President Donald Trump took a major step toward invoking some of the most extreme emergency powers available to a sitting president and claimed an “insurrection” is underway in Portland, Oregon.
During an interview with Newsmax host Greg Kelly, Trump said he would consider invoking the Insurrection Act as a way to “get around” a judge’s order blocking the administration from deploying National Guard troops to Portland.
“If you take a look at what’s been going on in Portland, it’s been going on for a long time, and that’s insurrection. I mean, that’s pure insurrection,” he said. “And then you’ll have a governor get up and say, ‘There’s absolutely nothing wrong.’ And you see these places are burning down.”
The only fires reported in Portland, Oregon, on Monday were smoke coming from the boiler room of a local high school and a mobile home engulfed in flames, according to Portland Fire & Rescue’s X account. No injuries were reported in either incident.
When it comes to violent crime, homicides are down by 51 percent this year, with 25 killings to date, according to city police data. Just two people were killed in August, the most recent month for which data is available.
Trump has nevertheless claimed that Portland, Chicago, and other blue cities—where peaceful protests have been held in opposition to federal immigration raids—are “under siege,” despite an objective lack of riots or other violent unrest.
He appears to be laying the groundwork to bypass the courts and invoke the Insurrection Act, a compilation of century-old statutes that allows the president to use the military to suppress an armed rebellion or other insurrection against the United States.
Without it, federal troops deployed to U.S. cities are only allowed to protect federal property and personnel, and are generally banned from law enforcement roles.
The Insurrection Act was last used in 1992 to suppress the riots that broke out in Los Angeles following the acquittal of three white police officers who had severely beaten Rodney King, an unarmed Black man.
Those circumstances were far different, though. Dozens of people had been killed in the riots, and both the mayor of Los Angeles and the governor of California had asked then-President George H.W. Bush to mobilize the National Guard.
During the Newsmax interview, Trump blasted Democratic leaders for not welcoming the military into cities like Chicago, where he claimed crime is out of control, and argued that soldiers “cleaned up” Washington, D.C., taking it from “a very unsafe city to one of the safest cities in the country.”
Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker hit back, “The Trump administration is following a playbook: Cause chaos, create fear and confusion, make it seem that peaceful protesters are a mob by firing gas pellets and tear gas canisters at them. Why? To create the pretext for invoking the Insurrection Act so that he can send military troops to our city.”
In the case of Portland, about 20 peaceful protesters had been gathering nightly throughout September outside the federal immigration facility, with few arrests made, the Associated Press reported.
Trump nevertheless announced on Truth Social in late September, “At the request of Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, I am directing Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, to provide all necessary Troops to protect War ravaged Portland, and any of our ICE Facilities under siege from attack by Antifa, and other domestic terrorists.”
When the president gave the National Guard orders last weekend, the crowd swelled to about 400 people. Federal agents shot tear-gas canisters into the crowd, but again, things remained largely under control, according to the AP.
On the night that Trump warned of an “insurrection,” just 100 protesters and counter-protesters gathered outside the federal immigration building, The New York Times reported. After some taunting, the crowd split up and went home without incident.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment.
In back-to-back rulings over the weekend, Judge Karin Immergut—whom Trump himself appointed in 2019—found that the administration had used false claims of violence against immigration officials to “justify” deploying hundreds of National Guard troops from Texas and California to Oregon.
“This is a nation of Constitutional law, not martial law,” she wrote in an order temporarily blocking the deployment.
After the ruling, a White House spokesperson told the Daily Beast that Trump had “exercised his lawful authority to protect federal assets and personnel in Portland following violent riots and attacks on law enforcement.”
“We expect to be vindicated by a higher court,” spokesperson Abigail Jackson said.
The president revealed during a Sept. 28 interview with NBC that his team has been telling him that protesters were “literally attacking and there are fires all over the place.”
A special that aired on Fox News in early September also passed off violent footage of Portland from 2020 as if it were happening now, Press Watch reported.
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