I’ve been hearing sirens and helicopters on and off since Saturday afternoon. These are the sounds of the Los Angeles Police Department passing my neighbourhood on their way to police the protests. Beyond this, my own life has hardly been affected by what’s going on downtown. Neither, as far as I can tell, has the lives of the vast majority of the city’s 3.8 million residents.
Even so, President Trump has deployed the National Guard, along with several hundred marines, to Los Angeles — despite the objections of California Governor Gavin Newsom. This is the first time a president has invoked this authority since Lyndon Johnson sent them in to protect civil rights protesters in Alabama in 1965 when the governor George Wallace, a notorious segregationist and demagogue, refused to protect them himself. The circumstances in Trump’s case are dramatically different, and it’s far from clear that his decision meets the legal standard for federalising Guard troops. California Attorney General Rob Bonta has already filed a lawsuit.
Whether or not such action was legal, it was certainly indefensible. The protests over the weekend weren’t even particularly large, numbering in the hundreds, rather than the thousands, most of whom were demonstrating peacefully. There were a few reports of people who “threw objects” at ICE agents who were taking immigrant workers into detention, but I haven’t seen any claims of serious injuries. Nevertheless, Trump’s response was unprecedented in recent American history.
When the Guard was deployed on Saturday, the Twitter account of the Customs and Border Protection agency sternly posted that anyone “who assaults or impedes a federal law enforcement officer or agent in the performance of their duties” will face “life long consequences”. It’s a threat difficult to take seriously coming from the Trump administration, which mass-pardoned rioters who assaulted Capitol police officers on January 6. This included rioters who had attacked cops with flagpoles and bear spray. Surely this is far worse than the friends and colleagues of terrified workers making desperate attempts to save them from ICE?
It’s even harder to believe that such ostentatiously cruel roundups of unauthorised immigrant workers are a necessary part of a populist effort to protect native-born workers from low-waged competition. The Trump administration has been waging an all-out war against organised labour, attempting to abolish the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and shredding the collective bargaining agreements of federal workers. They’ve promoted Medicaid cuts, gutted regulatory agencies, and torn up workplace safety standards. But we’re supposed to believe that the administration is terrorising migrant workers because it wants to protect the living standards of the working class?
Los Angeles has been the site of massive and destructive riots at various points in its history, such as the Watts Riots in 1965 or the explosion following the Rodney King trial in 1992. But the level of destruction we’re seeing now is the kind you might expect from a sports riot in a Midwestern college town. It’s hard to shake the impression that Trump’s goal is to heighten tensions. After all, Los Angeles is a big liberal city that conservative commentators often treat as a byword for crime, homelessness, and political dysfunction. California is one of the most solidly Democratic states. Trump might see several advantages to engineering a dramatic showdown in a city and state run by his political enemies.
He also probably wants to posture for his base as a tough and decisive leader. His most hard-core supporters believe that his first administration was obstructed by feckless moderate Republicans who took key roles in the White House. For them, this explains all the gaps between rhetoric and reality. After all the hype about “building the wall” along the Mexican border, for example, less than 50 miles of new border fencing was constructed during Trump’s four years in office.
“He also probably wants to posture for his base as a tough and decisive leader.”
The incentive to pander to his base might be particularly strong in this case because the underlying issue is immigration. When Trump assumed office, he promised to deport “millions and millions” of unauthorised immigrants, but his administration has struggled to deport anything like that level. By sending the marines to Los Angeles to stop protesters from blocking ICE vans, perhaps Trump is seeking to symbolically compensate for the gap between rhetoric and reality.
There are other plausible explanations which are far more disturbing. Is Trump hoping that inflaming tensions will provoke a violent response from Angelenos extreme enough to justify seizing further emergency powers? Or could it be a trial balloon: an opportunity for Trump to gauge how much authoritarianism he can get away? That would fit the pattern of the rest of his second term, during which he has sent deportees to a prison in El Salvador without trial, and ignored a judge’s explicit order to turn back deportation flights that were already in the air. (Administration lawyers argued that the order wasn’t binding because it hadn’t been delivered in writing.) Why did Trump bother doing that? It’s not as if much rested on those particular planes making it to their destination. But perhaps he thought that establishing that the administration could get away with ignoring the courts would be a useful precedent going forward.
Something similar might be going on here. While senior White House aide Stephen Miller has explicitly used the word “insurrection” to describe events in Los Angeles, Trump has so far stopped short of using the i-word. Perhaps this time he won’t go so far as to invoke the Insurrection Act, which would allow him to use the marines and guardsmen in LA to engage in law-enforcement activity such as arresting rioters. Instead, the marines and the guardsmen will stand outside federal buildings looking intimidating. Even so, this sets a precedent: that marines can be sent to sites of domestic unrest. And this might make the public and the press a bit less rattled if Trump ever does invoke the Insurrection Act in the future.
Trump, though, tends to act on impulse. Few presidents have been less consistent in their decision making: administration officials and advisors come and go, the President’s moods change, and everyone has to scramble to keep up. But while he fumbles in the dark, acting on instinct, many of those instincts are deeply authoritarian. Testing how far he can push the limits of presidential power is par for the course. And the best hope for the health of American democracy is for the public to signal, loudly and clearly, that enough is enough.
