It Sure Looks Like Kash Patel Used the FBI’s Jet to Go on a Date

One such area the president has homed in on is Portland, Oregon, a city better known for Voodoo Doughnuts and cold brew than hellish riots. Late last month, the president ordered the National Guard to the hipster paradise, but his rationale for sending them was not informed by statistics or data—instead, it was because of something he saw on TV.

Other crime stats that have informed his decision to federalize the law enforcement of American cities were completely imagined. When Trump deployed hundreds of National Guard members to Washington in August, he blamed the city’s rising crime data—from 2023. The cherry-picked statistics misrepresented the state of crime in the nation’s capital, which, according to data from the Metropolitan Police Department that was touted by Trump’s own FBI, had actually fallen last year by 35 percent.

A month before the presidential election, the Brennan Center for Justice referred to the Posse Comitatus Act as “too flimsy a guardrail” to genuinely protect the nation from a Trump White House, explaining that the principle within the act is protected “more by norms and historical practice” than the law itself. “Unfortunately, we’ve entered an era in which we can no longer rely on tradition to constrain executive action,” Joseph Nunn, a counsel in the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program, wrote at the time.