The president retains claiming a serious American metropolis is burning down. Even although that is not even near true.
President Donald Trump told reporters on the White House on Tuesday: “I looked at Portland over the weekend. The place is burning down, just burning down.” Trump famous that an appeals court docket on Monday overturned one of the two rulings that have quickly blocked his try and deploy National Guard troops to Portland, Oregon, then added: “You look at a place like Portland, it’s just — it’s ridiculous, when they say that there’s no problem. The place is — it was on fire over the weekend.”
But Portland was nothing remotely resembling “burning down” over the weekend. It nonetheless wasn’t when Trump made these feedback on Tuesday. And it wasn’t when Trump made such claims on earlier events during the last month.
Photos of Portland over the weekend — together with photographs of an anti-Trump “No Kings” protest that was peacefully attended Saturday by tens of 1000’s of individuals — present a metropolis very a lot intact and never ablaze. Portland metropolis spokesperson Cody Bowman stated the hearth division was by no means even dispatched over the weekend to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement constructing that has been the middle of protest exercise in current months.
It’s attainable that Trump noticed photos of small fires that began close to the ICE constructing on Saturday after federal agents deployed tear gas and smoke devices to disperse protesters there. The Oregonian newspaper reported Tuesday in a debunking of Trump’s newest “burning down” claims: “Federal agents used tear gas against the crowd and sparks from canisters set several small fires, but rain and a lack of fuel quickly extinguished them.”
Leaving apart the matter of why these fires began, the president’s categorical declaration that a metropolis of 145 sq. miles and greater than 630,000 residents is “burning down” is clearly not substantiated by the transient existence of small fires on one block.
Bowman stated the Portland hearth division responded to only one constructing hearth over the weekend. He stated the division responded to about 9 whole fires a day from Friday to Monday, “significantly fewer” than throughout the identical interval final 12 months, and that about half of them have been trash fires. The Oregonian reported that a enterprise was broken by an “explosive” Friday afternoon hearth in an RV that had been parked beside it.
A single hearth engine was dispatched to deal with that incident, the hearth division informed the newspaper; this was a minor native story, nothing near the citywide inferno of the president’s suggestion. You can check out live video shots of Portland your self to see how removed from the reality the president’s claims have been as of this text’s publication on Wednesday.
Trump has made equally baseless assertions about Portland on a number of events in September and October. He has falsely said that “Portland is burning to the ground” and that “Portland’s been on fire for years”; falsely said town doesn’t “even have stores anymore” and that individuals “don’t even put glass up” on home windows, solely plywood; and groundlessly referred to “War ravaged Portland.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt defended Trump’s feedback on October 6 by encouraging reporters “to go on the ground and to take a look at for yourself.” The subsequent day, NCS correspondent Shimon Prokupecz made clear from the bottom in Portland that the president’s descriptions are indifferent from actuality.
“Keep in mind, this is all happening on less than a single block, not even in the city center,” Prokupecz stated of the protest clashes across the ICE constructing, which have included occasional flag-burning by protesters. “The rest of Portland is not in chaos. The streetcars are running, guitarists play outside the famed Powell’s bookstore, and there’s a guided tour in Pioneer Courthouse Square. If you weren’t looking for it, you’d never know anything was happening on that one city block outside the ICE building.”
Portland residents and authorities officers within the metropolis and the state of Oregon, from the police chief to the mayor to the governor, have all tried for weeks to appropriate Trump’s narrative.