Though President Donald Trump is famous for changing his mind on issues based on whom he last spoke to, his personality is far less variable. The hunger for authoritarian powers, the mixing of national and personal interests, the hostility to truth — all these qualities remain as evidently detrimental as they were on the first day of his first term as president. But a decade after he entered politics, there’s something new to fear about Trump: We can no longer be sure whether what’s informing the president is even real.
For several weeks, the president has insisted that Portland is “war-ravaged,” “on fire” and “bombed-out.” Obviously, this doesn’t match reality: There have been occasional clashes between protesters and counterprotesters around the city’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility, but the demonstrations have been almost entirely peaceful and largely confined to one city block. Just before Trump ordered National Guard troops to the city, The New York Times reports, federal officers and police described the protests as “low energy” and “uneventful.”
Indeed, if there were even a single video truly showing a city at war, you can be sure Fox News and other right-leaning outlets would be broadcasting the footage 24/7. But they’re not — and that absence is particularly noteworthy given how Trump characterizes his sources. “Unless they’re playing false tapes, this looks like World War II,” he said on Sept. 30. “It’s like the movies you see for the kids, I guess not only the kids, adults also, where you have these bombed-out cities and these bombed-out people,” he said at the White House roundtable on Wednesday.
To be clear, there is a long history of presidents receiving distorted assessments of reality. When the George W. Bush administration wanted war with Iraq, for instance, U.S. intelligence agencies gave the White House the “evidence” it was looking for — supposed proof of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction that swiftly fell apart after the invasion of Iraq. For Trump in particular, the influence of cable news segments, especially Fox News, on his view of the world has also been extensively documented since his first term.
In this instance, Fox News seems to have helped spark Trump’s interest in the city: While protests outside ICE’s facility in Portland began in June, the president didn’t announce a National Guard deployment until early September. “That was not on my list, Portland, but when I watched television last night, this has been going on,” he said on Sept. 5. As The Guardian reported, on Sept. 4, Fox News broadcast a segment about protests in Portland “that featured video of a 2020 protest wrongly described as having taken place this summer.”
But while the network has breathlessly depicted Portland as “conquered by antifa,” the footage in Fox’s segments doesn’t match Trump’s descriptions. Even the right-wing influencers who have flocked to Portland in recent days — at times seeming to seek out clashes with anti-ICE protesters — have not posted anything like what Trump claims to have seen.
So where is Trump seeing “movies” or “tapes” of “bombed-out” Portland “on fire?” We don’t know.
That’s particularly concerning given the rise of AI videos, with fake videos of protesters going viral among MAGA supporters on social media. And we don’t have to speculate whether Trump is susceptible to this slop. Just two weeks ago, as my colleague Steve Benen wrote, Trump shared (before later taking down) “a video of a fake, AI-generated Fox News segment in which a computer-generated version of himself declared that ‘every American will soon receive their own MedBed card’ that will grant them access to new ‘MedBed hospitals.’”
Again, we have no idea from where Trump conjured the image of a leveled city where “you don’t even have stores anymore.” But if Trump can be fooled by a fake video with his own face and voice, what else is fooling him? If such delusions were expressed by a random citizen, it would be sad, but innocuous. Coming from the president of the United States, it’s still pathetic, yet it’s anything but harmless.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
