The Daily Populous Friday October 17th, 2025 morning edition
Authored by theintercept.com and submitted by Ok-Celebration-1702

President Donald Trump claims that U.S. troops have engaged in hand-to-hand combat with young members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua on the streets of Washington, D.C. But Joint Task Force–District of Columbia, the umbrella organization for the military occupation of the nation’s capital, says it never happened.

Trump’s outlandish claim — that National Guard members beat child gang members — is one of numerous demonstrably false claims peddled by the president concerning the deployment of military troops, including that there is now “no crime” in the district. It’s part of a raft of lies Trump has used to paint America’s cities as war-torn wastelands and justify urban military occupations. These blatant falsehoods have increasingly drawn the ire of the federal judiciary.

“You saw it in Washington,” Trump announced in an address to hundreds of top military officers late last month. “We had gangs of Tren de Aragua, say 10, 12, 15 kids. And these military guys walk up to them, and they treat them with disrespect, and they just got pounded.” After twice more reiterating that U.S. troops “pounded” gang members, Trump claimed the suspects were “thrown into paddy wagons and taken back to their country.”

JTF–DC spokesperson Alexia Nal says that troops deployed on the streets of the capital have never engaged in combat with any suspected criminals. “Nope. We’re not allowed to,” she told The Intercept, stating that service members cannot put their hands on people. One defense official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, called Trump’s claim “obvious bullshit.” Two more government officials laughed when The Intercept brought the president’s story to their attention. “Of course not. Not a chance,” one of them said when asked if there was any possibility that Trump’s account was based on a real incident.

“President Trump’s false and inflammatory justifications for deploying federal agents and National Guard troops to vibrant American cities may keep shifting, but the truth does not,” Hina Shamsi, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s national security project, told The Intercept. “There’s simply no emergency to justify deploying federal forces to Washington D.C. or any other city the president wrongly paints as a hellscape.”

The White House did not respond to questions about the supposed assault of members of Tren de Aragua; whether the supposed gang members were, in fact, children; and if the president was suggesting members of Tren de Aragua were driven by “paddy wagon” to Venezuela.

Trump’s fabricated tale of combat on the capital’s streets are mirrored by his clearly false claims about crime in Washington since troops began their occupation of the city in August. “D.C. is now a no — it’s a free crime city. We have no crime in D.C. … It took me 12 days,” Trump announced early last month, also referencing Tren de Aragua in those remarks.

Trump reiterated those boasts more recently. “We’ve got no crime,” Trump claimed last week. “It took 12 days to solve the problem. And we’re going to do that in Chicago, we’re going to do that in Portland.” The remarks came only hours after D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department announced the victims of two deadly shootings.

A JTF–DC spokesperson refused to contradict her commander-in-chief. “We do not speculate,” she responded when asked if crime in the district had been eliminated. “However, JTF–DC stays committed to the mobilization in the District until law and order is restored.”

Regular announcements on the Metropolitan Police Department’s website, alone, put the lie to Trump’s boasts. “On Sunday, October 12, 2025, at approximately 10:18 p.m., Seventh District officers responded to a report of a shooting in the 3800 block of 9th Street, Southeast … the victim was pronounced dead,” reads a MPD press release issued on Tuesday. Of more than 20 announcements made last week, two chronicled homicides.

“Yes, there has been crime,” MPD spokesperson Ebony Major told The Intercept. “I mean, there’s crime everywhere.”

In addition to Washington, D.C., Trump has deployed or is attempting to deploy troops to Los Angeles, Memphis, New Orleans, Chicago, and Portland, Oregon. A federal judge ruled last month that the first of those deployments, which is ongoing, is illegal. Courts have recently blocked the latter two occupations — at least temporarily — leaving activated federalized troops in a holding pattern. “They are not conducting any missions right now,” a Northern Command spokesperson told The Intercept on Tuesday, referencing troops in Illinois and Oregon. “They’re just on standby.”

Trump has also threatened to send the military to Baltimore, New York City, Oakland, St. Louis, San Francisco, and Seattle to put down supposed rebellions and to aid law enforcement agencies, despite falling crime numbers and pushback by local officials. “[W]e’re going to go city by city,” he said earlier this month. “We’re going to have safe cities.”

Hanna Homestead of the National Priorities Project, a nonpartisan research group, said Trump was employing a standard playbook as his D.C. deployment burns through an estimated $1 million per day. “This is nothing new,” she told The Intercept. “All authoritarian regimes frame ruthlessly oppressive social control and militarization as necessary for public safety.”

Trump has justified his push to militarize urban America through gross hyperbole, dog-whistle politics, and the peddling of baseless lies. Trump said protesters in Los Angeles were “animals” and “a foreign enemy,” calling the city “a trash heap” with “entire neighborhoods under control” of criminals. He said Washington, D.C.’s homicide rate is higher than “the worst places on Earth.” (Not only did Trump use older and larger statistics, but even cherry-picking the data, at least 49 other cities across the world had higher homicide rates.) Trump also claims that Portland is “war-ravaged” and in a state of rebellion. “Portland has been on fire for years. … I really think that’s really criminal insurrection,” Trump recently told reporters.

Last month, U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer ruled that the Trump administration’s Los Angeles occupation is illegal, noting that while troops were deployed “ostensibly to quell a rebellion,” there was “no rebellion, nor was civilian law enforcement unable to respond to the protests and enforce the law.”

More recently, Breyer has been echoed by other federal judges ruling on court challenges to Trump’s proposed military occupations of Portland and Chicago. “The President’s determination was simply untethered to the facts,” U.S. District Judge Karin Immergut in the Oregon case found, noting that “the protests in Portland were not ‘a rebellion’ and did not pose a ‘danger of a rebellion.’” District Judge April Perry similarly wrote that the Trump administration’s “perceptions are not reliable” and that she could not “find reasonable support for a conclusion that there exists in Illinois a danger of rebellion.”

Trump’s claims of hand-to-hand combat against Tren de Aragua in Washington follow persistent attempts to paint the gang as a bogeyman to justify illegal, authoritarian efforts by the administration. At the beginning of his second term, the Trump administration claimed Tren de Aragua had invaded the United States, allowing the government to use the 1798 Alien Enemies Act’s fast-track deportation of people it says belong to the gang. Last month, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals blocked the government from using the war-time law. “We conclude that the findings do not support that an invasion or a predatory incursion has occurred,” wrote Judge Leslie Southwick.

The Trump administration is also waging a secret war against mostly undisclosed enemies in the Caribbean without the consent of Congress. The administration refuses to identify the “designated terrorist organizations” it is attacking in its strikes on purported drug-smuggling boats, beyond claims by the president that at least some of those killed are “Tren de Aragua Narcoterrorists.”

Trump has also had a long history of demonizing youth, especially minority children. From the very beginning of the D.C. deployment, Trump has leaned on the notion that not only had the capital “been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals,” but also specifically “caravans of mass youth” who “rampage through city streets” day and night.

This type of vilification by Trump goes back decades to the furor surrounding a group of Black and Latino boys who were wrongly accused of raping Trisha Meili, a white woman jogger in New York’s Central Park in 1989. Trump took out full-page ads in four newspapers calling for New York to “BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY. BRING BACK OUR POLICE!”

The so-called Central Park Five were convicted, but later exonerated and had their convictions vacated after a convicted serial rapist confessed to the crimes. The confession was confirmed by DNA evidence. New York City awarded the men $41 million in 2014, a decade after some of the men initially sued the city for how it handled the case.

The five men sued Trump during last fall’s presidential election campaign, accusing him of making “false and defamatory statements” about them during the September 10 debate in which he said they “pled guilty” and “killed a person.” Neither is true. (A federal judge rejected Trump’s effort to dismiss a defamation lawsuit earlier this year.)

In his 1989 newspaper ads, Trump painted New York City as “a world ruled by the law of the streets, as roving bands of wild criminals roam our neighborhoods, dispensing their own vicious brand of twisted hatred on whomever they encounter.” In August, Trump trotted out similar language to describe Washington. “Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs,” he announced, claiming D.C. had been overtaken by “crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor and worse.”

Experts told The Intercept that it was clear that Trump was banking on his fearmongering about cities to galvanize public support and justify turning America into a full-fledged police state. “President Trump has slandered everyone from peaceful protesters to urban communities just trying to live their lives in his attempt to make the U.S. seem far more dangerous than it actually is,” Sara Haghdoosti, the executive director of Win Without War, told The Intercept.

“His goal is simple: the more people believe that violence is rampant, the more power he can accrue under the guise of national security. But people in this country can see his obvious lies for what they are, which is why his authoritarian agenda gets less popular every day.”

Redtex on October 16th, 2025 at 02:05 UTC »

Does anybody actually believe a word Trump says now, seriously?

SmallRocks on October 16th, 2025 at 01:58 UTC »

Lmfao child gangsters?

The lost boys are running loose! They’re fucking the cats.! They’re fucking the dogs!

sljxuoxada on October 16th, 2025 at 01:42 UTC »

Trump fabricates pretty much every story he tells.