At a time when international investors were already inclined to casting a wary eye at US assets, including and especially America’s longer-tenor debt, the country could’ve done without the spectacle of riots and troops in the streets.
I want to be clear: Donald Trump may not be “happy,” per se, about what’s going on in Los Angeles, but he’s not upset about it either. I touched on this in the editorial accompanying the June 8 evening mailer, but I think it’s important enough to broadcast to a wider audience.
When Trump embarked on his long-promised deportation sweep, he knew full well that aggressive immigration raids were likely to result in civil disobedience. Knowing that, he might’ve taken steps to minimize the risk or otherwise de-escalate the national temperature ahead of on-the-ground ICE operations. He did the opposite.
Over the first few months of his second presidency, Trump dialed up the national temperature by, among other things, effectively suspending habeas corpus and deporting, at taxpayers’ expense, hundreds of people to a maximum security prison in a foreign country.
Over and over again, administration officials went out of their way to rile and incense. Pam Bondi all but turned her nose up at the Supreme Court when the justices demanded the US facilitate the return of a wrongly-deported man. Kristi Noem had her picture taken in front of inmates at El Salvador’s mega-prison, where shirtless, tattooed prisoners were used as props, crowded like sardines into cells. Tom Homan and Stephen Miller were their usual inflammatory selves whenever anyone turned a camera on them. And on and on.
You’d be hard-pressed to find a single example of the administration behaving in a way that suggested Trump was interested in doing anything other than maximizing the tension.
Do note: That’s something different from minimizing it. Nobody expected compassion from Trump and you could argue his reelection constituted a mandate for cruelty towards immigrants. That’s bad — very bad — and also tragically ironic coming from the Mother of Exiles who lifts her lamp beside the golden door to welcome the tired, the poor, the homeless and the huddled masses, but we all know Trump doesn’t want the wretched refuse, nor the tempest-tost. No one expected empathy from Trump.
What we might’ve expected, naive or not, is that he wouldn’t instrumentalize immigration raids as a means to militarize blue-state streets. But that’s what he did. And there’s no mystery as to why.
This isn’t about ensuring federal immigration officials can conduct their business unimpeded. As I put it Sunday evening, the federalizing and dispatching of the National Guard to Los Angeles was about optics. Trump wants to advertise his authority and willingness to deploy troops against a restive populace in a blue state at the slightest provocation.
It’s a show of force intended every bit as much, and perhaps even more so, for Americans who aren’t protest participants as for those who are. The message is clear: Challenging Trump’s government can and will result not just in law enforcement action, but in a military response.
So eager was Trump — so determined not to let this opportunity go to waste — that he sent in the National Guard preemptively. He didn’t give local law enforcement a chance to quell the violence, and he didn’t care the slightest bit that deploying troops was guaranteed to make things worse. As if his intentions needed to be any clearer, Trump had Pete Hegseth intimate that active-duty Marines might be deployed in Los Angeles.
Gavin Newsom sued Trump on Monday, calling the decision to federalize the National Guard illegal and warning that Trump’s handing himself authority “to go into any state and do the same thing.” And he will, by the way. Go into other states and do the same thing. I guarantee it.
The events of the past few days in California set the stage for Trump to normalize a troop presence in America’s streets. The excuses will become thinner over time, and no one should be surprised if, at some point, it’s active-duty army personnel, not the National Guard.
Trump and Homan on Monday took things up another notch, threatening to arrest Newsom as well as Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass. Ever the showman, Newsom told Homan to get on with it. “Arrest me, let’s go,” he said, during an NBC cameo.
Trump said that’d be “great,” albeit while gently suggesting Homan might be inadvertently participating in a Newsom PR stunt. “Gavin likes the publicity,” the president remarked.
It’s important Americans understand what’s going on here. Step back and think about this: It took Trump less than five months to find an excuse for putting troops in America’s streets.
This is yet another autocracy harbinger. What’s happening in Los Angeles, and what may very well happen in other cities, is tantamount to a false flag operation. Trump knew that sooner or later, ICE raids would result in some sort of societal unrest given the national temperature around this issue. As soon as it happened, he bypassed local officials, federalized the National Guard and sent in soldiers.
Coming full circle, the world’s watching. And unlike a lot of clueless Americans, the international community sees right through this ruse of Trump’s. So alarmed was the UN that a spokesman for Secretary-General António Guterres on Monday exhorted America against “any further militarization of this situation.”
Later Monday, reports indicated 700 Marines were en route to Los Angeles from Twentynine Palms.
Third world.
Trump absolutely wants the situation to escalate. He would be more than happy to see riots to give himself any pretense, no matter how flimsy, to declare martial law in blue states. Who’s going to stop him?
And you know, to put Marines in this situation — a situation where they might have to choose between, say, watching a car get burned or a store looted and opening fire on American citizens — is a terrible thing to do to those young men and women.
I agree. I was there when they did it at Kent State and Ohio State. 18 year old kids fully armed with rules of engagement. I was the only person trapped inside the air-locked front door of the OSU Administration building trying to pick up a check so I could complete my dissertation research. Alone with me in this tiny space were two fully armed state troopers on air in real time with their brethren at Kent State. I was standing there with these two guys when the four kids at KS were shot and killed. It came over the radio right when it happened and the troopers with me said they wished they could get the guard to mow all the traitors down. Luckily, that’s when the guard opened the inside door and let me in. I hustled upstairs, retrieved my large check and fled out the back door. Later I was teargassed, along with 40 fellow administrative assistants in our offices. The guard and the troopers were trying to disperse a huge crowd on the central oval. My mates and I were collateral damage. Woody Hayes and several assistant even braved the gas to drag away any football team members in the crowd. Just wait ’til DJT’s thugs do it all over.
I had this song in my head all weekend:
“Tin soldiers and Nixon coming
We’re finally on our own
This summer I hear the drumming
Four dead in Ohio . . .”
H-Man, he truly believes that he is the teflon man.
Easy to see the problem. What do we do? Keep pointing out the problem? This riot will make POTUS stronger across his base and deflect attention from his weaknesses. Sad.
Trump has overplayed his hand. Up until now the opposition has been dispirited and amorphous. But he has finally given it a uniting issue — Troops in the Streets. It resonates intellectually, emotionally, symbollicaly because it so clearly represents what this administration is all about. And its early innings.
It feels like another Kent State tragedy could be right around the corner. Every day he makes America look like a disorganized band of well-armed miscreants, entirely comfortable with using armed military officers to stifle peaceful dissent.
Trump’s behavior is terribly predictable and terribly sad.
A logical response (albeit incredibly unlikely) by California would be to rapidly employ the existing Cal Guard (the California State Guard) to recruit away California-based soldiers and officers from the deployed National Guard units (any who are not avowed Trump loyalists) and make use of their California roots and loyalty. Cal Guard operates solely under the authority of the governor and can be used to strengthen police and Guard responses in emergencies (such as the State of California being invaded by illegally-deployed federal forces whose intent seems to be to cause unrestrained violence throughout the state). In short, a State Guard could wind up defending the State in an emergency consisting of a Federal invasion with military forces. In the heat of battle (hopefully rhetorical), what would constitutionally-allocated Federal oversight of state guards mean when the nature of the emergency was asserted to be illegally-deployed Federal military powers? Where would or could the governor draw a line on how forcefully Cal Guard would intervene to restore order and contain the Federal intervention?
Would such a “damn the lawyers, full speed ahead” approach be at all different from what Trump has established, repeatedly, as political precedent?
I know you’re thinking “Oh, this is just silly”, but as an ostensible Texan, I can tell you, were the shoe on the other foot, our governor and the Texas State Guard would already be fueling the self-propelled howitzers. Eskalation uber alles.
I would like to see Newsome (or another state governor order his state police out to block the illegal deployment of National Guard or regular military personnel. One would hope that would cause the MAGAmaniacs in charge to back down, or result in honorable commanders defying chain of command in favor of conscience and deference to democratic principle. Or it might become a Lexington – Concord moment. But if that’s what is needed to awaken Americans, to begin to stop the march of Trumpofascism I say bring it on – the sooner the better.
This, unfortunately, is not Kent
State revisited.
Drumphie (ie Miller et al) will try anything to see what sticks. And if it doen’t stick, they will try the next one.
Hasn’t been even 5 months yet!
“A face in the crowd my friends, a face in the crowd!”
It goes without saying that this is in sharp contrast to his (un)willingness to deploy the Guard on Jan. 6.
This might be fun for trump (who knows what that guy thinks or feels) but we’ll see what he does if the ratings for this episode are bad. Crying shame though…
Street battles will drive GDP – down.
World Cup and Olympics are gonna be lit
Will they even happen? Perhaps not.
Miller sure wants his hometown “cleaned up”. what a long game to try and turn it back Reagan Red