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President Trump’s sharp descent into authoritarianism in Los Angeles has bent our collective reality like a funhouse mirror. On Monday, the president authorized deploying another 2,000 National Guard troops to the chaos-stricken city, adding to the 2,000 National Guardsmen and 700 Marines he already activated. The scene now looks more like Kirkuk than the West Coast.
Trump has teased more and bigger action to come, including deploying additional troops to other major cities and threatening to arrest California Gov. Gavin Newsom. “I think it would be a great thing,” he told Fox News’s Peter Doocy. Trump’s major escalations suggest he isn’t backing down this time. The president wants a made-for-television summer crisis, and he is determined to get one.
In response, the MAGA base has folded in on itself like a pretzel to rationalize Trump’s blossoming love of militarism. The same voters who spent the Biden years fearing tyranny behind every corner now cheer Trump’s promise that Democratic cities are “going to have troops everywhere” for an indefinite period of time. To Trump’s die-hard supporters, their only problem with L.A.’s military occupation is that the Marines didn’t cut the power first.
For years Trump promised his base a political crackdown that would send America down the militaristic, authoritarian path of gangster states like Russia. Of course, it wouldn’t be a Trump-incited civil conflict without the president’s impeccable showmanship. It’s coincidental, one might think, that Trump authorized such a striking display of American military force against civilians just a week before his June 14 military parade in Washington.
Trump’s actions have ensured that no matter where news consumers turn over the coming weeks, they will see Trump’s name alongside staggering displays of U.S. military might. The visual statement of the National Guard and Marines in Los Angeles, even as 7 million pounds of rocket launchers and tanks march in front of the White House, would be impossible to miss. This is the far-right fantasy of America that Trump and his allies hope to turn into reality. So far, no one is stopping them.
It’s no secret that Trump was looking for any excuse to deploy federal troops to L.A. as part of his broader effort to portray Democratic cities as dangerous, anarchic dens of unrest that can only be brought to heel by the extreme application of force. That Trump is lying hardly matters to his base, who see his escalating raids as both a campaign promise kept and a long-simmering kind of wish fulfillment.
The factual basis for sending in the troops never really mattered — if L.A.’s Democrats aren’t guilty of this specific offense, the MAGA logic goes, they’re certainly guilty of something else. Republicans who loudly pledged to “back the blue” in 2024 had little to say when Trump overruled Los Angeles Police Department leadership and sent in soldiers to strip them of their local authority.
Nowhere is the moral decay of Trumpism more visible than in Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. During the pandemic, she became a conservative celebrity for refusing to impose “tyrannical” mask mandates on South Dakotans. Note that Noem had nothing to say when masked government agents allegedly injured journalists with nonlethal rounds, then subjected some to illegal detentions, even though they were acknowledged as lawful reporters. In Noem’s mind, apparently, not all tyrannies are created equal.
In fact, Noem seems to be enjoying spreading a little tyranny herself. In an interview with Fox News on Monday, she referred to Los Angeles as “a city of criminals” and pledged to “hit ’em back harder than we ever have before.” To Trump and Noem, Angelenos aren’t fellow Americans with civil liberties. They are a foreign invasion to be crushed by any means necessary.
Trump’s occupation of Los Angeles and his looming military celebration are the GOP’s most direct efforts yet to acclimate the American people to the idea of a constant, visible military presence in our communities. That Trump’s tyranny is (for now) limited to Democratic cities must seem like a win-win for Republicans who have grown tired of pretending to care about what kind of country we become.
That kind of short-term thinking will guarantee a summer of violent civil unrest, and blue cities won’t be the only victims. A majority of Americans now believe political violence is an inevitability. Trump’s swaggering embrace of military imagery and military force only further convinces those Americans that they were right to give up on our republic.
Trump’s actions in Los Angeles have divided our house against itself. History tells us it cannot stand.
Max Burns is a veteran Democratic strategist and founder of Third Degree Strategies.