He’s coming, and he wants a spectacle.
Don’t give it to him.
It doesn’t take Nostradamus to figure out virtually the entire Bay Area — San Jose, Oakland, San Francisco and most everything in between — is on Donald Trump’s list.
For now, Los Angeles is giving the president what he wants to justify expanding his power over the state — and temporarily satiate his sadism.
Since Friday, when U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s stepped-up raids became public, Angelenos have taken Trump’s bait.
Hook, line and sinker.
And in San Francisco, where Trump has started chumming the water, some local anti-ICE protesters started biting on Sunday, when they injured two police officers, vandalized Muni buses and smashed some store windows, and again on Monday, when they smashed the windows of several businesses.
Trump and conservatives, overall, are obsessed with tarring California — to them, the apotheosis of liberalism — as a violent, lawless, anti-American hellscape.
And a fraction of a fraction of the L.A. metropolis’ 13 million denizens are working hard to confirm conservatives’ absolute worst possible biases of California.
Naturally, Fox News is there to lend a hand and monetize the mayhem. Prominently featured on Fox’s website on Monday was footage that couldn’t have been scripted better by White House courtier Stephen Miller or the Texas Chamber of Commerce.
In one clip, you can watch masked rioters smashing the windows of an LAPD headquarters. To top it off, one of them is carrying a — wait for it — Mexican flag.
And in another clip, which you best believe Fox will be re-airing for the next decade in their never-ending schadenfreude segment dubbed “Liberal Cities in Crisis,” some masked protesters spit on and burn an American flag, liberally doused in lighter fluid.
To be fair, Fox didn’t have to search hard for bedlam. Some Angelenos have made it easy to sensationalize. Even PBS NewsHour didn’t have to try hard to make this look like a redux of the 1992 riots.
Poisoning the well
While the vast majority of protesters have been non-violent, a tiny minority has used the tumult to take out their non-sequitur aggression by, among other useless displays of pent-up testosterone, doing donuts in reverse in street intersections and burning Waymo’s helpless fleet.
Unfortunately, all it takes is one hooligan among 10,000 non-violent protesters to completely poison the well of public perception. Right now, that’s what’s going on in Los Angeles.
These rebels without a cause are doing Trump’s work for free, helping to convince Americans that Los Angeles and California officials — especially his nouveau bête noire, Gov. Gavin Newsom — are weak liberal losers who can’t maintain social order.
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Is Los Angeles really out of control? No. But Trump desperately wants it to be. The president thrives on chaos and has exacerbated the conflict on purpose.
The crazier, the more violent, the more unhinged Angelenos get, the easier it is for Trump to do what he really wants: use military power to quell domestic dissent. That is what he’s now laying the groundwork for.
In fact, it’s already starting.
On Saturday night, for the first time since 1965, the president bypassed a governor to commandeer the National Guard, a state-based military force. By Tuesday, Trump had needlessly mobilized 4,000 California National Guard troops and more than 700 Marines to keep the peace in L.A. Of course, he knows the very presence of armed troops on city sidewalks is creating the problem they’re there to solve.
Keep in mind that LAPD has nearly 9,000 well-armed officers and L.A. County Sheriff’s Department — the second largest policing agency in the country — has almost 10,000 equally well-armed deputies.
The real agenda
It’s a pretty simple formula going on here: Make L.A. look like a warzone to justify wartime powers.
If you think that’s hyperbolic, remember: In the run-up to November’s election, Trump repeatedly railed against the “enemy from within” — and he even claimed that these vaguely described domestic enemies were a bigger threat to America than foreign enemies including Russia and China.
But truth be told, Los Angeles isn’t the biggest California prize for a vindictive president obsessed with punishing his internal political foes. That distinction falls to the Bay Area — ground zero for Democratic politics and pro-immigrant rights.
There are multiple so-called “sanctuary cities” here, including San Jose, Berkeley, Alameda, Fremont, Mountain View, Emeryville and San Francisco. In fact, Trump has already threatened to withdraw Bay Area cities’ federal funding because of their immigration policies.
And for an administration hellbent on flexing its power in the guise of protecting Americans from dangerous foreigners and especially their deranged Democratic leaders, the Bay Area makes for the juiciest of targets. His rhetoric is escalating by the day. In his most recent provocation, he has called arresting California’s governor “great.”
Where he goes from here is anyone’s guess. There is no floor.
But one thing is certain:
If San Jose, Oakland and San Francisco want to give Trump any new excuses to rationalize seizing even more power — like using the U.S. military to eliminate domestic dissent — the best thing they can do is be like Los Angeles and bite his bait of bile.
Max Taves is deputy opinion editor for the Bay Area News Group.
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