How Trumpworld inflates the perceived danger of the left
It is stipulated at the outset that there have been gruesome acts of political violence in recent months that appear to have been motivated by hostility to right-wing politics or the administration. This is not really contestable and rarely seriously contested. There is, in fact, violence on the political left.
It is also the case, though, that right-wing political violence has been much more common in recent years. This is not a useful bit of information to the Trump administration, which actively seeks to ignore or bury it. The administration, like Trump himself, is committed to presenting political violence as centrally if not entirely a function of the left — obviously in part because doing so provides a rationalization for the administration to crack down on the president’s political opponents. Trump’s been champing at the bit to deploy the military against protesters, a desire so obvious that questions about his doing so were part of Pete Hegseth’s confirmation hearings to serve as Defense Secretary.
Over the weekend, Trump announced on social media that he would be directing the (since-confirmed) 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.” He further “authoriz[ed] Full Force, if necessary” — apparently giving the military a green light to shoot at the purported “terrorists”.
Why Portland? Well, that’s an interesting story that reflects one of the central ways that Trump and his allies convince the right that there’s an imminent threat — a tactic so convincing that it apparently convinced Trump, too.
Bad reporting
In mid-June 2020, I noticed something weird about Fox News’s coverage of the racial-justice protests that had emerged in response to the killing of George Floyd: they were often accompanied by footage of violence or vandalism that had actually occurred more than a week prior. Tucker Carlson (then still a Fox host), Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham were incorporating footage into their shows that had been recorded in late May. The reason for doing so wasn’t subtle; they (and Trump, who was president) hoped to suggest that a firm hand was needed to keep the lunatic left under control.
It didn’t work. But what I couldn’t have anticipated then was that Fox would still be using that footage five years later.
For a moment, Trump seemed to waver on his threat to send troops to Portland. In an interview with NBC’s Yamiche Alcindor, he described a conversation he’d had with Oregon’s governor.
“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.
In the next hour, they ran the same playbook. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich was on, talking about how dangerous the left was next to footage of Portland violence from July 2020.
If this is what Trump was seeing, one can see how he might have been confused about the timeline (particularly if he wasn’t wearing his glasses). You can also see how the average Fox News viewer might be under the impression that Portland is a violent hellscape.
Particularly given the extent to which Fox News otherwise frames its coverage. The McLaughlin interview, for example, included a graphic purporting to show arrests of “antifa-aligned left-wing violent extremists” across the country — a series of events across the country that would seem to bolster Trump’s anti-antifa (is there a more concise way to say that?) executive order.
But the graphic is not only conflating arrests of protesters with “violent extremists,” it’s looping those purported extremists in with the category “antifa” — presenting people who oppose the administration’s actions with the sort of extremism that Trump is targeting. It’s an exaggeration almost as egregious and obvious as the use of vandalism footage from 2020.
Bad data
On Sunday, deputy White House press secretary Abigail Jackson took a different tack in suggesting that the left was uniquely dangerous. She shared a story from Axios with the useful headline, “Study: Left-wing terrorism outpaces far-right attacks for first time in 30 years.”
Jackson summarized the headline as “left-wing terrorism climbs to 30-year high,” a claim at odds with the graphic that accompanied the link in her social-media post. The number of attacks in 2022 was higher than the number this year, for example, though the 2025 numbers are only through July 4.
Perhaps you noticed something else striking about that chart! Here, take a closer look in case you didn’t.
Yellow is left-wing attacks. Gray is right-wing attacks. Knowing that, is your assessment of the problem the same as Jackson’s?
If we get rid of the stacked columns, the difference is even more obvious. The blue/left-wing line does finally emerge from the shadow of the right-wing mountain range … at least through July 4.
If we look at the three-year average of these events, we get a better picture of what’s been happening in the U.S. Yes, left-wing attacks (as measured by the Center for Strategic and International Studies) have been rising since the mid-2010s. But, in about the same period, right-wing terrorism began to skyrocket.
The researchers’ finding about the emerging gap between left- and right-wing attacks depends on the idea that there has been only one right-wing attack this year, the assassination of Minnesota Democrat Melissa Hortman. There has been a “striking” decline in right-wing terrorism, they write, allowing left-wing attacks to have become more common.
Explanations for the drop are “speculative,” they note, but they do offer a possibility: “many traditional grievances that violent right-wing extremists have espoused in the past—opposition to abortion, hostility to immigration, and suspicions of government agencies, among others—are now embraced by President Trump and his administration.” Put another way, the White House has gobbled up the right-wing fringe, meaning there’s less reason for fringe actors to use terrorism to effect their desired outcomes.
This is not the story the administration and its allies want to tell, though. So they center not on the fact that there have been four times as many right-wing as left-wing attacks in the past decade but on the determination that there have been five times as many left-wing attacks this year — since five is five times one.
And if you aren’t convinced that the left is more dangerous, just wait until you see what people were doing in Portland five years ago.
Photo: Trump watches himself on Fox News at the White House, June 27, 2025. (White House/Flickr)
Update: After this was published, it became clear that Trump hadn’t given up on his idea of invading Portland, so I tweaked the language I’d originally used.