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As Los Angeles braced for the arrival of new federal troops, Donald Trump on Tuesday reiterated a slew of falsehoods and misleading statements about the tensions in the US’s second-largest city.
In an address to troops at the Fort Bragg military base in North Carolina, Trump spread conspiracy theories, maligned California’s Democratic leaders and misleadingly portrayed protesters as part of a “foreign invasion”.
The comments came as the city of angels prepared for the arrival of hundreds of new troops tasked with protecting immigration enforcement officials, after protests against immigration raids kicked off on Friday.
The initial deployment of 300 national guard troops, federalized by Trump over the objections of California leaders, is expected to quickly expand to 4,000. An additional 700 marines began arriving on Tuesday.
Here are some of Trump’s claims, fact-checked.
Trump falsely claims protesters are bearing foreign flags as part of a ‘foreign invasion’
In his deeply partisan speech at Fort Bragg, Trump made the baseless claim that the protests against immigration raids in LA are being led by paid “rioters bearing foreign flags with the aim of continuing a foreign invasion”.
The comments echoed accusations by top Trump adviser and speechwriter Stephen Miller, who on Sunday wrote on social media that “foreign nationals, waving foreign flags” were “rioting”, and an unfounded allegation by Kristi Noem, Donald Trump’s homeland security secretary, who earlier this week accused Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum of “encouraging violent protests”.
Sheinbaum on Tuesday said the allegation is “absolutely false”.
Some protesters in recent days have waved the flags of Mexico, Guatemala and El Salvador – as well as flags that combine the banners of those nations with the US flag – in a show of ethnic pride and solidarity with immigrants in their community now targeted by immigration officials.
Trump repeats baseless conspiracy theory that bricks were staged for protesters in LA
Trump also referenced a viral conspiracy theory that pallets of bricks were left out for protesters to hurl at police officers in LA. “They came in with bricks,” Trump said.
This claim was made repeatedly in 2020, during the Black Lives Matter protests that followed the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer.
In June 2020, the week after Floyd was murdered, the Trump White House boosted the viral conspiracy theory by releasing a compilation of video clips posted on social media by people who believed, wrongly, that piles of bricks they came across had been planted there by “Antifa and professional anarchists” to inspire violence at protests.
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Within hours, after reporters showed that those clips had been of piles of bricks from construction projects that were in process before the protests started, the White House deleted the video from its official social media accounts, without apology or explanation, but only after it had been viewed more than a million times on Twitter alone.
Trump spreads wild conspiracy theory that Gavin Newsom and Karen Bass ‘paid troublemakers, agitators and insurrectionists’ in LA
Trump also claimed California’s Democratic elected officials paid protesters to attack federal officers, something for which there is no evidence at all.
“In Los Angeles, the governor of California, the mayor of Los Angeles, they’re incompetent and they paid troublemakers, agitators and insurrectionists. They’re engaged in this willful attempt to nullify federal law, and aid the occupation of the city by criminal invaders,” the president said without reference to reality.
That conspiracy theory was later repeated as fact in a social media post from the department of homeland security with the text: “California politicians must call off their rioting mob.”
