The autumnal equinox was a nothingburger, and the leaves have barely begun to change, but real fall will arrive crisply at midnight Tuesday when the calendar finally flips over into Red October. The Phillies somehow ended the regular season with the second-best record in Major League Baseball, and we also learned Sunday that they won’t face the Curse of Citi Field after an epic collapse by the New York Mets. My 1969 self is locked in my bedroom across the street from Don Draper in Chilmark, crying.
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Trump saw a five-year-old riot on Fox News, so he’s sending in the troops
When fascism finally came to America, it was indeed wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross — but it was helped over the top by something that’s known in the television business as b-roll.
B-roll is the background footage that TV producers splice into a news report to pad it out — a montage of the president greeting world leaders in a story about foreign diplomacy, for example — and it used to be pretty innocuous. Then along came the Fox News Channel, and b-roll became an integral part of its plan to inculcate conservative thought across America.
For the last five years, since the protests triggered by the May 2020 police murder of George Floyd, it’s been routine for Fox producers to illustrate stories about Black civil rights with the most violent moments — burning buildings, overturned cars, or whatnot — from weeks of demonstrations that were overwhelmingly peaceful
So it was on the recent night of Sept. 4 when a routine Fox News report about the very small but occasionally contentious protests outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Portland, Ore. were amped up to 11 by mixing in some hellfire-and-brimstone from their Worst of 2020 vintage collection. For better or worse, the report seems to have gotten the only ratings that truly matter at Rupert Murdoch’s flagship media outlet, a party of one…
…Donald John Trump, the 47th president of the United States.
“Portland, it’s unbelievable what’s going on in Portland. The destruction of the city. I’m going to look at it now,” Trump said at a news conference in the Oval Office the following day. He also implied that protesters were tossing “smoke bombs,” probably a reference to tear gas that was actually deployed by federal agents against protesters. He added of the TV news report that “I didn’t know that was still going on.”
That’s because it wasn’t, really.
Yes, there were those small ongoing protests at the remote site several miles from downtown Portland, some arrests and occasional confrontations — but apparently nothing as dramatic as what was happening more than five years ago. What’s more, top brass in the Portland police testified under oath in a federal lawsuit that a lot of the disruption was actually provoked by the feds. Portland Police Bureau Assistant Chief Craig Dobson said that federal agents were “night after night, actually instigating and causing some of the ruckus that’s occurring down there.”
But in Portland, legend has become fact. This weekend, Trump — with fast-falling poll numbers and beleaguered by demands to release files about his one-time friend, the late wealthy sex fiend Jeffrey Epstein — announced on Truth Social that he’s sending federal troops into “war-ravaged Portland,” with orders to use “full force” against protesters.
The president’s demand, which apparently surprised top officials at the Pentagon along with everyone else, triggered overlapping reactions — anger and anxiety over an increasingly authoritarian United States that’s shattering norms and arguably laws in deploying troops on American soil, but also ridicule of Trump’s absurd vision of the Pacific Northwest.
Within minutes, denizens of Portlandia posted their visits to farmers markets or bike outings on a beautiful, and peaceful, fall Saturday. Eventually, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth did authorize a limited operation — federalizing 200 soldiers from the Oregon National Guard to presumably guard the ICE facility — but defiant state and city officials are challenging this in court.
The move sounds like a lot less than the “full force” vowed by Trump, and the apparent reason for the pullback is incredible: The oldest president ever at the time of his election was starting to realize that, to paraphrase a famous quote from his first term, what he was seeing and hearing, from Fox, was not what was happening.
Trump told NBC’s White House correspondent Yamiche Alcindor about his weekend phone call with Oregon’s Democratic Gov. Tina Kotek. “‘Well wait a minute, am I watching things on television that are different from what’s happening?’,” Trump recounted saying. “‘My people tell me different. They are literally attacking and there are fires all over the place… it looks like terrible.’”
It also looks terrible when the president of the United States appears to be so out of touch with the reality-based world. Just hours after Saturday’s Portland threat, Trump took again to social media with a post that was less consequential but more weird — and highly alarming.
Out of the blue, the president posted a short video that (ironically, given the Portland debacle) looked like a Fox News report but was actually a fake — produced with artificial intelligence, or AI. Its centerpiece was an interview with an AI Trump (did he really not remember that he never said these things?) touting the benefits of something called a “medbed” that is claimed to use imaging technology to cure all diseases but is really a right-wing conspiracy theory — kind of like Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster, except much further from the truth.
Trump or a staffer finally deleted the Truth Social post, which creates a message: “This Truth no longer exists.” The headline in the Daily Beast — “Trump, 79, Deletes Weird AI Video Shilling Magic Beds” — ought to win some kind of Pulitzer Prize, for its subtle-but-no-so-subtle implication that maybe the president is getting too old for this… stuff.
This new unreality show from the star of The Apprentice would be comic gold if the questions it raises weren’t so serious. In many ways, the two episodes sum up what America has become in a brave new world when cable TV news for boomers, or YouTube for zoomers, has become our soma, treating information as a recreational drug while, well, this truth no longer exists.
A billionaire-owned “traditional” media outlet bamboozling not just millions of regular schlubs but even the president with misleading reports at the same time that same president is eager and willing to broadcast dangerously fake news and pretend that it’s real isn’t some symptom of what is wrong with this country. It’s the disease.
A disease that has poisoned the elephant in the Oval Office: a 79-year-old commander-in-chief whose mental abilities are rapidly disappearing in front of the whole world, and yet still has possession of the nuclear football. This time, the president is sending troops into an American city because he’s a real-life Chauncey Gardiner who doesn’t understand what he’s watching on TV. God only knows what button he might press next time.
Yo, do this!
Ask me anything
Question: Who among Dems will replace/succeed the abysmal [Chuck] Schumer & [Hakeem] Jeffries? When? — @tenseven.bsky.social via Bluesky
Answer: There were several variations of this question this week, as clearly the anemic state of Democratic Party leadership is on the minds of a lot of newsletter readers. I’ve noticed in recent TV interviews that rank-and-file Capitol Hill Democrats, even the more progressive ones, are reluctant to criticize Schumer and Jeffries even as their constituents boil. It’s just not their nature to challenge authority. Despite their bumbling, my current prediction is that Democrats will still gain in the 2026 midterms, which ironically would save Schumer and Jeffries for another couple of years. The Democratic Party does have real “leaders” — Sens. Chris Van Hollen and Chris Murphy, Reps. Jasmine Crockett, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jamie Raskin, and maybe the best current example, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker. Let’s follow them in the fight for democracy.
What you’re saying about…
I guess either a) the threat of a government shutdown didn’t feel real to folks one week ago, or b) readers are just as flummoxed as our political class in D.C., because there were very few responses to last week’s question about the impasse. The general sense was a reluctance to fund the Trump regime’s push for autocracy. Said Eileen O’Rourke: “I can’t even think of any concessions right now because my head is spinning from too much news, and feeling helpless.” Ray Landis is also worried. “I don’t know what Trump would do if the government shut down,” he wrote. “What kind of emergency would he proclaim?”
📮 This week’s question: Let’s pretend that Schumer and Jeffries did miraculously decide to step aside. Who then would you like to see lead the Democrats in the Senate and the House? Please email me your answer and put the exact phrase “Democratic leaders” in the subject line.
History lesson on Hegseth’s new battle for Wounded Knee
Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump’s in-over-his-head defense secretary, seems to love war crimes almost as much as that first nip of gin for breakfast. The former Fox and Friends Weekend co-host forged a bond with Trump over Hegseth’s advocacy for convicted U.S. war criminals in the Afghanistan conflict where he’d also served — two of whom were later pardoned by Trump during his first term. Hegseth told his Fox audience that soldiers like Mathew Golsteyn, convicted of summarily executing an Afghan captive, were “doing the job they were hired to do.”
Hegseth’s new role in charge of the Pentagon has provided him with vast new power to erase the very concept of American war crime off the books. Last week, he took a giant stride in that direction when the defense chief announced that medals would not be revoked for some 20 soldiers — including those given the Medal of Honor, the highest award — who took part in the notorious 1890 massacre of at least 230 Lakota Sioux men, women and children near South Dakota’s Wounded Knee Creek on the Pine Ridge Reservation. Hegseth noted that this was the recommendation of a panel that began work before he arrived, which was created after a push by a harsh critic of the Trump regime, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren. But Hegseth added his own stamp of approval, calling the men “brave soldiers.”
The Pentagon leader’s announcement aims to change the perception of the slaughter of Native Americans 135 years ago, but it can’t change the facts. In a searing essay last week, the historian Heather Cox Richardson traced the high-level political corruption and malfeasance that placed the U.S. Army in direct conflict with the famine-plagued and desperate Lakota. The situation ignited when a gun went off and the soldiers began firing indiscriminately (killing 25 of their own men in the process). Richardson wrote that over two hours, “frenzied soldiers hunted down and killed every Lakota they could find … Some of the escaping women were ridden down three miles from the encampment. When the wagons stopped moving, the soldiers moved the guns to the creek bed and shot everyone who moved.”
This all seems worthy of moral condemnation, not 20 medals, but the Wounded Knee story is powerful proof of George Orwell’s observation in 1984 that “who controls the past, controls the future.” Hegseth is racing to throw America’s past war crimes down the memory hole as his Pentagon is actively committing new ones. Our modern-day massacres are occurring in Caribbean waters near Venezuela, where American drones are targeting and obliterating boats that military officials are alleging, without evidence, are involved in the drug trade. The killing spree comes amid uncertainty over what other military adventures an expansionist Trump regime might have up its sleeves. We don’t yet know what future crimes against humanity might be aided by burying the truth at Wounded Knee.
What I wrote on this date in 2021
When did all the excitement about Joe Biden kicking Donald Trump out of the White House and his surprisingly progressive agenda begin to die in sorrow? It was roughly this date four years ago, when Biden’s ambitious plans for things like free community college died from opposition within his own party, especially the hedge fund-besotted then-Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema. I wrote: “Whatever happened in that California vineyard, Sinema is clearly still drunk on her own power, and maybe the power of her new best friends in private equity and in Silicon Valley that she now gets to pal around with.” Read the rest to better understand why Sinema is no longer a senator: “The train wreck of Sen. Kyrsten Sinema is the cost of not getting money out of politics.”
Recommended Inquirer reading