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.
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 … andfootage 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 ifhe 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.
But Trump fell for it bigly – and then ran with it. (The Guardian’sRobert 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.
That law enforcement agencies across the US are swiftly converting themselves into military outfits is hardly a surprise at this point. The problem is that nothing seems to be slowing them down, not even the dismayed reactions of citizens supposedly under their care.
The government’s desire to offload its unused military hardware at deeply discounted rates has turned a few outliers into the new normal. Towns as with populations well under the 10,000 mark have secured Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles, supposedly in order to keep up with a non-existent arms race between the good guys and the bad guys.
The MRAPs are only the most visible symptom of law enforcement’s desire to dress for battle. Along with the vehicles (which normally run from $250,000-$750,000 but are routinely paid for by DHS grants awarded to requests that mention the word “terrorism” or “drugs” in a sufficiently terrified manner), agencies are also picking up military-grade weapons like grenade launchers and automatic weapons. The low prices and large grants make this an opportunity few agencies are able to resist.
The problems with this sort of ad hoc “mobilization” are numerous. The dangers of outfitting police with military gear can best be signaled with a combination of “if all you have is a hammer…” and Chekhov’s Gun. If you give police military gear, they’re going to want to use it. The very occasional shootout with heavily-armed criminals simply won’t satisfy the urge to deploy the new acquisitions. The slightly-more-occasional no-knock warrant served in the dead of night to known drug offenders won’t sufficiently scratch the itch. Consequently, this:
Police SWAT teams are now deployed tens of thousands of times each year, increasingly for routine jobs. Masked, heavily armed police officers in Louisiana raided a nightclub in 2006 as part of a liquor inspection. In Florida in 2010, officers in SWAT gear and with guns drawn carried out raids on barbershops that mostly led only to charges of “barbering without a license.”
All the training and all the equipment obtained over the years to… crack down on unlicensed barbering. (Or check water quality/“rescue” a baby deer from an animal shelter.) Square that with this statement by David Lutz, chief of the Edinburgh (IN) police department:
Lutz fully supports using the MRAP. “Oh, yeah, anything for the safety of officers,” he said. “SWAT is after the worst of the worst. It’s what they do.”
Crime, including domestic terrorism — the fear most commonly cited in equipment requests — has never been lower. But the nearly universal response has been to escalate. With no data on their sides, defenders of these acquisitions are forced to rely on speculation and worst-case hypotheticals to defend bringing an MRAP into communities where violent crimes like homicide are nearly nonexistent.
“I don’t like it. I wish it were the way it was when I was a kid,” [Neenah, WI police chief Kevin Wilkinson] said. But he said the possibility of violence, however remote, required taking precautions.
Remote possibilities are the stated “goal.” The reality is raided barbershops.
Others see it as nothing more than the natural progress of law enforcement, so entirely normal that what citizens perceive as a shift towards a police state is actually something so innocuous it can be taken to local schools to impress the kids.
Capt. Chris Cowan, a department spokesman, said the vehicle “allows the department to stay in step with the criminals who are arming themselves more heavily every day.” He said police officers had taken it to schools and community events, where it was a conversation starter.
Again, the facts simply don’t bear out this statement. Criminals aren’t arming themselves more heavily every day. Crime stats don’t bear that out. In other nations, this is happening, but the United States is not ground-zero for a drug war — or even a real war, for that matter. But yet more and more law enforcement agencies are pretending Neenah, WI and Pulaski County, IN (pop. 13,124) are the new Kabul, Afghanistan. [Warning: AUTOPLAY]
“The United States of America has become a war zone,” he said. “There’s violence in the workplace, there’s violence in schools and there’s violence in the streets. You are seeing police departments going to a semi-military format because of the threats we have to counteract. If driving a military vehicle is going to protect officers, then that’s what I’m going to do.” (Pulaski County Sheriff Michael Gayer)
The unintentionally irony of this claim (which also happens to be both completely ridiculous and profoundly disturbing) is that these “new war zones” will apparently be populated by US citizens returning from the “old” war zones. This is what’s awaiting our nation’s military veterans: their old equipment being deployed against them, because if they killed overseas, they’ll probably just keep on killing when they get home.
In the Indianapolis suburbs, officers said they needed a mine-resistant vehicle to protect against a possible attack by veterans returning from war.
“You have a lot of people who are coming out of the military that have the ability and knowledge to build I.E.D.’s and to defeat law enforcement techniques,” Sgt. Dan Downing of the Morgan County Sheriff’s Department told the local Fox affiliate, referring to improvised explosive devices, or homemade bombs. Sergeant Downing did not return a message seeking comment.
Law enforcement agencies seem to want a war. And if the public fails to give them one, they’ll apparently manufacture one themselves by sending heavily-armed men to enforce hairdresser regulations and use MRAPs to break up knife fights. On the bright side, this issue is receiving more and more attention, but so far, the ability of law enforcement agencies to obtain military gear far outpaces efforts directed at tempering this activity.
