One such area the president zeroed in on is Portland, Oregon, a city better known for its voodoo donuts and cold beer than its hellish riots. Late last month, the President ordered the National Guard into hipster paradise, but the reason he was sent wasn't based on statistics or data—instead, he saw something on TV.
Other crime statistics that influenced his decision to federalize law enforcement in American cities were entirely fictitious. When Trump sent hundreds of National Guard members to Washington in August, he blamed city officials. increase in crime data– from 2023. The cherry-picked statistics distort the state of crime in the nation's capital, which actually dropped 35 percent last year, according to Metropolitan Police Department data touted by Trump's own FBI.
A month before the presidential election Brennan Center for Justice called the Posse Comitatus Act “too fragile a fence” to truly protect the nation from the Trump White House, explaining that the principle of the law is protected “more by norms and historical practice” than by the law itself. “Unfortunately, we have entered an era in which we can no longer rely on tradition to constrain executive action,” Joseph Nunn, counsel at the Brennan Center’s Freedom and National Security Program, wrote at the time.
