There’s little about this presidency that a majority of Americans support, and Trump seems uniquely uninterested in changing their minds. This is his m.o. His entire reelection platform was basically, “They can’t throw me in jail if I’m the president,” and the only thing he’s done since his return is to use the office to mete out vengeance on everyone who he believes has wronged him—just as he said he would. That’s why the biggest lesson of the unrest in Los Angeles is simply this: We are, at all times, hurtling toward conflict with the Trump administration, and the future of our democracy depends on understanding this and fighting it head-on.
The Trump administration is angry and humiliated—and grossly unprepared. They have not done the planning necessary to pacify a city, and they don’t have the numbers to do it either. The National Guard members they have activated are famously sleeping on floors and complaining about how the administration is using 29-day deployments to avoid having to pay for active-duty benefits. And the president’s coalition is starting to fracture: Florida state Senator Ileana Garcia, who helmed Latinas for Trump during the election campaign, denounced the president’s crackdown this week. Another California Republican issued a statement urging the administration to “prioritize the removal of known criminals over the hardworking people who have lived peacefully in the Valley for years.”
While these displays of courage should be celebrated, there are still too many Democrats in Washington who are hesitant to step up—and who mirror the administration’s lack of preparedness. This week, California Senator Alex Padilla demonstrated that he was up for the fight, disrupting a press conference from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and getting manhandled and briefly detained as his reward. Still, many of his Capitol Hill colleagues seem to not understand the moment at all. Even as Angelenos were putting themselves in harm’s way to stop ICE raids and humiliate the Trump regime, 75 House Democrats were signing their name to a resolution expressing “gratitude to law enforcement officers, including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel, for protecting the homeland.” Beyond that, I’m seeing the same basic reluctance among Beltway Democrats to recognize that they’re in a content-creation war. Republicans are still much quicker to grab a microphone or position themselves in front of a television camera. And even Trump understands that the biggest virtue of deploying Marines to California is that he’ll get the media to report it.
As Brian Beutler explains in a recent Off Message newsletter, Democrats have been having an almighty struggle with the basic concept of forethought. We have, for a long time, been operating under the ambient threat that the administration was going to provoke the public into a spectacular anti-administration response, whereupon Trump would do something like invoke the Insurrection Act or otherwise activate some militarized rejoinder. People have long been anticipating the need for blue-state governors to get out in front of the threat. “We knew he’d wield immigration enforcement cruelly, in a manner designed to draw protesters into the streets, and we knew he’d be eager to deploy troops once protests began,” Beutler writes.
At any rate, the time for anticipating what Trump might do has long passed. The conflict has arrived, and we are in a perilous moment. That said, I’d worry more if the people were mirroring the reticence and timidity of many of our political elites. But as we’ve seen in Los Angeles—and are likely to see as anti-Trump protests spread across the nation this weekend—no one is waiting for politicians to step in and be the grand marshal of this growing dissident movement. Democratic leaders may still be waiting for the “time, place, and manner of our choosing” to take the fight to Trump. But Angelenos have countered, “What better place than this? What better time than now?”
This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.
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