Trump’s Fantasy: Using LA as a Trap for Democrats

Surely, I am not the only one thinking that what’s unfolding in L.A. is Trump’s fondest fantasy?

Gavin Newsom is right — mass-deportation round-ups of people who have committed no crime is wrong. It is not what was promised and not what the American people support. A majority did support sending immigrants, those without legal status but who were guilty of committing criminal acts, back to where they came from. But not the round-ups of people who are playing by the hard-to-decipher and often changing rules of the immigration game. Not people who were not only not harming anyone but actively contributing by working and paying taxes.

Meanwhile, the rock-throwing, car-burning, and assaults on federal agents are playing right into Trump’s hands. Americans have a right to assembly and to peaceful protest, but no right to commit acts of violence. To the extent that Trump can highlight, and provoke, the acts of violence, he is getting exactly what he wants.

At “The Dispatch” newsletter, founded by The New York Times columnist David French and his friend, Jonah Goldberg, Goldberg cites a few instructive historical precedents for how this all works:

“Every time a protester burns a car, hurls a rock, or smashes a window, the protester ceases to be a lawful demonstrator and becomes a rioter. And contrary to a lot of left-wing romantic nonsense, rioting is not only wrong and illegal, it’s politically unpopular.

Then-Massachusetts Gov. Calvin Coolidge became a national star by calling in the Massachusetts Guard in response to the 1919 Boston police strike, which had ignited riots and looting. In the 1968 election, Richard Nixon used the riots after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination to win the presidency on a promise of restoring law and order.” Goldberg might also have added in 1968 in Chicago, and how that undid Hubert Humphrey’s presidential candidacy.

It isn’t clear that Newsom’s claim that Trump’s deployment of the National Guard is illegal. In 1965 LBJ deployed the National Guard in support of school integration and against then Alabama Gov. George Wallace. But it is clear that Newsom and L.A. Mayor Karen Bass needed to exercise enough push back against mayhem that those who were willing to turn a legitimate and peaceful protest into a riot didn’t give Trump what he wanted. Newsom could himself have called out a smaller number of the National Guard to indicate he would not tolerate violence.

I marvel at how things seem, again and again, to work out for — and to the benefit of — Donald J. Trump. He loses an election but is able to sell the Big Lie, walk away from January 6’s insurrection and get re-elected. He’s indicted, even in one case convicted, but runs out the clock on the most legitimate and important cases against him while casting himself as the victim of lawfare. He survives an assassination attempt and emerges as a heroic figure complete with iconic photographic image. This cat definitely has nine lives.

And now, just when it appeared that with the Musk mess and the tariff TACO, Trump was starting to unravel. Then along comes this LA disturbance to shore him up and change the narrative. His terrible and expensive military birthday parade would have incited real, justified, protest and opposition, not least from veterans who are seeing their benefits jeopardized. But now Trump’s awful Soviet-style parade will undoubtedly have Trump wrapping himself in the mantle of “law and order” and the American flag, as the Republicans genuflect.

A salutary reminder and a last word from Jonah G. “The president isn’t your commander in chief or mine. He’s not even Gavin Newsom’s commander in chief. He’s the commander of the armed forces, and that’s it. But like all statists before him, he thinks he can convince you otherwise — if he can first convince you that we’re at war.”

As the prophet Jeremiah lamented to God long ago, “Why do the wicked prosper?”