WASHINGTON, D.C. – President Donald Trump said late Friday he would send National Guard troops to another city, and, while declining to specify which city it would be, mentioned Portland, Oregon, as one possibility.
Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office, Trump, whose orders deploying National Guard troops in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., this summer sparked controversy and legal challenges from local officials who did not condone the orders, said Portland recently entered a short list of cities he was considering.
He also mentioned New Orleans earlier this week, and has cited Baltimore and Chicago in recent weeks. Like Portland, voters in those cities skew heavily toward Democratic candidates.
A television report Thursday night alerted him to supposed rampant violence in Portland, he said.
He also possibly alluded to weeks-long protests in the city after the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020. Those protests, which sometimes included clashes with police, ended in 2020.
“I didn’t know that was continuing to go on, but Portland is unbelievable,” he said. “The destruction of the city. 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. So we’ll be able to stop that very easily.”
Trump, without offering evidence, described the city as beset by “paid terrorists” who smokebomb stores.
“And when we go there, if we go to Portland, we’re going to wipe them out,” he said. “They’re going to be gone, and they’re going to be gone bad. They won’t even stand the fight. They will not stay there. They’re ruined. They’ve ruined that city.
“What they’ve done to that city, it’s like living in hell,” he added.
Another National Guard deployment coming
Trump’s opining on the state of Oregon’s largest city was part of his answer to a reporter’s question about if he had chosen the next city where he would send National Guard troops.
The president said he would send troops to another city and had decided which one, but was not ready to announce it.
“I’m not going to say it now, but yeah, I have” decided, he said. “We’re going to go into another place and straighten it out.”
Trump has said the deployment to Los Angeles was meant to subdue protests over the administration’s immigration crackdown, while the troops in the District of Columbia were there to control crime, despite a 30-year-low violent crime rate in the nation’s capital.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom and District of Columbia Attorney General Brian Schwalb have sued Trump over the deployments.
Newsom won a decision Tuesday, with U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer ruling that Trump used military personnel as law enforcement in violation of an 18th-century law banning military personnel from conducting law enforcement, as well as a more fundamental principle of U.S. democracy.
The administration has not responded to Schwalb’s suit, which was filed Thursday.
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