With President Donald Trump sending more troops into Los Angeles amid protests there, a remarkable image has gone viral on social media. It shows members of the National Guard crowded into a sterile-looking office, sleeping on a hard floor, in evident discomfort, all dressed in full military gear.
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.
Guess who knows this disconnect is a problem? Trump does.
“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.
All of this is supposed to seem fearsome and strong, and the dispatching of the military is unquestionably a serious abuse of power that must be strenuously resisted. But it’s also worth seeing it as a display of a certain form of political weakness. The buffoonery of Trump’s claims about the need for the Guard and his wildly uncontrollable rage at Newsom—combined with new revelations about the genesis of this crisis—point to a real vulnerability that sits at the core of this whole spectacle.
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”:
He directed them to target Home Depot, where day laborers typically gather for hire, or 7-Eleven convenience stores. Miller bet that he and a handful of agents could go out on the streets of Washington, D.C., and arrest 30 people right away.
“Who here thinks they can do it?” Miller said, asking for a show of hands.
It’s this order that inspired the ICE sweep at a Home Depot in Los Angeles that led to where we are right now, reports the Journal. And this is highly instructive.
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.”
Thus it is that Miller and Trump spent the 2024 campaign depicting all migrants as dangerous criminals in order to sell mass deportations to the voters. Now, however, because there aren’t enough dangerous criminal migrants around, two-bit fascist Miller is frantically urging ICE officials to head to the nearest Home Depot and scoop up as many migrants as possible, to make those deportation numbers pleasing to the raging Audience of One.
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.
The Trump-Miller answer to the political problem here has been to deport as many people as possible, then label them all criminals after the fact. But that’s also not going well. The courts are standing robustly in the way. And polling data shows that while generalized deportations sometimes poll well, majorities do not support removals of longtime residents, non-criminals and people with jobs. Voters want a law-based, orderly immigration system, but they don’t harbor Trump-Miller’s deep ideological hostility to the mere presence of undocumented immigrants, which MAGA views as itself posing a national emergency.
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.
Indeed, Newsom’s office tells me that according to National Guard officials it’s in touch with, most of the 2,000 National Guard troops originally sent by Trump are not even being deployed right now. “Our understanding is that there are about 1,600 soldiers waiting for orders at local armories,” a Newsom spokesperson emails.
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.
It’s often said that making things worse is what Trump wants out of this situation. But journalists haven’t spun out the real political significance of this. Many news organizations are credulously reporting, with zero independent scrutiny, that the White House views this as a political winner: Axios says this episode provides Trump an “opportunity to fuse power, politics and spectacle,” suggesting this lets Trump fight on immigration as his “home turf.” NBC News uncritically reports that the White House sees this as a “winning issue.”
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?
MAGA politics has a built-in structural problem here: It thrives on invocations of endlessly sinister, inchoate enemies and fantasies about using emergency authorities and awesome firepower to crush them. Just as Trump and Miller needed to paint all migrants as criminals but now are reduced to scouring Home Depot parking lots, so too must they wildly inflate the violence in L.A.—and put on garish paramilitary displays in response—to keep the MAGA Media Complex happy. But many voters in the middle do not thrill to the same enemies or lust after the same emergencies that MAGA does.
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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