Sundowning demented elderly man continues to confuse five-year-old deceptively edited clips on Fox News for the nightly news

And now this, as Neil Postman once said:

On Sunday, NBC’s Yamiche Alcindor nailed an exclusive phone interview with President Trump. A good deal of news came out of that, and a story that followed highlighted Trump’s vague and ominous threat to investigate former FBI director Christopher Wray amid false claims that FBI agents were part of the January 6 crowd that stormed the Capitol. 

Another big piece of news came out of that interview, and we know about that thanks to Evan Watson, a reporter for KGW-8, the NBC affiliate in Portland, Oregon. KGW obtained a transcript of Trump’s remarks and published a story midday Sunday that highlighted a stunning quote from Trump. Here is the section, emphasis mine:

Trump referenced a weekend conversation with Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek, and he alluded to being told by Kotek that the reality in Portland is different from what’s being portrayed to him.

“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.”

That quote tells us a great deal about Trump’s decision to send troops to Portland, but it says even more about how our president obtains and processes information. And it jibes with a new lawsuit filed by the city and state to stop Trump’s moves into Portland. In the suit, the plaintiffs allege that Trump has been relying on clips from violent George Floyd protests in Portland in 2020 to decide how to act there in 2025. Last September 5, the suit says, “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 Fox News 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…‘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.’”

The quote highlighted by KGW got a lot of attention on social media, but it took a day or more for mainstream outlets like MSNBC and Politico to tell their readers about it (while many other news organizations still haven’t picked up on it). 

That’s Bill Grueskin in the Columbia Journalism Review, and you can find similar stories from Dan Froomkin, Mike Masnick, and others.

On one level the big meta-journalism story here is that NBC News didn’t even mention Trump telling its reporter in an exclusive interview that he was confused about whether what he was watching on Fox News about Portland was actually happening. That seems pretty significant, given that Trump is president of the United States, and is ordering military invasions of American cities on the basis of five-year-old Fox News clips which he is mistaking for what is happening in Portland and other cities right now.

But there’s also a meta-meta level here, which is that THIS STORY IS MORE THAN MONTH OLD ALREADY! (Sorry for shouting but seriously).

Donald Trump told reporters that he might send national guard troops into Portland, Oregon, apparently because he was misled about the scale of small protests there by a TV report that featured video of a 2020 protest wrongly described as having taken place 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 residential 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 following the police killing of George Floyd that regularly drew thousands to tens of thousands of demonstrators to a central part of the city for months.

“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 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.

That’s from the September 5th edition of the Guardian. SEPTEMBER 5TH.

Everybody not deeply embedded in the Trump (and even many people who are) realizes Donald Trump is a bullshitter and a gaslighter, and thus he often doesn’t really believe what he says, which has certainly been true a few million times over the past 78 years or so.

But there are also plenty of reasons to believe that that’s not what’s going on here.

What’s going on here ain’t exactly clear, but there’s a man with the nuclear codes over there, and he appears to believe, sincerely, that five-year old Fox News clips are actually the nightly news, livestreaming from Portland right now. Furthermore — and this in my view is the biggest story of all — he’s had this belief for several weeks, and nobody around him has corrected this misapprehension, because they find it convenient to make no attempt to disabuse Trump of his senile demented delusions.

Again, this has been going on for more than month, and the fact that it’s happening and has been happening for more than a month are both basically not really stories.

It’s basically impossible to convey how insane this all is.

ETA: Commenter Cereal points out that what’s fooling Trump isn’t B-roll, but something much worse. B-roll is a street shot of random people walking around Boulder, spliced into an interview with a CU professor. This is deceptively edited footage by Fox, intended to confuse Trump about what’s happening in Portland. I’ve changed the post title to reflect this point.

I think it’s quite possible that Fox is informally conspiring with Miller, Vought, Bondi, Leavitt, Noem, and the rest of them to feed the mad king fake news, to further their authoritarian agenda. The claim that Trump realizes this is fake and is just bullshitting makes no sense, because if he realized that he wouldn’t be talking about how he’s confused by the differing stories he’s getting. He would just do what his courtiers do, which is assert that Portland is a war zone, without bothering to cite any evidence for this claim.