The image doesn’t just reveal awful planning for this dispatching of troops. It also captures the deeper absurdity of this entire operation: These members of the military were supposedly needed to quell an urgent emergency, but as it has turned out, they were simply not needed for this purpose at all.
“If I didn’t ‘SEND IN THE TROOPS’ to Los Angeles the last three nights, that once beautiful and great City would be burning to the ground right now,” Trump raged on Truth Social, adding that Governor Gavin Newsom is “incompetent.” This came after another incendiary Trump missive, which vaguely suggested that “Gavin Newscum” is inspiring protesters to “spit” on National Guardsmen, and after Trump called for Newsom’s arrest based on nothing. In a subsequent speech to servicemembers, Trump also absurdly described L.A. as nothing but a “trash heap,” presumably meaning he’s its savior, and goaded his audience into booing Newsom.
Those revelations come in this report in The Wall Street Journal, which says that in May, top Trump adviser Stephen Miller told Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials that Trump was displeased with lagging deportation numbers. Miller told ICE officials that they are not merely supposed to target gang members and violent criminals, and instead must “just go out there and arrest illegal aliens”:
“Who here thinks they can do it?” Miller said, asking for a show of hands.
Here’s why: MAGA, like other iterations of authoritarian and fascist politics, thrives on the invocation of a vast and implacable enemy within that requires the dramatic exercise of emergency authorities and extraordinary measures to defeat it. But executing that invocation in the first place requires what’s technically known as “making shit up.”
The absurdity of this is plain. As Josh Marshall notes, by definition this entails targeting day laborers—that is, going after people who want to work and whose labor is in demand, meaning it inherently constitutes the opposite of hunting for dangerous criminals. Worse, Trump and Miller are not just neglecting serious criminal migrants to target more non-criminals; to do so, they’re also actively shifting law enforcement resources away from other serious crimes, from drug trafficking to child exploitation.
That brings us to Los Angeles. There is zero indication that Trump’s sending in of the Guard has prevented widespread civil collapse from breaking out, as his rage-tweet claimed. Though any violence is to be condemned, the unrest has been limited to extremely contained localities in the massive land area known as Greater Los Angeles, as David Dayen’s reporting shows.
If true, then Trump’s claim that his dispatching of troops kept L.A. from burning down looks even more absurd. So does Trump’s decision to dispatch another 2,000 Guardsmen. By the way, now that Trump has announced that he’s sending in 700 Marines as well, the L.A. Police Department has declared that this could create “an additional logistical and operational challenge” for those “safeguarding the city.” Trump is making things worse.
But that’s garbage analysis. By unthinkingly amplifying the White House’s spin that this is good political strategy, it wraps lawless and authoritarian abuses of power in the aura of conventional politics. What’s more, polling doesn’t even support the idea: Only small minorities support the sending in of the National Guard or the Marines, while pluralities oppose it. And why even assume that people will see troops descending on cities amid largely peaceful protests primarily as an immigration issue?
None of this diminishes the real danger this situation poses. Trump’s troops really could be the prelude to invoking the Insurrection Act and worse. But to reflexively assume that voters will robotically side with Trump here is to assume that imagery of violence, disorder, and paramilitary gear will automatically turn off their brains.
True, this debate is not fully settled yet. In fact, as Brian Beutler says, this is why Democrats must engage it forcefully. But that entails refraining from assuming that voters will believe Trump when he declares that his military displays are necessary to establish civil order in Los Angeles. Trump is raging at Newsom—and demanding our applause for putting down this “rebellion”—not because he’s fearsome and strong, but because his watch-me-play-fascist-on-TV routine is self-evident overkill, voters suspect the military is not needed here, and it’s all making him appear simultaneously tyrannical and incompetent. Democrats: Proceed accordingly.
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