During the last months of last year’s presidential campaign, Donald Trump would hold his rallies in places like Pennsylvania and complain about Vice President Kamala Harris’ home state of California being a violent hellscape that had its residents cowering in terror of the rampaging hordes of immigrant criminals who were routinely killing people in their beds. He would often complain that the police were hamstrung by “woke” policies that wouldn’t allow them to take the gloves off. At one of his rallies, Trump even daydreamed about what he would do about it if he became president again: allow the cops to have “one really violent day.”
His crowds loved it. He’s always entertained them with his lurid, violent fantasies. It’s one of the things they love about him.
Californians didn’t love it so much, however. The fact that Harris hailed from the state was certainly an invitation for him to trash the state, but he’d been doing that long before Harris was in the race. In fact, despite owning a house and a golf course in Los Angeles, Trump has been openly hostile toward California ever since it failed to vote for him in 2016. During his first term, he raged at the state for failing to “clean the floors of the forest,” which he claimed was responsible for the fires that hit Northern California. As The Atlantic’s Ron Brownstein reported, during the global pandemic crisis, he demanded that if the Golden State wanted pandemic supplies and federal help, they would need to “ask nicely” and capitulate on issues like sanctuary cities. Trump and then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., called such requests a “blue state bailout” and suggested that the state should go bankrupt if it requests relief during the global emergency. Trump behaved similarly toward other blue states, but reserved a special portion of his ire for California.
He started his second term by maligning Los Angeles during the devastating wildfires in January. He fatuously insisted that if the state had listened to him about “turning on the valve” in Northern California to release water to the south from Canada, there would have been no fires. He even ordered the Army Corps of Engineers to release millions of gallons into a flood plain and then weirdly claimed that he’d “invaded” Los Angeles and solved its water problem.
He never had a word of sympathy for the victims of the tragedy. All he could do was blame the governor, who he immaturely calls Gavin “Newscum.”
All that was bad enough. But now he’s pretty much declared war on Los Angeles.
Ever since Trump came into office with his mandate for “Mass Deportation Now,” he’s been impatient with the pace and the numbers. What was touted as a plan to rid the country of violent gang members has proved to be less fruitful than he promised. He always meant to deport as many immigrants as possible, regardless of their legal status or criminal history. (Why else would he pounce on the Haitian community as he did?) As the Washington Examiner reported last week, Trump’s enforcer and shadow president Stephen Miller brought the hammer down on ICE in recent days, instituting a quota and demanding that they stop looking for criminals and start arresting people at their workplaces, schools and outside places like Home Depot and 7-Eleven.
I live here and I can validate the fact that immigrants in this city are part of the fabric of our lives … Nobody here is asking for this.
They’ve been doing smaller raids around the country for some time. But after Miller’s edicts, they are now waging full-scale assaults. They’ve come to LA, with its large Latino and Asian immigrant communities, carrying assault weapons and wearing masks, to make an example of the already stressed city, which is still recovering from an epic natural disaster. What better way to demonstrate our new constitution-shredding, authoritarian police state? (And, naturally, it happens to be Stephen Miller’s hometown, which he has loathed since he was an angry xenophobic misfit at Santa Monica High School.)
Last week, ICE began a series of large-scale raids, naturally provoking protests from the community. As the demonstrations against them escalated over Friday and Saturday, ICE lied about the LAPD failing to help protect them, clearly as a way to allow Trump to deploy the National Guard.
He claimed it was a riot. Los Angeles knows what a riot is. We have had real ones here, and this is not that. He did not ask the governor to deploy the National Guard, as he is expected to do. He instead evoked a very rarely used law that was last applied in 1965 by President Lyndon Johnson to protect civil rights workers from local police, allowing him to federalize those troops.
Start your day with essential news from Salon.Sign up for our free morning newsletter, Crash Course.
He issued a memorandum ordering “at least 2,000” troops to the city of LA for “no less” than 60 days. It instructed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, most recently a former Fox News weekend host, to order active duty military on standby as well. Several hundred of these federalized California National Guard troops entered the city on Sunday. All this action did was escalate tensions and prompt more unrest. But then, that was the point.
I live here and I can validate the fact that immigrants in this city are part of the fabric of our lives. There have always been many undocumented workers here and they’re part of the community — they’re our families, friends and co-workers. We value them and the contribution they make culturally and economically. Nobody here is asking for this. Having militarized federal cops and active duty troops raiding our neighborhoods and violently grabbing people off the streets is the real invasion, not the people who’ve been living and working here forever.
And it isn’t going to be just us. Liza Goiten, director of the National Security Project at the Brennan Center, told CNN:
[Trump’s] memorandum doesn’t even mention Los Angeles. It authorizes the deployment of federalized national guard forces and active armed duty forces anywhere in the country where protests against ICE activity are occurring regardless of whether those protests involve any violence or in places where protests are simply likely to occur. And that could really be anywhere in the country. That kind of pre-emptive nationwide deployment of the military to effectively police protests is unprecedented, incredibly dangerous and an abuse of any law the president might be relying on. “
On Sunday, Donald Trump spoke to the media and promised that “we’re going to have troops everywhere.”
Late last night, he posted this:
We can probably expect to see even more escalation by Trump in the coming days. The state of California is filing suit, so perhaps the court will stay his hand temporarily. But that won’t be the end of it. If they rule that he cannot use this rarely used law, he will almost certainly invoke the Insurrection Act and, if necessary, declare martial law. This is just the beginning. Anyone who lives in a blue American city should get ready. They’re coming for you, too.
Read more
about this topic
