The Los Angeles protests are catnip for Trump

Donald Trump said yesterday that Los Angeles would be “burning to the ground” without his intervention into street protests over immigration raids.

So what? California’s leaders disagree. They accuse Trump of manufacturing and inflaming a crisis to wage political warfare against a solidly Democratic state. Behind that is also a worry that he may try to impose martial law under the rarely-invoked Insurrection Act of 1807. Trump has stopped short of this, but other norms defied include

• federalising the national guard without a state request for the first time in sixty years;
• sending hundreds of marines to the city at an estimated cost of $134 million; and
• suggesting that California governor Gavin Newsom should be arrested.

Maga’s story. Trump’s allies have likened events in Los Angeles to the 1992 riots, when vast swathes of the city – particularly poorer, black-majority areas – careened out of control for several days. The national guard was brought in to restore order.

The real story. Since Sunday, action has been limited to just a few blocks of downtown LA around the federal office building and the nearby courthouse. An overwhelming majority of the demonstrators have been peaceful. The police chief has described acts of violence and vandalism as the work of “anarchists” on the protest fringes. LA mayor, Karen Bass, has imposed a curfew in parts of downtown Los Angeles.

Counterfactual history. Trump has been quick to credit national guardsmen with preventing LA from being “obliterated”, but they have played almost no role in policing other than guarding federal buildings. The Los Angeles police, county sheriff’s department and other local law enforcement agencies have handled the bulk of the work without assistance.

The timeline. It has not been especially easy for Americans seeing alarming images on TV and social media to discern the truth. Events on the ground have competed with a highly partisan information war, in which perception has been as important as reality.

Friday 6 June: ICE officials conduct an aggressive workplace raid in the Garment District in downtown LA and arrest a union leader acting as a community observer.

Saturday 7 June: The sight of federal enforcement officials near a Home Depot store in the Latino-majority city of Paramount, southeast of LA, is enough to trigger a spontaneous protest. Trump’s reaction is to requisition California’s national guard.

Sunday 8 June: After hours of largely peaceful protest in downtown LA, protesters burn several self-driving Waymo cars and masked men hurl rocks at police cruisers. Trump and his allies seize upon these images to suggest a city in the grip of mayhem.

Monday 9 June: By Trump’s version of events, he rings up Governor Newsom to tell him to “do a better job”. Newsom says there was no such call.

Tuesday 10 June: Demonstrations begin to ease in LA. Trump takes credit on Truth Social, suggesting he has averted catastrophe in “that once beautiful and great City”.

Why this? Trump knows the promise of immigration enforcement is a winning issue that helped propel him to a second term – and is also prone to creating the kind of chaos on which he thrives. He has been pressuring ICE to up the pace of daily arrests, which were no higher for the first few months of his administration than under Biden.

Why now? He may also be creating a sense of crisis as a form of pressure on hesitant Republican lawmakers to pass his “big beautiful bill”, which will cut taxes for the rich and slash government medical coverage for millions of poorer Americans.

Why California? Trump has repeatedly singled out the deep blue state as an emblem of Democratic failure. California’s cities embrace diversity and rely on immigrant labour in ways that run directly counter to his political agenda, making them a tempting target in a contest of strength. He sees Governor Newsom as a useful foil and often calls him “Newscum”.

What next? The governor has sued the president for going over his head to mobilise the national guard and for deploying the marines for a domestic policing operation. Hanging over both these moves is a threat by Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act, which empowers the president in an emergency to deploy the military to put down civil unrest.

Unbound. The Brennan Center for Justice wrote to Congress in 2022, proposing that the act should be reformed to avoid just this possibility. They called it an “extraordinary delegation of power” with “virtually no checks against abuse”.

Not there yet… Trump said yesterday that he would invoke the act “if there is an insurrection”. But so far the national guard has played a limited role in LA and the marines are expected to be similarly low-key. That may be as far as he feels emboldened to go for now.

Photograph by Ethan Swope/AP