.”

While answering questions from the press on September 25, 2025, the President baselessly insisted people had “just burned the place down.”

So half of this story is that we have a mad king who will fall for anything he sees on Fox News without bothering to first find out whether it’s true or not.

That’s terrifying!

But the other part is that his “people” around him are clearly abusing the senile President to take advantage of the situation to play out their own violent fantasies. Greg Sargent at the New Republic has a story about a back-and-forth he had with Steve Bannon, who flat out tells Sargent that all of this is Trump deputy chief-of-staff Stephen Miller’s doing:

I asked Bannon if he thinks Miller’s tweet means federal law enforcement should and will now criminally investigate groups who describe ICE as “authoritarian.”

“Yes,” Bannon replied. “Stephen Miller is correct—more importantly he’s in charge.”

Miller’s long-standing hunger for using federal force against those he views as domestic opponents now has the perfect vehicle: a president so detached from reality that he can be manipulated into military action by old Fox News clips and whispered lies from advisors who know exactly which buttons to push.

All of this is fucking terrifying. The institutions designed to prevent exactly this kind of abuse—Congress, the Cabinet, the Supreme Court—have either abdicated their responsibilities or actively enabled this moment.

But there’s a more immediate question: if the President can be manipulated into deploying military force by Fox News b-roll and vengeful advisors, what else might they convince him to do? Yesterday it was AI deepfakes of himself promoting fake medical devices. Today it’s military deployments based on five-year-old footage. Tomorrow?

Should the United States survive this, there is going to need to be a serious reckoning over how we fix our institutions to protect against such horrifying abuses.

Filed Under: , , , , , , ,

Rate this comment as insightful
Rate this comment as funny
You have rated this comment as insightful
You have rated this comment as funny
Flag this comment as abusive/trolling/spam
You have flagged this comment
The first word has already been claimed
The last word has already been claimed
Insightful Lightbulb icon Funny Laughing icon Abusive/trolling/spam Flag icon Insightful badge Lightbulb icon Funny badge Laughing icon Comments icon

Comments on “So Donald Trump Is Declaring War On US Cities Based On Fake Fox News Footage And Nonsense His ‘People’ Tell Him”

Subscribe: RSS Leave a comment
38 Comments
Anonymous Coward says:

Should the United States survive this, there is going to need to be a serious reckoning over how we fix our institutions to protect against such horrifying abuses.

Maybe put a maximum age limit on serving as president?

Trump is also a pawn. For years he told lies about himself and others. He thought he was in control and at times he was able to manipulate things independently. But now the past is coming back to bite him in more public ways and he is so surrounded by incompetent and evil people. So they either no longer care enough or are unable to protect trumps image anymore.

May he be removed from office soon.

This comment has been deemed insightful by the community.
Anonymous Coward says:

Re:

Trump was unhinged from reality in 2016. I don’t think he’s measurably more incoherent than he was then. He has always been a (proudly) ignorant dupe. Democracy doesn’t an age limit so much as it needs multiple limits against Ignorant Dupes (of any age) and the bad actors who exploit them (of any age).

Stephen Miller is barely 40 years old. Whatever definition of elderly you want to work with he’s not too old. He’s just also a menace to free society.

The US actually has several checks and balances against an executive going amok. It’s just that congress and the courts have gone completely supine at the exact moment we need them most. If there’s a fundamental flaw with the American system, it’s however the fuck that happened.

Arianity (profile) says:

Re:

Maybe put a maximum age limit on serving as president?

From a practical standpoint, the issue is it’d require a Constitutional Amendment. The requirements for the presidency are set by the Constitution and it’s not legal to layer things on top.

From a more theoretical standpoint, it’s a bit awkward since it’s technically anti-democratic.

Stephen T. Stone (profile) says:

Re: Re:

it’s a bit awkward since it’s technically anti-democratic

I don’t see how. We all recognize that as people age, they decline mentally, be it gently or steeply or somewhere in-between. A maximum age on the presidency (and on members of Congress) ensures that the presidency will not be held by people whose cognitive decline will be the greatest. Some (awful, horrible, no-good very bad) people still make jokes about how women can’t hold the presidency because they’d launch nukes during their period. Do you really want that power in the hands of a man so cognitively impaired that he believes footage of riots from five years ago is footage from five days ago?

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re: Re:

A maximum age on the presidency (and on members of Congress) ensures that the presidency will not be held by people whose cognitive decline will be the greatest.

No, it doesn’t, because age is not perfectly correlated with cognitive decline. In other words, the effect would not be ensured; there’s no reason to think that a young person could not have a greater decline.

But even if the logic were valid, I don’t agree that the decline is the problem. That suggests it’d be fine to have an idiot in charge, provided their idiocy didn’t increase after the vote. One could reasonably argue that Trump remains exactly who people voted for last year.

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re: Re:3

Sure. Why not? It’s kind of bullshit anyway. I guess it’s meant as a proxy for experience or maturity, but the 79-year-old toddler shows us how well that works. And then there’s the 41-year-old Vance, who wouldn’t be stopped by an upper age limit unless the age range got very tiny indeed; similarly for many of “Trump’s people”.

Something like a minimum number of years in government could work better. I don’t have a good idea for how to prevent Trump-like presidents; rules can only go so far if people want an idiot who’s bad at the job. One thing that seems obvious—now—is that too many laws defer to the President for no good reason. Maybe the President should go back to merely “presiding”; that is, “sitting before” the people doing the real work (and perhaps guiding conversations, breaking ties, and so on, but not acting unilaterally).

Arianity (profile) says:

Re: Re: Re:

I don’t see how.

Basically, either:

Voters want to vote for that person, in which case you’re preventing them from doing so.

Or voters don’t want to vote for that person, in which case you don’t need it.

Do you really want that power in the hands of a man so cognitively impaired that he believes footage of riots from five years ago is footage from five days ago?

I can’t think of a better solution, and voters don’t seem to be able to not screw it up, so I’m ok with it. But it does kind of give me the ick.

It just feels kind of weird to trust voters to pick someone to run the country, if they can’t even handle the most basic part of not picking someone who isn’t senile. And it’s not even just partisanship, you had people in Congress like Dianne Feinstein

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: Re:

If you can have a minimum age limit of 35 you can have a maximum age limit of 60 or 65.

If you cannot have a maximum age limit then the floor is legal adulthood (so ends up being 18 or 21)

It might be written in the constitution with no maximum limit but a sane SCOTUS won’t tell Congress they have to call a Constitutional Convention merely to apply a maximum age limit.

The purpose isn’t to avoid ‘the wrong people’ getting into the seat anyway because of the voters voting ‘fuck you’ it’s solely to cut off the tactic of voting in a corpse and then propping it up then hiding the cognitive decline and potentially the death certificate without passing to the VP to retain political cover for anti-democratic actions.

The latter overrides the argument that it’s limiting or vetoing the people’s choice.

On top of this you have credible evidence Trump never won the election anyway and the entire Cabinet is now illegitimate both from the 2024 election tabulation machines and from the insurrectionist clauses the SCOTUS ignored, so not only is that another subject entirely but a new Democratic president would have to order the arrest of the entire SCOTUS panel anyway (and then let the liberal jurists off the hook in exchange for voluntary resignation to reset all nine seats instead of packing the court)

Sooner or later the opposition party is going to have to come to terms with the fact that the ‘unitary executive theory’ is going to necessarily give them the tools and precedent to blow past a lot of due process and the Constitution itself to render the GOP’s Right to Rule null and void outright and force one or more new right wing political parties with none of the GOP’s institutional, media and campaign/finance advantages just to restore sanity to the country’s politics and restore the ability to do foreign diplomacy.

That’s going to require breaking a few eggs and flexing judicial precedent and the Constitution itself until a new Constitutional Convention can be called to amend it to actually make sense for the modern age. Without doing this and succumbing to due process hand-wringing, tradition will continue to get used as a shield for fascism and then be discarded.

Uriel-238 (profile) says:

Re: Upper age limit for presidency

That’s the beginning. We’ve already seen that an administration will hold onto power after the President is no longer fit to serve, whether via Wilson’s stroke or Reagan’s alzheimers or George W. Bush’s… lack of grasp on reality. In fact, it is these sorts of scenarios that allow for oligarchs and shadow regents to slip in and take over, since they can act without personal responsibility.

Of course, SCOTUS, by giving POTUS immunity (governed by SCOTUS itself) has created circumstances in which the President can still have his faculties and still govern in bad faith, or be directed to do so by a kitchen cabinet.

So we’re going to need a far greater amount of reform than some new age brackets in order to restore the good-faith integrity of the federal executive… or for that matter, the legislative and judicial as well.

As terrifying a constitutional convention might be, we should have one. There’s too little of what is left to be worth salvaging.

This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.

This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.

Anonymous Coward says:

“Fiery but mostly peaceful”

….standing in front of a literal riot, a building burning down.

This crap just doesn’t work anymore. Antifa (and others) are literally attacking ICE facilities and officers. You can’t lie and tell people that isn’t happening. You can’t blame it on Fox News. It’s real, the video evidence is numerous and EVERYWHERE, several people are dead now, and yes, it’s perfectly willing to use a the National Guard to fight what is an insurrection. Remember when you hated supposed “insurrections”, yeah?

The lying just isn’t working, please stop.

Anonymous Coward says:

Re:

It’s weird how you quote something pretending it’s in this article when it’s not.

Literally everything in your comment is a lie. Yes, Fox News feeds this kind of lie to gullible suckers like yourself, but it’s pretty pathetic that you believe it.

No one is attacking ICE facilities. People are protesting because ICE is kidnapping people. There is no insurrection. There are no riots. There are no burning buildings (other than the burning Mormon church set ablaze by a vocal Trump supporter).

Fox News lies to you.

And you’re too fucking stupid to realize how gullible you are. You’re a mark. And an easy one.

There is no war zone in Portland. There are no “antifa” attacks. Antifa is a joke that was made up to make people like you look even dumber for believing it’s a real thing.

My god you are stupid.

This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.

This comment has been deemed insightful by the community.
ThatOtherOtherGuy says:

End of Commander in Chief...

The President as commander in chief needs to be severly restricted. The executive office should not be able to deploy ANY troops (active or reserve) for longer than 10 days without Congressional approval.

That is more than enough time for Congress to convene, debate, and vote of the deployment(s).

ThatOtherOtherGuy says:

The cult of personality is collapsing...

Trump’s cult of personality was being used by a group of truly evil people to promote their own Fourth Reich agenda.

With Trump’s failing health and mental decline, it is now apparent to everyone that he is not running his own life or the Presidency.

I’m not sure that even hardcore MAGA Trump supporters will fall inline with these Nazis using Trump as their strawman.

That One Guy (profile) says:

He and those around him WANT violence so they can employ it

I think the primary explanation is even simpler, and unfortunately it’s a party/cult wide problem: He believed what he was told not so much because his brain is increasingly failing(though it is) but because he wants to believe it, and in the post-reality party what you want to be true matters more than demonstrable reality.

AMS says:

Too old?

Trump appears to be suffering from some sort of dementia. To me it looks as if other people are using him as a puppet to further their own agendas with no accountability. His focus is seemingly on amassing as much wealth for himself as possible and is content/forced to leave running the country to others.

A phrase keeps running through my mind. “In the court of the mad king”.

buttwipinglord (profile) says:

Where are the lawsuits against Faux News then? Where are all the apologies they have spend decades screaming about when others mislead people? Lawsuit for manipulating every single thing Drumpf said during the election even in the middle of an interview with Kamala.
It’s increasingly clear that the US is toast and nothing short of tearing down the entire govt system,constitution be damned because it clearly doesn’t mean shit when the entire checks and balances have decided to make themselves irrelevant for dear leader.

I’ll be waiting for WW3 against the new Axis powers of the US, Russia and Israel.

Peter Graham says:

Lies about Portland

I was in Portland from Sept. 2 until the 11th & there were absolutely no violent or even demonstrations of any consequence taking place & I was in the downtown, SE & SW areas of the city. What little apparently took place thereafter was of no danger to the supposedly burning & ˋwar ravaged´ city whatsoever! All the footage Trump was shown were from other cities & even countries (the police uniforms from south of the U.S. border bore the emblems POLICIA!) Since Trump can barely manage the English language it is hardly surprising that he simply failed to notice the language from one of these purportedly Latin American countries.

Add Your Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Have a Techdirt Account? Sign in now. Want one? Register here

Comment Options:

Make this the or (get credits or sign in to see balance) what's this?

What's this?

Techdirt community members with Techdirt Credits can spotlight a comment as either the "First Word" or "Last Word" on a particular comment thread. Credits can be purchased at the Techdirt Insider Shop »

Follow Techdirt

Techdirt Daily Newsletter

Subscribe to Our Newsletter

Get all our posts in your inbox with the Techdirt Daily Newsletter!

We don’t spam. Read our privacy policy for more info.

Ctrl-Alt-Speech

A weekly news podcast from
Mike Masnick & Ben Whitelaw

Subscribe now to Ctrl-Alt-Speech »
Techdirt Deals
Techdirt Insider Discord
The latest chatter on the Techdirt Insider Discord channel...
Loading...