Before a federal judge blocked Donald Trump from putting members of California’s national guard on the streets of Portland, Oregon, late on Sunday, the state’s Republican party welcomed the planned deployment in celebratory posts on social media.
“President Trump on Sunday deployed 300 California National Guard troops to Portland, Oregon after a judge ruled that the Oregon National Guard could not be deployed to keep federal facilities and personnel in Portland safe,” Oregon Republicans wrote on their official Facebook, Instagram and X accounts.
On all three platforms, the statement was illustrated with an image that seemed designed to support Trump’s false claim that protests against immigration sweeps in Portland are so out of control that the city is “burning to the ground”. On one side of the image, a line of police officers held riot shields; on the other, a crowd of young men held up flares that lit up a night sky filled with red smoke.
On closer inspection, however, it turned out that the image was not a photograph of a real event in Portland, but instead a fabrication created by combining two photographs of scenes that unfolded in South America nearly a decade apart.