Donald Trump has ordered the National Guard to enter Los Angeles in their thousands, in a move with the potential to set off the biggest domestic political crisis the US has faced since Trump’s supporters attempted an insurrection in Washington DC in 2021.
The very fact of deploying the National Guard is striking in itself, but it is the circumstances surrounding Trump’s Saturday night decision to do so that are particularly extraordinary. Foremost among those is that no-one has asked for the help of the National Guard, and there is no obvious crisis in LA for them to solve.
The United States is both a nation and a coalition of 50 states. This is something that’s easy to forget when looking at the USA from overseas, but it is fundamental: city and state governments matter, and so do the choices they make. States’ rights – the freedom of each State to make its own choices, except where the Constitution says something is a federal matter – are usually a fundamental rallying call for Republicans. And those states’ rights usually mean that the federal government doesn’t send troops into a state unless they have been requested.
And yet Trump has ordered at least 2,000 National Guardsmen into the Californian city after three days of protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials. ICE had deployed tear gas and non-lethal munitions against the protests, but in a statement late on Saturday evening, Los Angeles Police Department issued a statement confirming the protests “remained peaceful” and “concluded without incident”. While some turbulence on the streets escalated in the evening, LA’s police also stressed they were in a “heightened readiness posture” and “ready to ensure the continued safety of communities”.
LA’s police, in short, are saying the protests are largely peaceful and they are able to handle them. The protests have occurred because of the actions of ICE, who are engaging in aggressive immigration raids across LA despite it being a “sanctuary city”, a term for a city in which laws have been passed barring all state officials and law enforcement from aiding immigration authorities. ICE was acting in an inflammatory way against the will of local voters, and was facing protest as a result.
In his executive memorandum ordering in the troops, Donald Trump said that those peaceful protests “constitute a form of rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States” – using this as a justification for the first non-consensual deployment of federal troops in this way since the civil rights clashes in the South. As if all of this wasn’t enough, Trump’s defence secretary (and former Fox News presenter) Pete Hegseth threatened to send in Marines to LA – a move California’s governor Gavin Newsom has rightly called “deranged”.
The dangers of Trump’s unprecedented escalation here should be obvious to anyone: the federal government has no business sending armed troops where they are neither needed nor wanted. Should things escalate into violence, it would be the federal government who poured petrol onto the fire. When armed troops are on the streets and top government officials are fanning the flames, people can easily be killed – and events can spiral.
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But the blazing hypocrisy of Trump and his top officials should stand out, too. One of Trump’s first actions on regaining the presidency in January was pardoning thousands of insurrectionists who participated in a violent invasion of Congress – including those who assaulted police. Now, mere months later, Trump claims to be so outraged by peaceful protest, which is protected by the First Amendment of the US constitution, that he is deploying troops against them.
This risks a full-scale collapse of the USA’s already crumbling political norms. Trump has pardoned his own supporters for violent insurrection even as he deploys armed soldiers against his political opponents. This is the behaviour of dictators, not democratic leaders. It is a sign of a society reaching its breaking point.
It has to be hoped that cooler heads prevail and manage to pull this particular crisis back from the brink. The people who actually make up the National Guard are not fanatics: they signed up to help their nation during crises, not to be a private army for a dictatorial president. California’s government and senior law enforcement officials will be trying to find ways to deploy troops that don’t risk escalating the situation. As always happens when Donald Trump is president, people will be working quietly to try to save America from the man leading it.
Hopefully America’s luck will hold and they will be successful – but as Trump embraces his tyrannical impulses ever more openly, there are fewer and fewer people around him with either the ability or the inclination to hold him back.
The citizens of Los Angeles were protesting against Trump’s unlawful use of the federal agency ICE to deport their friends and neighbours. For that, they are being called rebels against the state, and facing its military force. However the mess Trump has made in LA ends, America surely cannot withstand three and a half more years of this.
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