Misled by video of 2020 protests shown on Fox, Trump threatens to invade Portland and ‘wipe out’ protesters
Donald Trump told reporters on Friday that he might send national guard troops to Portland, Oregon, apparently because he was misled about the scale of small protests outside an immigration detention facility there by a TV report which incorrectly presented video recorded during a protest in 2020 as having taken place in the city this summer.
“I will say this, I watched today, I didn’t know that was continuing to go on, but Portland is unbelievable, what’s going on,” Trump said. He then claimed, incorrectly, that he had seen video evidence of “the destruction of the city”.
In fact, a handful of protesters have demonstrated outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in a remote area of Portland along the south waterfront this year, but the scale of the protests, which attract dozens at most, is nothing like the 2020 protests that regularly drew thousands or tens of thousands of demonstrators to a central part of the city.
“Are you going into Portland?” a reporter asked Trump.
“Well, I’m going to look at it now because I didn’t know that was still going on; this has been going on for years,” the president replied. He then explained how he had been misled into the entirely false belief that the large-scale protests from 2020 had continued.
“We’ll be able to stop that very easily, but that was not on my list, Portland, but when I watched television last night, this has been going on,” Trump said.
The president did not cite the specific news report that he was basing his impression on, but his favorite channel, Fox News, broadcast a report on Thursday that mixed images of a recent protest in Portland, attended by dozens of protesters, with a viral video clip from 2020 of one protester, Christopher David, being pepper-sprayed in the face by a federal agent that was wrongly described as having been shot in June of this year.
The report focused mainly on one protest outside the facility on Tuesday, attended by dozens of protesters who brought a guillotine as a prop before being doused with chemical agents by federal officers.
“These are paid terrorists,” the president said, once again spreading a baseless conspiracy theory his administration amplified about anti-fascist protesters in 2020.
“These are paid agitators, these are professional. I watched that last night, I’m very good at this stuff. These are paid agitators, they get paid money by radical left groups,” the president claimed. He then went on to suggest that well-printed signs displayed by some protesters proved his theory.
“These are paid agitators and they’re very dangerous for our country and when we go there, if we go to Portland, we’re going to wipe ‘em out. They’re going to be gone. They won’t even stand to fight. They will not stay there. They’ve ruined that city.”
“It’s like living in hell,” the president said, describing an imaginary version of Portland that bears no resemblance to the actual city, in which fences around the federal courthouse that was the scene of mass protests in 2020 have now been removed and the central police headquarters no longer has boarded up windows.
Key events
Closing summary
This brings our surreal-time coverage of the second Trump administration to a close for the day. We will be back soon, but in the meantime, here are the latest developments:
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Hundreds of people were arrested in an immigration raid at a Hyundai battery factory in Georgia, most of them Korean nationals, despite the fact that a warrant said that just four people, with Spanish names, were targeted.
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Donald Trump signed an executive order authorizing the US Department of Defense to refer to itself as the “Department of War”, as part of an attempt to formalize his rebranding effort without the legally required act of Congress.
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Trump announced that the US will host the 2026 meeting of the G20 at his privately owned Doral golf course and spa in Miami.
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Asked about Florida’s move to lift mandates on vaccinations for schoolchildren, Trump said that officials have to “be careful” in removing access to vaccines he described as “amazing” and “incredible”.
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After watching a misleading report on small protests in Portland, Oregon over immigration, the president said that he might send troops there. A Fox News report on the protests used video recorded during a protest in 2020 and wrongly said it had been recorded in the city this summer.
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CNN reported that Trump “is weighing options for carrying out military strikes targeting drug cartels operating inside Venezuela, including possible strikes within the country”.
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The Pentagon made some immediate cosmetic changes to signage on Friday, after Donald Trump signed an executive order to rebrand the Department of Defense as the Department of War.
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Two leading Republican lawmakers, the House speaker Mike Johnson and Nancy Mace, both claimed this week that Trump had acted as an FBI informant to take down Jeffrey Epstein. They offered no evidence, but if it existed it would be in the files Trump has fought to keep from the public.
Republican lawmakers push unsourced claim Trump was an ‘FBI informant’ against Epstein
As the Republican leadership in the House continues to block a bipartisan effort to force the full release of files from the federal investigation into Jeffrey Epstein, the late sex offender who was once Donald Trump’s friend, several of them have started to make the same unsourced claim: that Trump aided the federal effort to prosecute Epstein.
On Tuesday, Nancy Mace, the South Carolina congresswoman who has supported the petition to force the release of the files, told a reporter for the Independent that she had no reason to believe that Trump has opposed hte releae of the files because they might be embarrassing to him.
“Donald Trump is the one who banned Jeffrey Epstein from Mar-a-Lago”, she said. “He was an FBI informant, and he talked to the feds to get this guy turned over. So Donald Trump is a hero in this.”
Then on Thursday, the House speaker, Mike Johnson, made the same claim in an interview with Manu Raju of CNN.
When the reporter said that Trump had called the effort to release the Epstein files “a hoax”, Johnson replied: “He’s not saying that what Epstein did is a hoax. It’s a terrible, unspeakable evil. He believes that himself. When he first heard the rumor, he kicked him out of Mar-a-Lago. He was an FBI informant to try to take this stuff down.”
As the conspiracy theory expert Mike Rothschild noted: “This has been a supposition among QAnon believers for years. Maybe they could release the files and prove it!”
Sign on Hegseth’s office door now says ‘Secretary of War’
The Pentagon made some immediate cosmetic changes to signage on Friday, after Donald Trump signed an executive order to rebrand the Department of Defense as the Department of War.
A video clip posted on social media by the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, showed workers replacing the sign on his office door with one that read “Secretary of War”.
Other images gathered by Pentagon reporters showed workers scraping letters that spelled out “Department of Defense” from the wall near Hegseth’s office.
The URL of the Pentagon’s official website was changed from from “defense.gov ” to “war.gov”.
Trump promises to send federal troops to police Chicago and New Orleans
Speaking at a dinner for Republican lawmakers on the newly paved-over lawn on the Rose Garden, Donald Trump boasted of what he called the success of his federal takeover of policing in the District of Columbia and promised to send troops to Chicago and New Orleans next.
“We’re going to make Chicago like this”, Trump said. “We’re going to come into New Orleans and we’re gonna make that place so safe. It’s got a little problem right now, a couple of headaches like murders. A lot of little murders going on, and we’re not going to stand for it”.
Trump says he is ‘not talking about’ regime change in Venezuela, as he reportedly weighs air strikes
Donald Trump refused to answer on Friday when a reporter asked him, amid reports of US ships and bombers massing in the Caribbean, if he would “like to see regime change in Venezuela”.
“We’re not talking about that”, the president said, “but we are talking about the fact that you had an election which was a very strange election, to put it mildly”.
He went on to say that “billions of dollars of drugs are pouring into our country from Venezuela”, in line with his administration’s claim that it is now at war with drug cartels operating in the country.
The president’s comments came after Fox News reported that the Pentagon is deploying 10 F-35 stealth fighter jets to Puerto Rico, joining eight US Navy destroyers. That prompted the Fox national security correspondent Jennifer Griffin to observe that there was no apparent reason that stealth fighter jets were needed for a counternarcotics mission.
“The F35s being sent to Puerto Rico are usually used for large bombing missions like the targeting of Iran’s nuclear facilities- a 5th generation supersonic fighter jet known for its lethality”, Griffin wrote on X. “It looks to me like the US military is going to war.”
Later on Friday, CNN reported that Trump “is weighing options for carrying out military strikes targeting drug cartels operating inside Venezuela, including possible strikes within the country”.
Such strikes would be an escalation from deadly attack on a boat from Venezuela in the Caribbean, which killed 11 people the administration suspected on smuggling drugs bound for the US.
During Trump’s first term in office, according to his defense secretary, Mark Esper, the president asked him on at least two occasions if the US military could “shoot missiles into Mexico to destroy the drug labs.”
Esper recounted the requests in his memoir, and wrote that when he objected, Trump suggested that “no one would know it was us” if the US fired “some Patriot missiles” and he would just deny that the US had carried out the strikes.
In 2019, when Trump reportedly considered forcing its president, Nicolás Maduro, from office, a Democratic congresswoman opposed to what she called “regime change wars” objected very strongly. “The United States needs to stay out of Venezuela”, Tulsi Gabbard wrote at the time. “Let the Venezuelan people determine their future. We don’t want other countries to choose our leaders–so we have to stop trying to choose theirs.”
Misled by video of 2020 protests shown on Fox, Trump threatens to invade Portland and ‘wipe out’ protesters
Donald Trump told reporters on Friday that he might send national guard troops to Portland, Oregon, apparently because he was misled about the scale of small protests outside an immigration detention facility there by a TV report which incorrectly presented video recorded during a protest in 2020 as having taken place in the city this summer.
“I will say this, I watched today, I didn’t know that was continuing to go on, but Portland is unbelievable, what’s going on,” Trump said. He then claimed, incorrectly, that he had seen video evidence of “the destruction of the city”.
In fact, a handful of protesters have demonstrated outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in a remote area of Portland along the south waterfront this year, but the scale of the protests, which attract dozens at most, is nothing like the 2020 protests that regularly drew thousands or tens of thousands of demonstrators to a central part of the city.
“Are you going into Portland?” a reporter asked Trump.
“Well, I’m going to look at it now because I didn’t know that was still going on; this has been going on for years,” the president replied. He then explained how he had been misled into the entirely false belief that the large-scale protests from 2020 had continued.
“We’ll be able to stop that very easily, but that was not on my list, Portland, but when I watched television last night, this has been going on,” Trump said.
The president did not cite the specific news report that he was basing his impression on, but his favorite channel, Fox News, broadcast a report on Thursday that mixed images of a recent protest in Portland, attended by dozens of protesters, with a viral video clip from 2020 of one protester, Christopher David, being pepper-sprayed in the face by a federal agent that was wrongly described as having been shot in June of this year.
The report focused mainly on one protest outside the facility on Tuesday, attended by dozens of protesters who brought a guillotine as a prop before being doused with chemical agents by federal officers.
“These are paid terrorists,” the president said, once again spreading a baseless conspiracy theory his administration amplified about anti-fascist protesters in 2020.
“These are paid agitators, these are professional. I watched that last night, I’m very good at this stuff. These are paid agitators, they get paid money by radical left groups,” the president claimed. He then went on to suggest that well-printed signs displayed by some protesters proved his theory.
“These are paid agitators and they’re very dangerous for our country and when we go there, if we go to Portland, we’re going to wipe ‘em out. They’re going to be gone. They won’t even stand to fight. They will not stay there. They’ve ruined that city.”
“It’s like living in hell,” the president said, describing an imaginary version of Portland that bears no resemblance to the actual city, in which fences around the federal courthouse that was the scene of mass protests in 2020 have now been removed and the central police headquarters no longer has boarded up windows.
Trump says US must be ‘very careful’ in removing mandates for ‘vaccines that are so amazing’
Asked about Florida’s move to lift mandates on vaccinations for schoolchildren, Donald Trump said that officials have to “be careful” in removing access to vaccines he described as “amazing” and “incredible”.
“I think we have to be very careful” Trump said in the Oval Office on Friday. “Look, you have some vaccines that are so amazing. The polio vaccine, I happen to think, is amazing. A lot of people think that Covid is amazing. You know, there are many people that believe strongly in that. But you have some vaccines that are so incredible and I think that you have to be very careful when you say that some people don’t have to be vaccinated”.
Trump said that the position adopted by Florida was “a tough stance”, given the risks to the community by unvaccinated children attending school.
“Look, you have vaccines that work; they just pure and simple work, they’re not controversial at all, and I think those vaccines should be used, otherwise some people are going to catch it and they endanger other people”, the president said.
“When you don’t have controversy at all, I think people should take it”, Trump added.
His remarks come one day after his anti-vaccine health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, told senators that he agrees with the views of an Israeli management professor he recently appointed to a key CDC vaccine advisory panel, Retsef Levi, who has said that mRNA vaccines against Covid-19 are deadly and should no longer be used.
At the same hearing, Bill Cassidy, a Republican senator who is also a medical doctor, suggested that Trump deserves a Nobel prize for Operation Warp Speed, which sped up the development of mRNA vaccines against Covid-19 in 2020.
Trump announces US will host 2026 G20 meeting at his Doral resort in Miami
Donald Trump just announced that the US will host the 2026 meeting of the G20 at his privately owned Doral golf course and spa in Miami.
The president was joined by Miami’s mayor, Francis Suarez, for the announcement in the Oval Office.
Trump initially did not mention that his Doral resort was the location, but confirmed it in response to a question from a reporter. The president then quickly moved to downplay concerns that he was using his office for personal profit, claiming that “we will not make any money on it” and that the location was chosen because “everybody wants it there”.
The president was asked if he intends to invite Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, to attend as an observer. He initially said that he had not yet considered that possibility, but has previously claimed that excluding Russia, over its initial invasion of Ukraine in 2014, was a mistake.
Minutes later, Trump was asked again and said that both Putin and China’s leader, Xi Jinping, were welcome to attend as observers. “I’d love them to, if they want to”, the president said. “If they want to, we can certainly talk”.
Eric Adams, the mayor of New York, just announced that he will not end his re-election campaign, despite reports that he was recently offered a position in the Trump administration if he would do so.
Trump claims ‘a lot of illegal aliens’ worked at raided Georgia plant, but warrant targeted just four
Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office, Donald Trump just claimed that “a lot of illegal aliens, some not the best of people” were working at a factory in Georgia raided by immigration officers on Friday, resulting in nearly 500 arrests.
However, a warrant for the raid on the HL-GA battery factory, which is being built to make car batteries for South Korean electric vehicles, identified just four “target persons”. The warrant was obtained and posted online by Politico.
Trump signs executive order directing Department of Defense to call itself ‘Department of War’
Donald Trump signed an executive order on Friday authorizing the US Department of Defense to refer to itself as the “Department of War”, as part of an attempt to formalize his rebranding effort without the legally required act of Congress.
According to a draft White House factsheet seen by the Guardian on Thursday, the order designates “Department of War” as a “secondary title”, as a way to get around the need for congressional approval to formally rename a federal agency.
The move, to have the executive branch use a name for the department Trump called “much more appropriate”, restores a name used until 1947, when Congress merged the previously independent war department and navy department with the air force into a single organization, known as the National Military Establishment. In 1949, Congress changed the name of the National Military Establishment to the Department of Defense, and made the army, navy and air force secretaries subordinate to a single, cabinet-level secretary of defense.
Referring to the creation of the defense department in 1949, the president said: “We decided to go woke and we changed the name to Department of Defense, so we’re going Department of War”.
Trump also introduced the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, as “our secretary of war” and claimed that the name change “really it has to do with winning”, suggesting that the US military had somehow been hampered by the choice “to be politically correct, or wokey” and, as a result, failed to win “wars that we would’ve won easily”.
The draft White House factsheet on Trump’s rebranding initiative implicitly acknowledged that only Congress can formally change the department’s name, saying that the order would authorize the defense secretary to propose legislation that would make the change permanent.
New York’s mayor, Eric Adams to make ‘important announcement regarding the future of his campaign’
Eric Adams, the sitting mayor of New York, has just announced a hastily scheduled event to begin 30 minutes from now in which he will “make an important announcement regarding the future of his campaign”. The event is scheduled for 4.30pm ET.
Adams, who is running as an independent and trails in the polls, has previously denied reports that he is in talks with the White House over taking a role in the Trump administration in exchange for ending his apparently doomed re-election campaign.
At a dinner with tech industry leaders last night, Donald Trump denied that he is encouraging Adams to drop out of the race to help New York’s former governor, Andrew Cuomo, defeat Zohran Mamdani, the 33-year-old democratic socialist who is the frontrunner to be elected mayor in November. Trump then immediately said that he would like Adams to drop out for that reason.
The New York Times reported on Friday that Adams met in person with Trump’s friend and diplomatic envoy Steve Witkoff to discuss the possibility of being nominated as US ambassador to Saudi Arabia.
Last year, federal prosecutors accused members of the Turkish government of a years-long influence campaign to cultivate and secure favors from Adams.
In the federal indictment, the US attorney for New York’s southern district alleged that government officials and business leaders with ties to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the Turkish president, showered Adams with thousands in illegal foreign campaign donations and free or heavily discounted luxury hotel stays and flights around the world.
Charges against Adams were dropped by the Trump justice department this year, over the strong objections of prosecutors who claimed that there was an explicit quid pro quo arrangement in which the mayor would cooperate with federal immigration enforcement in the city in return for corruption charges being dropped.
Should Adams become the US ambassador to Saudi Arabia, he would oversee diplomacy with the kingdom whose de-facto leader, crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, US intelligence believes approved the 2018 murder of the Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Turkey.
The day so far
Donald Trump plans to announce executive orders shortly in the Oval Office, with the theme we know most about so far being an instruction to rename the Department of Defense the “Department of War”.
Until then, here’s a quick recap of some of the day’s key developments:
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Trump criticized the European Union’s decision to fine Google $3.46bn over antitrust concerns and threatened a wider trade probe against the EU in response to the move.
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Health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr plans to announce that use of Kenvue’s popular over-the-counter pain medication Tylenol in pregnant women is potentially linked to autism, without including evidence for the claims, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter.
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Georgia is about to become the eighth state to send national guard troops to Washington DC to support Trump’s federal law enforcement big foot operation there, as the US capital sues the administration over its actions.
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Most of the 475 people arrested in a massive Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) raid at a Hyundai factory construction site in southern Georgia are Korean nationals.
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The federal Ice raid is being described as the biggest single Department of Homeland Security (DHS, the parent agency of Ice) enforcement operation at one side in the department’s history. The DHS was created after 9/11.
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Treasury secretary Scott Bessent called for renewed scrutiny of the Federal Reserve, including its power to set interest rates, as the Trump administration continues its efforts to exert control over the US central bank.
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Vladimir Putin has said any western troops placed in Ukraine would be “legitimate targets” for Russian strikes, upping the stakes for Kyiv as Donald Trump’s efforts to forge a peace deal show little sign that are any closer to success.
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Trump is sending 10 F-35 stealth fighter jets to Puerto Rico to bolster US military operations against drug cartels in the Caribbean region. The action to send jets to be based in the US territory follows a deadly US missile strike on Tuesday on a boat that the administration insisted was carrying 11 Venezuelan drug traffickers.
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And the big economics news of the day was that the US added just 22,000 jobs in August, continuing the slowdown amid Trump’s tariff policy.
Trump threatens trade investigation over EU antitrust fine against Google
Donald Trump has criticized the European Union’s decision to fine Google $3.46bn over antitrust concerns and threatened a wider trade probe against the EU in response to the move.
“We cannot let this happen to brilliant and unprecedented American Ingenuity and, if it does, I will be forced to start a Section 301 proceeding to nullify the unfair penalties being charged to these Taxpaying American Companies,” the president wrote on his Truth Social platform.
Google’s fine for breaching the EU’s competition rules by favoring its own digital advertising services marks the fourth such antitrust penalty for the company as well as a retreat from previous threats to break up the tech giant.
The European Commission, the 27-nation bloc’s executive branch and top antitrust enforcer, also ordered the US company to end its “self-preferencing practices” and take steps to stop “conflicts of interest” along the advertising technology supply chain.
The commission’s investigation found that Google had “abused” its dominant positions in the ad-technology ecosystem.
Google said the decision was “wrong” and that it would appeal.
Kennedy and HHS to link Tylenol use in pregnancy to autism – report
Health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr plans to announce that use of Kenvue’s popular over-the-counter pain medication Tylenol in pregnant women is potentially linked to autism, without including evidence for the claims, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter.
Kennedy, in a report, will also suggest a medicine derived from folate called folinic acid can be used to treat symptoms of autism in some people, the WSJ reported.
Tylenol, whose active ingredient is acetaminophen, is a widely used pain reliever, including by pregnant women.
The report, expected this month from the US Department of Health and Human Services, is likely to highlight low levels of folate, an important vitamin, and Tylenol taken during pregnancy, as well as other potential causes of autism, the report said.
The health department and Kenvue did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.
It is not the first time Kenvue or J&J have faced questions about the link between Tylenol and the condition. In 2023, a judge rejected claims the drug causes autism if mothers take it during pregnancy.
The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists says Tylenol is safe to use in pregnancy, though it recommends pregnant women consult their doctors before using it, as with all medicines.
Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine group formerly headed by Kennedy, has posted several times in recent weeks on social media site X about the potential link between Tylenol and autism.
Georgia to send national guard troops to Washington
Georgia is about to become the eighth state to send national guard troops to Washington DC to support Donald Trump’s federal law enforcement big foot operation there, as the US capital sues the administration over its actions.
Georgia governor Brian Kemp announced he would be sending 316 members of the state national guard to Washington later this month, in the latest indication that Trump’s law enforcement action there will drag on, the Associated Press reports.
Kemp, a Republican, said he will mobilize the roughly 300 troops in mid-September to take part in Trump’s DC operation to relieve soldiers from elsewhere who deployed earlier.
Georgia is proud to stand with the Trump administration in its mission to ensure the security and beauty of our nation’s capital,” Kemp said in a statement.
Trump initially called up 800 members of the District of Columbia national guard to assist federal law enforcement in his unilateral action to impose federal resources on DC with the stated goal of cracking down on crime, homelessness and illegal immigration. Since then, seven other Republican-led states have sent troops – Louisiana, Mississippi, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee and West Virginia.
