Editor’s note (June 9th 2025): This article has been updated.
Is the unrest in Los Angeles a one-off? Or is it the beginning of a summer of unrest, and of crackdowns by President Donald Trump, who has no patience for protesters in Democratic cities?
So far the protests in Los Angeles are small compared with the city’s previous conflagrations. More than 12,000 people were arrested during the Rodney King riots in 1992. In the past two days the total runs to only 60 or so. But things could get worse. As Angelenos pray for calm and for troops to retreat from their streets, America finds itself at a dangerous moment.
At the core of the country’s dilemma is that the president was elected with a mandate to deal with illegal immigration. Yet some of his supporters take that to mean doing things which could be unconstitutional and are clearly impossible and unwise. Mr Trump himself seems keen on using soldiers to shut down protests against his policies. “We’re gonna have troops everywhere,” he said when asked about the situation in Los Angeles.
The president and his advisers think that the politics of imposing the National Guard on California are on their side. The template is as follows: announce an immigration crackdown on a city whose leadership does not want it, wait for protests, then call in the troops to put down the protesters. Cracking heads serves as a warning to other cities that might resist. It is also a signal to MAGA loyalists that Mr Trump is doing what they elected him for.
With the notable exception of the women’s marches in 2017, recent mass political protests in American cities have tended to be tinged with violence. In the past 72 hours LA has suffered property crime and police have had fireworks launched at them. This could make calling in the National Guard a self-justifying act: because the troops may come to be seen as a solution to the tension their presence seems designed to inflame.
One question is whether Mr Trump had the legal authority to deploy the National Guard without the involvement of California’s governor, Gavin Newsom. Mr Newsom says the police were coping fine on their own and that he is suing the administration. Mr Trump has cited a provision of the US Code on Armed Services that permits the deployment of troops to deal with the threat of rebellion.
Whatever the courts rule—and they are often loth to second-guess the president on what counts as a threat—Mr Trump’s immigration-enforcement policy is impractical. Undocumented migrants in America number somewhere between 11m (the estimate from surveys) and 20m (the number the administration uses). Even with the huge planned increase in spending on detention centres, Mr Trump has nowhere to put even a fraction of that number before they are expelled. Yet opposing the policy, as California does, puts the mayor of LA and the governor on the side of rule-breaking foreigners, which is where Mr Trump wants them.
Negative reinforcement
The president shows no signs of trying to lower the temperature in Los Angeles. On June 9th the Pentagon announced the deployment of hundreds of marines to the city to backstop the National Guard. That is unwise. Marines are not experienced in law enforcement. As the defence secretary likes to point out, soldiers are trained to kill. Of all the fights Mr Trump has picked—with courts, universities and law firms—a war with American cities, their voters and mayors has the greatest potential for violence.
It is hard not to believe that Mr Trump’s motives for this showdown go beyond the desire to deport immigrants efficiently. He won just over 30% of the vote in LA County last year. Only two of America’s largest cities, Dallas and Fort Worth, have Republican mayors. Amid the partisan hatred roiling America today, the president can use this tactic to infuriate the other side’s voters and thrill his own. In this tribal warfare, charges of hypocrisy melt away. On the contrary, when the president who pardoned his own Capitol-charging insurrectionists sends in troops to take on Democrat-supporting Angelenos, his loyalists are more likely to put aside their worries about the economy or the fuss surrounding the ex-DOGE boss, Elon Musk. The danger is that Mr Trump tries this tactic in other Democratic strongholds, too.
From the riots of the 1960s, which helped to elect Richard Nixon, to the Black Lives Matter unrest, which seemed to hurt Mr Trump before it helped him, the cycle of protest, violence and repression often benefits the political right, even when the unrest is fanned by the government itself. In Los Angeles neither the local police department, nor the mayor or the governor thought the presence of the National Guard would help restore order. But to point that out is to misunderstand why Mr Trump ordered troops in. That was to create confrontation.
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