The Brooklyn Rail

The Trump regime’s march toward an authoritarian police state has been purposeful and relentless over the first five months of Trump’s second term, and the response by most of the media and most of the American public to this takeover has been maddeningly tepid. The prevailing attitude across the political spectrum has been, “maybe if we just ignore it, it will go away, until we can have another election.” That attitude is no longer defensible.

The initial images coming out of Los Angeles this week—self-driving taxis on fire, protesters waving the Mexican flag, masked rioters breaking windows and looting stores, graffiti on public buildings, and National Guard troops lined up in formation facing bottle-throwing crowds—were all hailed by the Trump regime as support for their narrative of “LA is on fire, caused by lawless rioters, brought back into line by the federalized National Guard and US Marines, thanks to the all-knowing, all-powerful Trump.” It looked good on Fox News and initially played well across the country. Finally someone is standing up against the California woke crowd. The right-wing media’s control of public images handily eclipsed that of the liberal media during this period. Now the war of images is moving into a new, advanced stage.

Trump’s verbal attacks on California Governor Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, accusing them of fecklessness and being slow to respond to the crisis, seemed to stick, at first. Then other images began to take hold, of labor union leader David Huerta being pushed to the ground, injured, and arrested during a protest, of police in riot gear beating protesters with tonfas, and of guardsmen in uniform sleeping on concrete floors because no barracks were provided for them. Then the images of unidentified security personnel and FBI agents forcing US Senator Alex Padilla of California down to the ground and handcuffing him for asking a question of the Secretary of Homeland Security in a press conference. These images, coupled with the unhinged accompanying comments by Trump, Kristi Noem, Stephen Miller, and other MAGA regulars, began to even the field.

Trump kept threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act from 1807 to step over the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 and use federal troops on domestic soil (something he’s been threatening to do for years) to quell an “insurrection” or to repel an “invasion” in Los Angeles. “We’re going to have troops everywhere,” Trump said on June 8. The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said, “Illegal criminal aliens and violent mobs have been committing arson, throwing rocks at vehicles, and attacking federal law enforcement for days.” And Stephen Miller, always a voice of understatement and magnanimity, bleated out, “This is a fight to save civilization!”

What are the rules of engagement in a fight to save civilization? The Trump administration says they’re all for turning decision-making over to the states, in terms of public health, disaster relief, and education, but in this case Trump went directly against the loud and clear decisions of the state leaders to federalize the California National Guard, to militarize the police, and to punish protestors along with all of the dangerous dishwashers, field workers, and construction workers they could find. By bringing in combat-trained warfighters to confront the protestors, Trump is effectively declaring war on civilians.

From a strategic standpoint, these deployments are recklessly arbitrary. When the California National Guard was federalized by Trump and brought in on June 8 and lined up in front of the Federal Building in downtown LA, the New Yorker’s Emily Witt said the job of the Los Angeles Police Department officers, in riot gear black, “seemed to be to protect the Guard from protesters while the Guard ostensibly protected the building.”¹

And clearly, California is only the beginning, as anti-ICE demonstrations break out across the country, and people prepare for widespread massive demonstrations on Saturday to counter Trump’s military parade.

Are the anti-ICE protests in downtown LA Trump’s Reichstag fire? Trump and his minions are definitely tying their usurpation of state sovereignty in public order in Los Angeles to their bloated spending bill awaiting action in Congress. That spending bill contains provisions for a massive increase in spending on mass deportations—up to $185 billion, which is more than the total annual military spending of the UK and France combined.

In 2024, the Office of Homeland Security estimated that there were 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the US on January 1, 2022, and 44% of them were from Mexico. About 75 percent of undocumented immigrants are employed, primarily in lower-skilled, lower-paid jobs. They pay income taxes ($46.8 billion in federal taxes and $29.3 billion in state and local taxes) and they pay into Social Security ($22.6 billion) and Medicare ($5.7 billion), but are not eligible to receive those benefits.

The American Immigration Council estimates that deporting these undocumented immigrants would cost at least $315 billion and would greatly exacerbate the US labor shortage and cause significant damage to the construction, agriculture, and hospitality industries. Mass deportation on the scale now called for by Stephen Miller would lead to a loss of 4.2 to 6.8 percent of annual GDP. The worst economic damage would be inflicted on California, Texas, and Florida, which have almost half of the country’s undocumented immigrants. And California just became the fourth largest economy in the world, surpassing Japan.

But this is not, in the end, about the money, at least not in the views of most voters, as shown in recent polls. The Trump/Miller/Homan team sold mass deportation to voters on the grounds that they would go after murderers, rapists, drug dealers and gang members (“the worst of the worst”). As Trump said when he first ran for President, “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best . . . They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” The trouble is, Trump and Co. ran out of the worst of the worst very quickly. The people that are being snatched up in raids on Home Depot and restaurants in LA now are the good people who’ve worked hard, paid their taxes, and become an integral part of their communities. And the people coming after them look like the masked invaders.

The protests in downtown LA have set off the worst of Trump’s “strong man” fantasies. He wants to be like his heroes Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-un, Viktor Orbán, and Recep Erdogan, all of whom have basked in the glow of numerous parades displaying their military might.

On June 10 in the Oval Office, Trump was asked about the military parade for his birthday on Saturday, and he replied, “If there’s any protester wants to come out, they will be met with very big force . . . For those people that want to protest they’re going to be met with very big force.”

Just before her security detail swarmed a US senator and the FBI forced him to kneel on the floor, Kristi Noem made this statement, saying the quiet part out loud and making clear what the federal government is actually doing in LA, and what they intend to do in many other cities and states:

The Department of Homeland Security and the agencies and departments of the military, people that are working on this operation, will continue to sustain and increase our operation in this city. We’re not going away. We are staying here to liberate this city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and this mayor have placed on this country, and what they have tried to insert into this city.

“We are staying here to liberate this city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and this mayor have placed on this country.” Homeland Security sees this as a permanent occupation. Immigration is only a pretense.