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