Manufacturing a crisis in California, Trump escalates his insurrection against the United States
After years of racist lies about an immigrant invasion of America, the president is deploying troops to defend against a made-up "occupation" of L.A. — and to intimidate all who dare to oppose him
This piece was previously published at The Hot Screen.
Donald Trump’s federalization of California National Guard soldiers and deployment of U.S. Marines to the streets of Los Angeles are ominous acts, the latest demonstration that he intends to warp the U.S. presidency into a position of dictatorial power. These actions assault the rule of law, with Trump manufacturing a justificatory crisis out of whole cloth and then using that crisis to act repressively, illegally, and outrageously. Such is the strategy of an authoritarian, not a democratic leader.
This latest fake crisis is neither unique nor unexpected. Trump’s entire appeal is based on distorting actual challenges to the U.S. — an economy that leaves millions behind, a sense of a rapidly changing society that has left many unsure of their place or status within it — and turning them into arenas of poisonous, illiberal conflict, where all our ills can be pinned on convenient scapegoats. What we are seeing in California — the ICE raids that provoked a backlash of protests, and Trump’s premeditated decision to send in the troops — is linked to his fundamental lie that white Americans are facing diminishing prospects at the hands of fast-breeding, brown-skinned immigrants. Years of trumpeting an imaginary crisis — that immigrants coming across the southern border are stealing Americans’ jobs, housing, and lives — underly Trump’s cultivation of the L.A. crisis, in which ICE agents nab law-abiding but undocumented immigrants off the streets, and in which Trump uses the inevitable public backlash to declare the immigration situation to be even worse than ever.
Even knowing they are lies, you can still find yourself startled by the supposed horrors that Trump and his allies describe. The protestors are “insurrectionists”; those interfering with ICE efforts are engaging in “rebellion”; Los Angeles has been “invaded and occupied,” is in danger of being “obliterated.” In their justification of illicit escalation aimed at domestic repression, Trump and his administration are suggesting a total horror show, in which the United States is simultaneously under invasion and suffering a domestic uprising, a combined existential threat that only a certain Very Special President can handle through violence. It is all linked in the image of the valiant, masked ICE agent who’s just trying to do his job — to interfere with his attempted arrest and deportation of even a single undocumented immigrants is to strike a treasonous blow in favor of invasion, lawlessness, and rebellion.
If this description of Trump’s strategy sounds tendentious, don’t just settle for my word; here’s senior henchman Stephen Miller with God’s unvarnished truth about what’s going on in California:
Illegal aliens invaded America.
The government of California aided and abetted that invasion.
Violent mobs, incited by California leaders, attacked ICE officers to keep them from removing the invaders.
California officials refused to send the police to rescue the ice officers, hoping the rioters would succeed in shutting down ICE raids.
This is an organized insurrection against the laws and sovereignty of the United States.
Unfortunately for Miller, one glaring problem that has not gone unremarked is how Trumpist invocations of an insurrection inevitably bring to mind America’s last, real insurrection: the actual storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021 by Trump supporters, even as Trump worked tirelessly for months up to that point to overthrow the 2020 election results. It’s also worth noting that Trump did not think it necessary to call in the National Guard for that particular uprising. I think this is all part of the reason Trump and his allies are so eager to paint what’s happening in L.A. as a “real” insurrection — as a way of papering over what happened in 2021 as no big thing by comparison.
But that’s not the only reason they’re so focused on concocting an insurrection out of thin air in L.A. The reality is that it is Trump himself who is engaging in insurrection against the U.S., not a relative handful of overwhelmingly peaceful protestors hardly attempting to overturn the federal government. Treating American citizens exercising their right to assemble and to engage in free speech as if they are enemies of the state; usurping the rights of Californians to govern themselves as they see fit by displacing their law enforcement efforts; encouraging his followers to view their fellow Americans as treasonous enemies: these are all the actions of a man at war with the United States. With his latest comments about being willing to arrest Governor Gavin Newsom for interfering with federal actions, Trump doubled down on his scheme to turn the rule of law upside down, and to pretend the Constitution is a blueprint for dictatorship.
(And this is not even considering his historic corruption, abandonment of allies, subversion of the public health, and multiple other violations of his oath of office.)
But while the manufactured crisis in L.A. is of a piece with Trump’s long-standing desire to leverage fears of immigration into personal, despotic power, anyone who opposes Trump should be well aware of his capacity to make a fake crisis look a lot like a real one. Whether or not you agree with the narrative he has constructed (and I’ve hoped to persuade you to disagree), you can’t deny the fact that he, his advisors, and allied right-wing media are pushing hard on their “invasion/insurrection” storyline. Crucially, they are able to use the power of the federal government to actually help construct “reality.” First, they sent ICE agents to a city where they know immigrants are well-liked and integrated into the community, and targeted unthreatening folks like day laborers waiting around Home Depot for a job. Then, when pushback from local communities predictably took place, they federalized the California National Guard, and then called in the Marines — actions that, even for the well-informed, will instinctively create a sense in the average citizen that maybe there’s actually a reason to do so, otherwise why send the freaking military into L.A.?
On top of this, there is evidence of a right-wing push to flood social media with fake images and information supportive of the Trump administration’s claims of mass organized lawlessness in the Los Angeles area. These provide an incendiary distortion to the very real round-ups and protests taking place, including the president’s deployment of troops in order to shape both reality and his preferred narrative, making it more difficult for the average citizen to get the basic facts about what’s happening in California.
In other words, reality will not simply assert itself in the media or the public sphere more broadly; American will need to assert it themselves, to describe in plain language and documented fact what is happening in Los Angeles, in California, in our country besieged by an authoritarian Republican Party and its increasingly deranged leader. Ideally, this requires that Democratic politicians speak directly about the crises right in front of their faces, rather than assert that a presidential scheme to intimidate a city and a state by force of arms is somehow merely a distraction from all-important kitchen table issues. It should be obvious that the Democrats’ ability to help protect citizens’ access to health care and Social Security is inversely proportional to Donald Trump’s capacity to crush the citizenry of states like California.
Democrats have already ceded far too much ground on protecting immigrants, behaving as if the president has somehow “won” this issue for all time, while Trump has fashioned their retreat into a spear aimed at the heart of our democracy. A president who calls hard-working immigrants “invaders” and claims their very presence in America constitutes an occupation of our country has now taken his illogic to its furthest extreme, so that anyone who would treat immigrants with humanity and compassion is to be considered in rebellion against the United States. If the opposition cannot bring itself to refute the president’s self-serving, up-is-down lies — lies that have led to Marines being deployed against American citizens on American streets — then it is not much of an opposition at all.