Trump lights the fuse

National Guard troops in L.A. this morning: Mike Blake/Reuters

They’ve lost the narrative on the “Big Beautiful Bill,” and this week they went and jumped the shark with the Trump-Musk bromance break-up, so what does he do?

Oh, look over here! Somebody with brown skin threw a rock at a fed in full combat gear, bullet-proof vest, and helmet, carrying a full-automatic assault rifle, wearing a mask over his face as he went to arrest a brown-skinned seamstress in the garment district! I’m going to call out the National Guard!

He really is the master of distraction, isn’t he? Not a single shot was fired and not a single gun was carried by protesters who showed up to demonstrate against overreach by ICE in L.A., and yet Trump cites Title 10 Section 12406 of the federal law to place the California National Guard under the command of himself as President of the United States.

The last time this was done, folks, was 60 years ago in 1965 when Lyndon Johnson used Title 10 to federalize the Alabama National Guard to protect a civil rights march led by Martin Luther King from Selma to Montgomery two weeks after the infamous “Bloody Sunday” police riot at the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

A different federal law, Title 32, has been used to call up various National Guard units to serve either state or federal functions. Under Title 32 status, the Guard remains under state control but can be used for federal functions. Trump used Title 32 to deploy National Guard troops during George Floyd protests in Washington D.C. in 2020. The governor of California used the statute to call up the California National Guard during the Watts Riots in August of 1965.

Title 10 allows the call up and federalization of National Guard troops when the United States is “invaded,” or crucially, when “there is a rebellion or danger of a rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States.”

Trump used language from Title 10 to justify the California call-up, writing in his order that the troops were to be used to “temporarily protect ICE and other United States Government personnel who are performing Federal functions, including the enforcement of Federal law, and to protect Federal property,” justifying the order with this: “To the extent that protests or acts of violence directly inhibit the execution of the laws, they constitute a form of rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States.”

You will of course recognize that language from Title 10 itself.

Interestingly, Trump did not invoke the Insurrection Act in his order last night. Invocation of that law would have allowed the federalized National Guard troops to act in a law enforcement capacity. Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy invoked the Insurrection Act to deploy federal troops to desegregate schools in the Deep South after the passage of Brown v. Board of Education.

The Insurrection Act allows federal troops when requested by the governors of affected states, or under two other provisions of the Act, the President is empowered unilaterally…

“to address an insurrection, in any state, which makes it impracticable to enforce the law,” or

“to address an insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination or conspiracy, in any state, which results in the deprivation of constitutionally secured rights, and where the state is unable, fails, or refuses to protect said rights…”

In all other circumstances, including use of Title 10 to federally activate National Guard troops, the Posse Comitatus Act forbids the U.S. military from acting in a law enforcement capacity.

So, what’s going on here? Trump and his blood-thirsty minions certainly understand the different laws which apply to the federalizing of National Guard troops to suppress riots, or rebellions, or insurrections. In fact, Trump used the word “rebellion” in his order last night, and the odious Stephen Miller followed up by tweeting a video of the protests in Los Angeles, calling it “An insurrection against the laws and sovereignty of the United States.” Secretary of Defense Hegseth followed suit by threatening that “If violence continues, active-duty Marines at Camp Pendleton will also be mobilized – they are on high alert.”

The blatherings of Miller and Hegseth sound a lot like jumping on the bandwagon to make certain Trump knows they are right there behind him with their eager tongues out.

It is well known that Trump and his chief immigration attack dog Stephen Miller have been looking for an excuse to call out military troops to put down street protests that they can call an “insurrection.” Trump has even lamented that he did not use the military to put down George Floyd protests in 2020, although he certainly did threaten to.

Well, they’re not threatening to deploy troops any longer. It’s obvious Trump’s calling up of the California National Guard is a provocation. He hates the state’s governor, calling him Governor “Newscum” as he blasted protestors as “radical Left RIOTERS AND LOOTERS.”

“Border czar” Tom Holman told NBC News this morning that Governor Newsom and L.A. Mayor Karen Bass could be arrested and prosecuted by the Trump DOJ if they interfere in federal arrests of undocumented immigrants. “If she crossed that line, we’ll ask DOJ to prosecute,” Holman said of Bass. “I don’t think she’s crossed the line yet. But the warning we’re sending is, we’re not going to tolerate people attacking our officers.”

They’re spoiling for a fight. So far this morning, 300 of the 2,000 federalized National Guard troops have arrived in Los Angeles, decked out in their full combat gear, carrying loaded M-4 automatic weapons, at least some of them wearing masks. Looking at the National Guard troops and the federal agents who have been arresting undocumented immigrants around L.A., it’s going to be hard to distinguish between them.

The situation in L.A. is bad, and it’s going to get worse. Neither Newsom nor Bass has any control over the people who have been protesting the arrests, many if not most of whom are undocumented themselves. I saw a story yesterday that said about a third of the population of Los Angeles is immigrant, of which a large number are undocumented. If Trump and Kristi Noem and Holman somehow lined up and arrested everyone in L.A. who is in this country without a valid visa, they’d still be doing it at Christmas, and would have long since overloaded their capacity to hold the arrestees.

Not only that, but the economy of Southern California would be shut down, store shelves in L.A. supermarkets would be emptying out, office buildings would have whole corridors of offices that hadn’t been cleaned or had the trash dumped, lawns and hedges in Beverly Hills would be untrimmed and woolly, restaurants would close for lack of cooks and staff…you get the picture.

Now seems as good a time as any to ask this elemental question: What are Trump and his MAGA henchmen going to do with L.A. once they’ve got their 2,000 National Guard troops fully deployed? The first thing I would point out is what an infinitesimal drop in the proverbial bucket 2,000 soldiers are in a place as enormous as Los Angeles. The city of L.A. is huge – 500 square miles, with a population of about 4 million. L.A. County, which includes the San Fernando Valley and towns to the east and south of downtown, is even more enormous, covering more than 4,700 square miles with a population of almost 10 million. As a quick comparison, the population of L.A. County is greater than 40 of this country’s states. White people became a minority in Los Angeles in 2001, based on the 2000 census. The white population of the city of L.A. now stands at about 30 percent, with the Latino population at 48 percent. Most demographic projections of the U.S. population predict that whites will be a minority nationally in 2045, according to a Brookings Institution study of census data.

That means white people in the rest of the country have about 20 years before they are eclipsed by minorities, whether Trump and Stephen Miller and the rest of them like it or not. The City of Los Angeles is what the rest of this country may look like by the end of the 21^st Century.

Two thousand National Guard troops in Los Angeles and all the ICE agents they can muster isn’t enough to remove even a small fraction of the undocumented people living and working there. If Trump invoked the Insurrection Act and deployed the entirety of the 1.4 million uniformed men and women in the U.S. military, he and Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem and Kash Patel and the rest of them couldn’t arrest and deport their way out of the future that is not waiting to happen, but is already here.

Trump’s federalization of the National Guard and deploying 2,000 of them to L.A. isn’t based in any recognizable reality about immigration and the demographics of this country’s future. It’s a tactic meant to intimidate a city that didn’t vote for him in the largest state that didn’t vote for him.

Which makes it all the more important that protests against the excesses of ICE, and now the National Guard, must be peaceful. Disgust and displeasure with Trump and his ilk and what they’re doing in L.A. can be and must be expressed without violence. The best way to respond to Trump’s attempts at oppression is nationally with numbers that dwarf the 2,000 National Guard troops Trump is putting on the streets of L.A.

We need one million people in the streets of L.A., Chicago and New York, and we need hundreds of thousands protesting in the streets of other major cities like Phoenix, San Francisco, Houston, Dallas, Denver, Charlotte, and Washington D.C.

There are more of us than them today, and there will be even more of us tomorrow. They aren’t going to be “replaced,” to use the words of the racist conspiracy theory, but they are going to be outnumbered. Put that in your cheek and chew on it, Stephen my boy, and watch out that you don’t choke on your bitter spit.