Los Angeles has seen days of protests against the Trump administration's immigration raids.Eric Thayer/The Associated Press
In late May, the Trump administration started a fire.
According to reporting by the Wall Street Journal, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller gave an address at the headquarters of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, where he told officials that federal agents need to “just go out there and arrest illegal aliens.”
U.S. President Donald Trump wanted to see, at minimum, 3,000 ICE arrests per day, and that wasn’t going to happen if agents first developed target lists, presented warrants and the like. So Mr. Miller instructed ICE to go to places like Home Depot and swoop up as many illegal immigrants as possible.
The fire took, of course. Over the weekend, people in L.A. took to the streets – with a few of them turning violent – to protest ICE raids and Mr. Trump’s immigration policies more broadly.
Though the majority of the protests were peaceful, a few clashes with police and cars set ablaze were all the pretext Mr. Trump needed to throw some kerosene on his fire: that is, to call in the National Guard, under a provision of the U.S. code that allows the President to do so to repel an invasion or suppress a rebellion, even though the protests were lawful and the situation was being managed by local forces. On Monday, the Trump administration mobilized more National Guard troops, as well as 700 marines.
If the situation escalates further, Mr. Trump will likely invoke the Insurrection Act, which will empower troops to participate in civilian law enforcement (for now, they can only protect structures and personnel).
The President has already used the word “insurrectionists” to describe protesters on the ground in L.A., and has even gone so far as to muse about arresting the state’s Democratic Governor, Gavin Newsom. The situation could explode suddenly – dramatically, catastrophically – which would give Mr. Trump further pretext to engage in his most authoritarian fantasies, which could even mean assuming federal control of the state or delaying future midterm elections.
That would sound like a hysterical prediction if the U.S. government hadn’t already enabled masked, plain-clothed agents to snatch people off the streets; if it wasn’t trying to deport someone who is legally in the U.S. over a college newspaper op-ed; if it wasn’t openly defying court orders; and if it wasn’t musing about arresting political adversaries, planning a military parade for the President’s birthday and – oh yeah – calling in the National Guard, over state objections, to quell dissent. When things are on fire, you can give yourself permission to do all sorts of things. That’s exactly what the U.S. President is doing – and it’s exactly what he promised.
Opinion: For Trump, the L.A. protests are an opportunity to wield power and spread fear
He said explicitly during the campaign that he would not hold back on sending troops to dismantle protests like he did following the death of George Floyd in 2020.
“Next time,” he told a crowd in 2023, “I’m not waiting.” He spoke openly to Fox News back in October about using the National Guard or military to deal with “the enemy from within.” Mr. Trump was frustrated in his first term by objections from then-defense secretary Mark Esper to having U.S. troops patrolling American streets, and he has been clear – both in his statements, and his appointments of only the most obsequious minions to his inner circle – that he won’t be constrained this time. Nothing that leaks from Mr. Trump’s lips is ever rhetorical.
None of this should be a surprise. In fact, very little of what Mr. Trump has done in the first few months of his second term should come as a shock. He said he was going to implement tariffs, and he did. He said he was going to gut government agencies, and he has.
These were never really threats. Threats offer an opportunity to change course; they warn of the consequences for failing to change an action or behaviour. But there was never an opportunity to redirect Mr. Trump.
The President, who loves the idea of tariffs, was going to impose them one way or another – whether a trade deficit was real or imaginary, or whether Canada controlled the miniscule amount of fentanyl crossing the border or not. And so Mr. Trump invented an economic emergency, and did what he intended to all along. He’s following the same course with the protests in L.A., which were fairly standard in terms of intensity before the President summoned the National Guard.
Indeed, Mr. Trump’s threats were actually promises; now, he’s making good. So when the President says he will, for example, prosecute his political enemies, or seek out a third term, we’d be wise to see those not as threats, but as vows – ones that Mr. Trump will endeavour to keep.