Donald Trump v. America
President Donald Trump's deployment of National Guard troops and Marines to the streets of Los Angeles isn't a distraction. It's a warning.
In the decade he has been in the political spotlight, Trump has shown a desire to turn the U.S. into a police state, with him at the top. His signature policy priority is a mass deportation campaign led by armed federal officers. He rejects any opposition to his orders as illegitimate or illegal, routinely calling for political opponents and reporters to be jailed. And he previously wanted to order police and the military to shoot nonviolent protesters.
In doing so, Trump casts himself as leading a domestic war against internal enemies. His backers have been explicit on this, like now-State Department official Michael Anton's description of Trump's 2016 campaign as akin to the passengers of Flight 93 storming the cockpit to stop al-Qaeda terrorists on 9/11 or Vice President JD Vance's call for a de-Ba'athification process like that the U.S. occupying force in Iraq performed after overthrowing Saddam Hussein.
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Trump's second term in office is rooted in this desire to wage war on the American people in an effort to bury the 20th century's liberal order. To do this, he quickly inaugurated a turn toward autocracy with attacks on every element of civil society, from law firms, nonprofits, universities, the press, the civil service, his critics and his political opponents in the Democratic Party. These attacks took the form of threats, extortion and investigations.
Now, in Los Angeles, those threats are now being made from the end of a barrel.
By deploying the military to repress the American people, he threatens to make protests of his policies effectively illegal. Protests are still ongoing, but now face the specter of orders from the president or the Secretary of Defense to suppress them with force. The situation on the ground, as local officials have repeatedly said, does not warrant this reaction. Instead, this effort, which operates under dubious legal and constitutional authority, aims to inflame the situation in order to scare the public, suppress criticism and show that any challenge to Trump's rule will be met with the threat, or reality, of violence. This is what Trump's post-constitutional moment looks like.
The trigger for Trump's war on the American people is his mass deportation campaign, which aims to remove all 13 million-plus undocumented immigrants in the country as well as many legal immigrants and U.S. citizen children of undocumented immigrants. This is cast as a civilizational struggle against a 'migrant invasion,' akin to a military attack by a foreign state, led by 'foreign terrorist organizations,' that is 'poisoning the blood of our country.'
'We've been saying for years this is a fight to save civilization. Anyone with eyes can see that now,' White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller posted on social media on Sunday.
But if this is a war, who is the real opposing force?
Despite repeatedly saying that he would only target hardened criminals for deportation, Trump has instead turned the federal government against both undocumented and legal immigrants, including workers, families, students and children, across the board. Any opposition to this, or effort to help those targeted, has also been met with repression. Trump's Department of Justice has already charged a mayor, a congresswoman and a judge with crimes related to immigration enforcement. In short, he has turned his agenda of war against Americans themselves.
Just look at what has transpired in the past five months: ICE officers make warrantless arrests, often hiding their identities; international students have been detained and marked for deportation for their speech; U.S. citizen children have been deported with their undocumented parents; immigrants seeking legal status see their cases dismissed so they can be immediately arrested; temporary protected status for Venezuelans, Cubans, Haitians and Nicaraguans has been stripped; and hundreds of immigrants have been sent to a concentration camp prison in El Salvador in violation of the law and the Constitution.
This nationwide crackdown escalated ahead of the protests in Los Angeles after Miller, the architect of Trump's deportation campaign, reportedly upped deportation quotas for ICE and scolded officials there for only focusing on deporting criminals.
'What do you mean you're going after criminals?' Miller asked ICE leaders, according to the Washington Examiner. Instead, he demanded they raid Home Depots and 7-Elevens to round up undocumented immigrants seeking day labor. Miller pressed ICE officials to deport at least 3,000 people per day and threatened that those who do not meet quotas will be fired.
This is what touched off the protests in Los Angeles. ICE officers targeted two Home Depots and other sites in military-style raids on June 6.
'They were just grabbing people,' one witness told The Washington Post. 'They don't ask questions. They didn't know if any of us were in any kind of immigration process.'
Small protests followed that day and then grew on June 7 in response to the crackdown by ICE and police the night before and amid rumors of more ICE raids. Protesters gathered outside of ICE facilities in the county, leading to arrests, including that of David Huerta, the head of the Los Angeles chapter of the Service Employees International Union. Some protesters threw objects — rocks, bottles, concrete — at police officers and erected makeshift barricades on streets, and a self-driving car was set on fire.
Despite Los Angeles Police stating that it had the situation under control, Trump issued a memorandum federalizing the California National Guard that night while Miller called the protests a 'violent insurrection.'
Like many actions taken by Trump in his second term, that memorandum federalizes the guard on odd legal grounds through a novel and questionable use of existing law. It relies on a statute that has only ever been invoked in conjunction with the Insurrection Act, which allows the military to operate domestically under certain rare circumstances, in response to domestic disorder. It also marked the first time since 1965 that a president federalized troops in this manner over the opposition of a governor, when President Lyndon Johnson invoked it to protect the historic Selma to Montgomery march in Alabama. And the statute only authorizes the president to deploy National Guard troops, not the Marines, as Trump has done.
National Guard troops are technically only authorized to protect federal property and functions when deployed under this law. That is much more restrained than what they could do under the Insurrection Act, which would enable the military to engage in domestic police functions. However, the administration, in its pursuit of repressing the protests, looks like it wants this statute to function as the Insurrection Act would without invoking the act.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem sent a letter to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on June 6 calling on him to direct the military to detain or arrest 'lawbreakers' even though the statute Trump invoked does not authorize the military to act as a domestic police force, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. In doing so, Noem cast the need for this action as though the government were engaged in a war.
'We need … support to our law enforcement officers and agents … as they defend against invasive, violent, insurrectionist mobs that seek to protect invaders and military aged males belonging to identified foreign terrorist organizations, and who seek to prevent the deportation of criminal aliens,' Noem wrote.
This language of domestic war is the essence of Trumpism and the signature policy of his second term. It views the end goal — purging of disfavored racial and cultural groups and ideas from society — as of such paramount necessity as to enable the means of vast law-breaking and violations of the Constitution.
But the end and the means are one and the same. Trump and his aides want to end the liberal order that looked favorably on immigration, supported civil rights laws, aimed to create a more equal economy and sought to expand the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness to those previously denied them. Mass deportation may be an end in itself, but it is also the means to crush the liberal order and impose an autocratic police state.
Protest is the primary means to counter Trump's autocratic turn. And so Los Angeles has become a testing ground for his effort to use force to prevent opposition from spreading.
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