Trump hallucinated a Portland under siege—and ordered the military to act on his delusions

Welcome back to Uncharted Blue, the blog devoted entirely to pointing out that the sitting president of the United States is out of his mind.

Well, not entirely devoted to that. Just mostly. There's other stuff too, but "the sitting president of the United States is out of his mind" is one of those news stories that tends to drown all other stories out, given that the U.S. president is never more than a hundred feet away from a leather suitcase with nuclear armageddon inside and "is out of his mind" is one of the worst phrases you could possibly set down next to it.

If there is any solace to be had, it's that this beat seems to be getting less lonely in recent weeks. More and more people are beginning to note that Donald Trump is, in fact, out of his mind. Less flippantly, Trump is clearly suffering from dementia. He has a family history of it, he is exhibiting numerous symptoms of it, and since he is on television for a measurable chunk of time every damn day it is increasingly difficult to hide it.

It's impossible not to notice, in fact. Welcome to the Donald Trump Has Dementia beat, Robert Reich.

Over the weekend, on his Truth Social, Trump shared a video purporting to be a segment on Fox News — it wasn’t — in which an AI-generated, deepfaked version of himself sat in the White House and promised that “every American will soon receive their own MedBed card” that will grant them access to new “MedBed hospitals.”

What?

Believers in the “MedBed” conspiracy theory think certain hospital beds are loaded with futuristic technology that can reverse any disease, regenerate limbs, and de-age people. No one has an actual photo of these beds because they don’t exist. [...]

What’s been the media’s response to Trump’s bonkers postings and announcements this weekend? Nada. The media either ignored them, mentioned them as part of Trump’s “strategy,” or assumed Trump was just being Trump.

But there’s another explanation.

Trump is showing growing signs of dementia. He’s increasingly unhinged. He’s 79 years old with a family history of dementia. He could well be going nuts.

You might think this would be covered in the news, but he isn’t facing anything like the scrutiny for dementia that Joe Biden did.

Perhaps the most telling evidence of Trump’s growing dementia is his paranoid thirst for revenge, on which he is centering much of his presidency.

I too will refrain from linking to the "medbed" deepfake video, because there's no point in elevating this stuff, but I will charitably say that of all the stuff President Omnifelon has done in the last few weeks, posting a deepfake video that featured him supposedly signing papers to establish a new national healthcare infrastructure based entirely on magic beds powered by the souls of ground-up pixies barely rates compared to the rest of it.

We've known since Trump's first term that his aides struggle mightily to focus his attention on anything, and one of the most reliable ways to get Trump to pay attention to something was, according to news reports, to put his name and/or portraits all over whatever must-read briefing he needed to be aware of so that he'd be drawn in. The man could never be relied on to pay attention to his national security briefings, and so his babysitters were forced to scatter in references to the one thing he was always interested in, himself, in the hopes that maybe a few words about the latest terrorist plot or possible economy-crippling pandemic might sneak into his brain.

So it's not terribly surprising that Donald Trump, lifelong malignant narcissist, would see fake news coverage of himself presiding over a fake scientific breakthrough and share it just because he thought he looked great in the footage. We saw it happen again, shortly afterwards, when he posted an himself-featured video promoting medical cannabis for seniors—an odd move to make, for a man currently engaged in the summary execution of alleged drug dealers in the Gulf of Mexico. Not All Drugs, I guess?

So yes: To be honest, you could post a video claiming Donald Trump was responsible for giving syphilis to every last sixth grader in Florida and so long as the picture you used was flattering enough, Trump would probably repost it. That is how dull-brained the man is.

I'm willing to chalk up the "Donald Trump is giving every American access to a MaGiCaL TaNNinG BeD" post to Trump's unrivaled stupidity, in other words. We don't know for sure that Trump believed he was releasing Limb Regeneration Technology, something he didn't remember doing, just because he saw faked news footage claiming so. He might have just been so f--king stupid that he didn't know or care what the himself-featuring video was about.

The far more dire weekend news—and the one that more succinctly demonstrates that Trump is operating from a place of severely diminished mental capacity—is the Trump-announced invasion of Portland.

Yeah. Yeah, that.

At the request of the 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. I am also authorizing Full Force, if necessary. Thank you for your attention to this matter!

That was Trump's Saturday Truth Social announcement that the military would be deployed to Portland, presumably the one in Oregon but he didn't actually specify, to protect the "War ravaged" city from a purely fictional menace, capped off with the suggestion that the U.S. military would be free to murder Americans outright if that's what it took to break the "siege" of whatever-the-f--k.

If you're confused: good. You should be, because none of that makes the slightest bit of sense. That is the hallucinatory, disjointed delusion of a man having a mental episode of some sort.

Portlanders, who were possibly even more confused than the rest of us, quickly turned to social media to show scenes from the supposedly "War ravaged" city. Seems ... nice?

The closest anyone could come to showing unrest in Portland was the standing protests outside a Portland ICE facility that ... hang on, where'd they go...

Well, they were definitely there before. There was maybe as many as, like, ten people there. One guy was in a bird costume, or possibly a banana costume—it was yellow, that was all I could see.

Unfortunately, we were not the only ones caught off guard by Trump's declaration of "War." The military was just as baffled as everyone else, and it took until the next day for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's aides to both slap him sober and come up with a face-saving, plausible-sounding "military" response to Trump's delusions.

Trump's planned deployment caught many at the Pentagon by surprise, six U.S. officials told Reuters, speaking on condition of anonymity. On Sunday, Hegseth signed a memo ordering 200 Oregon National Guard troops deployed under federal authority. [...]

"It was a bolt from the blue," one of the U.S. officials said, adding that the military was previously focused on carrying out prudent planning for potential deployments of troops by Trump into cities such as Chicago and Memphis.

Nevertheless, Dear Leader is always right, and if Dear Leader is hallucinating a war in Portland, Oregon that nobody else can see, the Pentagon has no alternative but to send actual troops to crack down on that Nothing.

Also on Sunday, we got a clearer idea of just what had spurred Trump's demand for the military occupation of Portland. According to him, it was because he saw Portland burning on ... his television?

During a Sunday morning phone interview with NBC White House Correspondent Yamiche Alcindor, though, Trump made some remarks that seemed to indicate he might be backing off his military plan for Portland.

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."

From this snippet, sleuths were eventually able to come up with a theory for Trump's delusional claim. Philip Bump:

“I said, ‘Well wait a minute, am I watching things on television that are different from what’s happening? My people tell me different,’ ” Trump said of the conversation. “They are literally attacking and there are fires all over the place…it looks like terrible.”

Well, yes, Man Who Has Access to the Breadth of Federal Intelligence Gathering. What you saw on TV was in fact not what was happening at the moment in Portland.

So what had Trump seen? Given his tendency to stay tuned to Fox News we can make some educated guesses.

Trump made his pledge to send troops to Portland on Saturday morning. On Friday, Fox News had several segments in which purported violence in the city was shown.

One featured Tricia McLaughlin, a Homeland Security official who often appears on cable shows. As she was discussing an executive order Trump signed, the channel showed b-roll of events in Portland.

You will notice, though, that the footage was not timestamped for any date in September. Instead, they showed an encounter apparently involving tear gas that occurred back in June … and footage from protests in July 2020.

That's almost certainly how things went down, in fact. Trump was watching Fox News when an interview with Homeland Security talking head Tricia McLaughlin played—one that Fox News, because it is a propaganda network built on manipulating viewers into a state of near-panic about everything, all the time, decorated with footage from the summer protests from a half decade ago.

And Trump, because he has dementia, converted this segment into a belief that the city of Portland was currently on fire. A Fox News graphic displayed during the segment also highlighted "antifa-aligned left-wing violent extremists," which explains how the word "Antifa" entered his brain, and there you go.

There's the whole hallucination, just in one Fox News segment. "My people" are saying. "There are fires all over the place." "Antifa." His brain came up with it, his thumbs typed it out, and a confused Pentagon is ordered into another American city to use potentially lethal force against figments of a dementia sufferer's imagination.

This is not normal. There is no rational system of government in which the nation's leader can watch something on television, believe his completely ass-backwards interpretation to be reality, not bother f--king asking anybody about it, announce new military deployments based on it, and have the nation's military and its drunken television host-cum-secretary rush to comply.

It is true, there are many not-entirely-hinged people who see Fox News B-roll footage and integrate it into their very personalities. But they are not the president of the United States, they do not have command of the most powerful military in human history, and they are not surrounded by an entire executive branch devoted to gathering up the best and most accurate information available.

He has demonstrated, over and over again, that he does not understand and is not interested in the boundaries between fantasy and reality. And the United States military is receiving new orders based on the fantastical parts.

And it just. Keeps. Going. He writes a private note to his attorney general seemingly ordering her to do crimes—and accidentally posts it to Truth Social, where everyone can see it. He insists that he has or will lower drug prices "1,500 percent." It just keeps going and going, forever.

Rex Huppke:

An unhinged rant about Tylenol. Baffling conspiracies about an escalator. Deluded self-praise. Two-decade-old gripes over losing a construction project bid, droned about on the world stage as if nothing could be more important.

That all came from President Donald Trump in one week, a week that should alarm us and spotlight one simple fact: He is desperate and declining. [...]

Had an older president like Joe Biden babbled like this there would have been immediate calls to airlift him to a sanatorium. For Trump, it was the tip of the iceberg. [...]

This is madness. Democrats, pundits, corporate leaders, news organizations and anyone with a platform need to have the courage to come out and state clearly what we’re witnessing: Trump is often not making any sense or maintaining a coherent train of thought, he is acting recklessly and not controlling his worst impulses, and he is, transparently, getting worse.

This simply isn't sustainable. The nation cannot afford a "president" who imagines American cities to be under siege and who orders military deployments based on those delusions. We can't possibly survive a "president" who isn't sure whether he did or didn't invent a new magic limb-regenerating bad, but is willing to take credit for it in either case if the accompanying portrait is flattering enough.

I know I'm a broken record on this, but I can't fathom how Trump makes it to the end of his term. People at this stage of dementia, the stage where they can function normally during many periods but collapse into compulsive rage and irrational delusions at other times, tend to see the disease accelerate rapidly. He's not well, he's nowhere near well enough to be ordering military deployments anywhere, and this level of dysfunction is not something our compliant, authoritarian-leaning media can keep covered up much longer.