Fact check: Trump falsely claims, again, that Portland is burning down

By Daniel Dale, CNN

(CNN) — The president keeps claiming a major American city is burning down. Even though that is not even close to true.

President Donald Trump told reporters at the White House on Tuesday: “I looked at Portland over the weekend. The place is burning down, just burning down.” Trump noted that an appeals court on Monday overturned one of the two rulings that have temporarily blocked his attempt to deploy National Guard troops to Portland, Oregon, then added: “You look at a place like Portland, it’s just — it’s ridiculous, when they say that there’s no problem. The place is — it was on fire over the weekend.”

But Portland was nothing remotely resembling “burning down” over the weekend. It still wasn’t when Trump made these comments on Tuesday. And it wasn’t when Trump made such claims on previous occasions over the last month.

Photos of Portland over the weekend — including shots of an anti-Trump “No Kings” protest that was peacefully attended Saturday by tens of thousands of people — show a city very much intact and not ablaze. Portland city spokesperson Cody Bowman said the fire department was never even dispatched over the weekend to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement building that has been the center of protest activity in recent months.

It’s possible that Trump saw images of small fires that started near the ICE building on Saturday after federal agents deployed tear gas and smoke devices to disperse protesters there. The Oregonian newspaper reported Tuesday in a debunking of Trump’s latest “burning down” claims: “Federal agents used tear gas against the crowd and sparks from canisters set several small fires, but rain and a lack of fuel quickly extinguished them.”

Leaving aside the matter of why these fires started, the president’s categorical declaration that a city of 145 square miles and more than 630,000 residents is “burning down” is clearly not substantiated by the brief existence of small fires on one block.

Bowman said the Portland fire department responded to just one building fire over the weekend. He said the department responded to about nine total fires a day from Friday to Monday, “significantly fewer” than during the same period last year, and that about half of them were trash fires. The Oregonian reported that a business was damaged by an “explosive” Friday afternoon fire in an RV that had been parked beside it.

A single fire engine was dispatched to handle that incident, the fire department told the newspaper; this was a minor local story, nothing close to the citywide inferno of the president’s suggestion. You can check out live video shots of Portland yourself to see how far from the truth the president’s claims were as of this article’s publication on Wednesday.

Trump has made similarly baseless assertions about Portland on multiple occasions in September and October. He has falsely said that “Portland is burning to the ground” and that “Portland’s been on fire for years”; falsely said the city doesn’t “even have stores anymore” and that people “don’t even put glass up” on windows, only plywood; and groundlessly referred to “War ravaged Portland.”

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt defended Trump’s comments on October 6 by encouraging reporters “to go on the ground and to take a look at for yourself.” The next day, CNN correspondent Shimon Prokupecz made clear from the ground in Portland that the president’s descriptions are detached from reality.

“Keep in mind, this is all happening on less than a single block, not even in the city center,” Prokupecz said of the protest clashes around the ICE building, which have included occasional flag-burning by protesters. “The rest of Portland is not in chaos. The streetcars are running, guitarists play outside the famed Powell’s bookstore, and there’s a guided tour in Pioneer Courthouse Square. If you weren’t looking for it, you’d never know anything was happening on that one city block outside the ICE building.”

Portland residents and government officials in the city and the state of Oregon, from the police chief to the mayor to the governor, have all attempted for weeks to correct Trump’s narrative.

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