I Smell Smoke

Let’s get right to it.

It took Donald Trump just four months in office to deploy active duty US troops against American citizens to suppress dissent.

By any measure, that is the most blunt and emblematic example of old school authoritarianism in the book, one that—for almost a decade—we have been repeatedly assured by Trump’s enablers that Donald would never, ever do. Though sending a violent mob to try to overturn a free and fair election is a close second, and he’s already done that too.

In order to deploy those troops, Trump has brazenly disregarded the laws and norms governing such actions by a US president, chief among them, declining to coordinate with the governor of the state whose National Guard troops he federalized and into which he sent active duty US Marines—defying that governor’s explicit objections, in fact. He did so over a “crisis” that in no way meets the standard for a domestic rebellion or foreign invasion that such extraordinary measures require under the law. On the contrary: he has ginned up a fake emergency, justified on a wave of disinformation, fed through his preferred propaganda outlets to his uncritical base, who accept his version of events without question. He has painted a portrait of Los Angeles in chaos and flames and under assault from a criminal, foreign horde, and repeated those claims over and over again as the pretext for his actions, even though every state and local official in California has said they are bullshit.

To state the bleeding obvious: This whole "emergency" has been manufactured by the White House with the aim of normalizing the use of military force to suppress dissent in the US, and Trump’s authority to wield it at will. The implications for life in America going forward, and in particular, what should otherwise be free elections in less than 17 months, are ominous to say the least.

I’m not sure there’s anything else I can say about this situation that hasn’t already been said. But I’ll say it anyway (and I’ll take 5000 words to do it.)

BAIT, AND HOW TO USE IT

Contrary to what the White House would have you believe, the protests over ICE raids in LA are limited to one small part of that sprawling metropolis, and very manageable by ordinary police standards. As David Frum notes in The Atlantic, LA's various law enforcement agencies total about 75,000 officers, with some of the most extensive experience in crowd control in the whole country. The LAPD alone has nearly 9000. But they need help from 4000 National Guardsmen and 700 active duty Marines?

It goes without saying that the violent behavior of some protesters is ultimately self-destructive and not helpful to the anti-Trump cause…..which Trump knows very well, and is trying to provoke in order to justify his own draconian behavior, as despots have done throughout history. (After all, California is the land of Governor Reagan’s let’s-get-the- bloodbath-over-with.) This is not a case of the authorities responding to an out-of-control situation, but rather, of deliberately fomenting it. Both the AP and Los Angeles Times reported that the anti-ICE protests began peacefully, and as Tess Owen of The Guardian notes, only turned violent “when federal immigration authorities used flash bang grenades and tear gas against demonstrators.”

Donald Trump and his allies (cast) the sprawling city of Los Angeles in shades of fire and brimstone, a hub of dangerous lawlessness that required urgent military intervention in order to be contained.“ Looking really bad in LA,” Trump posted on Truth Social in the very early hours of Monday morning. “BRING IN THE TROOPS!!!”

But contrary to the Trump administration’s characterization of an entire city in tumult, the demonstrations were actually confined to very small areas and life generally went on as usual across much of the city.

So let’s get our cause-and-effect straight. The use of heavily armed National Guard troops in full riot gear, let alone active duty US Marine combat troops, was deliberately intended to spur violence. (LA Mayor Karen Bass described the decision to bring in the Guard as a “chaotic escalation”; California Governor Gavin Newsom called it “inflammatory.”) Even prior to the arrival of military forces, both ICE and Los Angeles’s law enforcement elements were already behaving in unnecessarily provocative and violent ways, including the LAPD, which has a history of brutality in suppressing protest and civil unrest.

Tom Nichols, formerly a professor at the US Naval War College, suggests that “Trump may be hoping to radicalize the citizen-soldiers drawn from the community who serve in the National Guard” by pitting them against their fellow Angelenos, and to humiliate Newsom and Bass, with what he calls “the president’s often-used narrative that liberals can’t control their own cities.”

Despite the fact that “even the Los Angeles Police Department—not exactly a bastion of squishy suburban book-club liberals—has emphasized that the protests have been mostly peaceful,” it is Nichols’ observation that Trump and his advisers, like Pete Hegseth, “seem almost eager for public violence that would justify the use of armed force against Americans.” I’d excise the “seem.”

During the George Floyd protests in 2020, Trump was furious at what he saw as the fecklessness of military leaders determined to thwart his attempts to use deadly force against protesters. He’s learned his lesson: This time, he has installed a hapless sycophant at the Pentagon who is itching to execute the boss’s orders.

Nichols writes eloquently that the protestors should not give Trump what he wants by taking the bait, arguing that “restraint will deny Trump the political oxygen he’s trying to generate.” Then again, The Onion writes equally eloquently, “Protesters Urged Not To Give Trump Administration Pretext For What It Already Doing.”

The use of the Guard is especially galling considering that on January 6, 2021, the Trump administration, in the person of acting Secretary of Defense Chris Miller and other senior officials, including Mike Flynn’s brother Lieutenant General Charlie Flynn, the Army’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations, declined to send Guardsmen in to defend the Capitol and members of Congress whose lives were in danger. Trump has also balked at using the Guard and other federal assets to help California when it was in need of disaster relief. The New Republic’s Timothy Noah summarizes Trump’s hypocrisy on federal power thusly: “If it’s a peaceful anti-ICE protest, send in the Marines. If it’s a hurricane, no disaster aid for you!”

(Not that it’s the main problem, but also worth noting: The Los Angeles deployment is expected to cost the federal government roughly $134 million, even as it appears to have been haphazardly managed. Reportedly there has been no logistical support for these troops: no bivouac arrangements, no chow, no nothing—not even their pay. Very on brand for this cosplaying military dictatorship.)

THE THIN (AND FUZZY) BLUE LINE

Echoing Nichols and other observers, the blogger Kristofer Goldsmith, writing in his Substack “On Offense,” argues that “we need to deny Trump the image he wants most: protesters acting like the caricature he paints of them.”

Authoritarians need chaos. They need an excuse to escalate. They need you to react in a way that justifies their overreach. And if you don’t give them one, they will try to manufacture it.

Trump and his allies want violence on the streets because it validates their narrative: that they are “restoring order,” “protecting the nation,” “defending law-abiding citizens from the enemy within.” They want footage of clashes in the streets to distract from footage of a federal agent loading a garment worker or waiter onto a bus. They want the public to stop asking whether the immigration raid was legal, and instead focus on protestors being detained. They want to bait us into paying attention to the escalation, and to not have our focus on the issue that started it all: they’re kidnapping people and punishing them without due process.

And we cannot take the bait.

But the provocation is not limited to the micro level of face-to-face confrontation with riot shields and nightsticks: it’s also operating on a macro level. In The New Republic, Melissa Gira Grant argues that the LA demonstrations are themselves an act of self-defense, as Angelenos aren’t merely protesting, but “attempting to protect their communities from ICE’s raids.” The details of what ICE was doing in LA are awful, including masked agents in tactical gear arresting families en masse and detaining them for long periods in overcrowded, makeshift facilities without food or water. Random witnesses filming the events—not even protesting—were met with tear gas, flash-bang grenades, and rubber bullets. Grant:

Drawing lines between “peaceful” and “violent” is a common move for politicians amid popular protest. They continue to urge so-called nonviolence even as such directions can feel quite difficult to follow in a cloud of tear gas you did not set off. It’s nearly impossible to figure out what compliance is supposed to look like when police are launching weapons of war on the public….

No matter what a peaceful protester may intend, it’s police who are deciding when to use violence and whom to use it against—and nothing we saw this weekend indicates their violence was confined to those who were not “peaceful.”

Grant also indicts Mayor Bass for allowing the LAPD to aid ICE in its immigration sweeps, quoting longtime immigration reporter Tina Vásquez :

Los Angeles was built by communities who have survived and fled political persecution and state violence, (Vásquez) pointed out, and who have faced it again—including from police—in their new homes. “When you are an Angeleno and this is your lineage, you are fully aware of what local law enforcement is capable of,” she added, and when the LAPD attempts to distance itself from ICE raids, “you know better.” No one outside of Los Angeles should be surprised: “ICE sent the city of Los Angeles a message when its agents showed up in full force and in broad daylight, and that message was responded to in kind by the people.”

Central to the Trumpist narrative is the idea that the protestors deserve what they get Goldsmith refers back to NYU Prof. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, who in her book In Strongmen warns us that “authoritarians thrive when they can delegitimize opponents as criminals or terrorists. They count on state violence to provoke reactions that appear to prove them right.”

To that end, FBI Director Kash Patel tweeted that LA was “under siege by marauding criminals.” Stephen Miller called LA “occupied territory,” and tweeted: “Simply put, the government of the State of California aided, abetted and conspired to facilitate the invasion of the United States.” In The Guardian, Owen reported that Trump himself posted on Truth Social:

A once great American City, Los Angeles, has been invaded and occupied by Illegal Aliens and Criminals. Now violent, insurrectionist mobs are swarming and attacking our Federal Agents to try and stop our deportation operations – But these lawless riots only strengthen our resolve.

As Ruth Ben-Ghiat said, “This is the language of authoritarianism all over the world.” In particular, Ben-Ghiat cited Hegseth for employing “the classic authoritarian thing, of setting up an excuse, which is that the internal enemy, illegal criminal aliens, is working together with an external enemy, the cartels and foreign terrorists, and using that to go after a third party, of protesters, regular people, who came out to show solidarity.”

But other Republican politicians and media figures didn’t spew such sewage, right? Good one!

As Trump and his allies fomented chaos on the streets, MAGA-world personalities and some Republican officials added to the mayhem by sharing misinformation online. Senator Ted Cruz and Infowars’s Alex Jones reshared a video, originally posted by conservative commentator James Woods, of a burning LAPD car during a protest in 2020, claiming it was from the current LA unrest. Prominent accounts also shared a video from last year of a flash mob attack on a convenience store clerk, claiming that violent protesters were currently assaulting a small business owner.

An account called US Homeland Security News, which has almost 400,000 followers, posted an image of a stack of bricks with the caption: “Alert: Soros funded organizations have ordered hundreds of pallets of bricks to be placed near ICE facilities to be used by Democrat militants against ICE agents and staff!! It’s Civil War!!” The image, which was also used to spread false information about Black Lives Matter protesters in 2020, was taken at a building supply company in Malaysia.

Trump also repeatedly claimed that some protesters were “paid,” a frequent Republican assertion, I suppose because they can’t fathom anyone standing up for other people unless there is something in it for them. Owen again:

This, too, is another tactic out of the authoritarian playbook, according to Ben-Ghiat. “If there are any protests against the autocrat, you have to discredit them by saying they are crisis actors, they are foreign infiltrators,” Ben-Ghiat said. “You have to discredit them in the public eye.”

ALL THE NEWS THAT’S FIT

It may seem petty, but what’s really annoying is that the Trump and the Republican Party have such lack of imagination that they have gone back to this same old playbook that despots and would-be despots have been running since time immemorial. But I guess it works—especially when you’ve got a domestic audience and electoral base that slavishly laps it up.

Indeed, so far, Trump’s strategy seems to be working. In The Atlantic, Missy Ryan and Jonathan Lemirereport that the White House and its allies are deliriously happy with what’s going on in LA, which they believe plays right into their hands.

One widely circulated photo—showing a masked protester standing in front of a burning car, waving a Mexican flag—has been embraced by Trump supporters as a distillation of the conflict: a president unafraid to use force to defend an American city from those he deems foreign invaders. “We couldn’t have scripted this better,” said a senior White House aide granted anonymity to discuss internal conversations.

I don’t doubt that the White House is thrilled, as are its fans, though people opposed to this administration and its policies are rightly outraged—the same polarizing, Rorschach test dynamic that has defined the entire Trump era. Not surprisingly, polls show public opinion is about evenly split, along party lines, although the more people pay attention to what’s going on, they more likely they are to oppose Trump‘s actions, which is telling. But that’s usually the case with this presidency.

And how was the press reacted to all this? Pretty much as you would expect. Although there has certainly been stellar reportage and criticism, much of the mainstream media is happy to abet the administration’s cause, unwittingly or not. The Washington Post ran an editorial this past week headlined “The best way to end the escalation in Los Angeles” that began with an attack on how Kamala Harris has responded to the situation. (No word on what Walter Mondale thinks.) That’s your new Trump-friendly WaPo, folks: “Democracy dies in broad daylight too—and we’re helping kill it.”

But Bezos & Co. are far from alone in disgracing the Fourth Estate. As a fake New York Times headlinesatirized, “Embattled US Ruler Deploys Armed Troops Against Citizens Amid Mass Protests Against Regime’s Kidnapping Spree.” At least that’s what the headline would say in an alternate universe in which the Gray Lady reported, ya know, the news. Even NPR (NPR!) promoted the White House narrative, reporting that anti-ICE protests turned violent and therefore Trump had to send in the National Guard. (I heard it with my own ears on Morning Edition.) What more could this White House ask for, even from its alleged “enemies” in the Biden-run state sponsored media?

THE NOT-SO-HIDDEN AGENDA

The real purpose of sending these troops into LA, of course, is to establish the precedent that Trump can get away with deploying the US military against US citizens to suppress dissent, particularly over his unconscionable campaign of mass deportation, which—not to put too fine a point on it—resembles nothing so much as the Nazi campaign against the Jews soon after the NDSAP came to power in Germany. And the Reichstag fire that is a supposed “insurrection” in LA follows that playbook too.

He wants to normalize and inure us to the use of troops in that role and to their presence on our streets, and for us to know that any pushback against administration policies—even peaceful ones—will be met with armed suppression. That is particularly true when it comes to what the state of the nation will be in 17 short months when the midterms roll around, and two years after that, the next presidential election.

To satisfy his coalition of plutocrats and xenophobes, Trump has to deliver two things: for the former, tax cuts for the wealthy, and for the latter, mass deportation and other culture war red meat. With the “One Big Beautiful Bill” and the travesty in LA unfolding simultaneously, he is doing both at once—impressive multitasking. (And PS, in addition to being a big fat Christmas present for the rich, the OBBB also includes autocracy-abetting measures like elimination of the judiciary’s ability to enforce contempt of court citations. So the two threads are linked.)

But you ask: Won’t tax cuts for the rich and armed troops in the street hurt the GOP in the coming elections? You bet. But that seems to be part of the plan as well. Former Bush speechwriter David Frum—the man who coined the term “axis of evil,” before his horror at Donald Trump caused him to switch sides—writes:

Doesn’t Trump know that the midterms are coming? Why isn’t he more worried? This weekend’s events suggest an answer. Trump knows full well that the midterms are coming. He is worried. But he might already be testing ways to protect himself that could end in subverting those elections’ integrity. So far, the results must be gratifying to him—and deeply ominous to anyone who hopes to preserve free and fair elections in the United States under this corrupt, authoritarian, and lawless presidency.

Frum goes on to describe the events in LA as a “dress rehearsal” for postponing, cancelling, or otherwise undermining those upcoming elections.

If Trump can incite disturbances in blue states before the midterm elections, he can assert emergency powers to impose federal control over the voting process, which is to say his control. Or he might suspend voting until, in his opinion, order has been restored. Either way, blue-state seats could be rendered vacant for some time.

Like Nichols, Frum notes that Trump’s first term mutterings about national emergencies, like the fictional “caravan” of migrants that were supposedly invading the US in October 2018, or his musing about shooting BLM protestors in the legs in the summer of 2020, were quashed by cooler heads, like General Mark Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Now the likes of Milley have been replaced with bootlickers like the new CJCS, retired USAF Lieutenant General Dan “Razin’” Caine, Patel at the FBI, Tulsi Gabbard as DNI, and Hegseth in the Pentagon, to name but a few.

Frum writes: “The presidency of 2025 has available a wide and messy array of emergency powers, as the legal scholar Elizabeth Goitein has described. Second-term Trump and his new team are avidly using those powers in ways never intended or imagined”….like “sending masked agents into the streets to seize and detain people—and, in some cases, sending detainees to a prison in El Salvador without a hearing—on the basis of a 1798 law originally designed to defend the United States against invasion by the army and navy of revolutionary France.”

Trump has not even bothered to invoke the Insurrection Act, as he has long threatened, going back to the protests of 2020, and which has fan boys have slavered over. He just leapfrogged over it with his own edict, which, as Joyce Vance notes is sweeping:

When you consider that the presidential edict that permits Trump to do this isn’t limited to Los Angeles—it has no geographic limitations—and that he has been intimating all week that he will send federalized troops wherever there are protests, (not just violence but Americans out exercising their First Amendment rights), then it’s clear this is a very dark moment indeed.

Echoing Vance, Kristofer Goldsmith argues that, with his executive memorandum titled “Department of Defense Security for the Protection of Department of Homeland Security Functions,” Trump “rewrote the rules of protest in America, and the gravity of this change hasn’t yet received enough attention.”

The memo is chilling in its language and unprecedented in its implications. It declares that protests which interfere with ICE operations may be treated as a “rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States.”

In the stroke of a pen, Trump redefined resistance against authoritarianism as insurrection. Let’s be clear about what this means: Trump has militarized a response to constitutionally protected protest, claimed the power to override governors, and set a precedent for using the military against domestic dissent without even invoking the laws that were written for that purpose.

This is a psychological operation as much as it is a military one. The message is clear: federal power will not be checked by state leaders, and protest will be met with overwhelming force.

In other words, whether it’s as extreme as a canceled election or as (relatively) camouflaged as one conducted under the intimidating glare of men with guns, the Republican Party is challenging the very nature of free expression in the United States—and with it the electoral process as we know it.

Former Labor Secretary and UC Berkeley Prof. Robert Reich writes that “The National Guard’s deployment in Los Angeles sets the US on a familiar authoritarian pathway,” arguing bluntly that “we are witnessing the first stages of a Trump police state.”

History shows that once an authoritarian ruler establishes the infrastructure of a police state, that same infrastructure can be turned on anyone. Trump and his regime are rapidly creating such an infrastructure, in five steps:

(1) declaring an emergency on the basis of a so-called “rebellion”, “insurrection”, or “invasion”;

(2) using that “emergency” to justify bringing in federal agents with a monopoly on the use of force (Ice, the FBI, DEA, and the national guard) against civilians inside the country;

(3) allowing those militarized agents to make dragnet abductions and warrantless arrests, and detain people without due process;

(4) creating additional prison space and detention camps for those detained, and

(5) eventually, as the situation escalates, declaring martial law.

Seen in that light, the use of federal force in LA doesn’t put Trump and the GOP at risk of losing the next election, even though it might infuriate as many Americans as it excites, because that use of force may be the linchpin that prevents free and fair elections from happening in any recognizable way, full stop.

DON’T REIGN ON MY PARADE

Maybe it’s the screenwriter in me, but is anybody else concerned that at the same time our fearless leader is deploying the US military against protesters in LA and claiming that there is an insurrection, he is also bringing hundreds of tanks, Bradley Fighting Vehicles, and self-propelled 155mm howitzers into DC?

The timing of the troop deployment in LA and the Red Square-style parade for Trump’s birthday damn sure makes for a helluva split screen, and a two-fer of aspirational authoritarianism. (Bonus fun: a photo emerged this week of one of the heavy equipment transporters hauling those M1 tanks to DC bearing graffiti that read “HANG FAUCI & BILL GATES.”)

It’s ironic of course that Trump is criminally politicizing the US military on the eve of it 250th birthday, which is the putative reason for his parade. (“The only thing on parade is his stupidity,” wrote the Internet wit Jeff Tiedrich.) Anticipating protests in DC for his big boy birthday, Trump has warned that they will be met with “very big force.” I guess he consulted his advisors Tonto, Tarzan, and Frankenstein to come up with that policy.

Another preview of how Trump intends to politicize the US military—“his” generals, as he likes to call them—came in his appearance at Ft. Bragg, NC this week. Ft. Bragg is near and dear to me: I lived there as a boy in the ‘70s, trained there as a cadet in the ’80’s, and was stationed there as an officer in the ‘90s. Trump’s Nuremburg-ready speech at Bragg—and the sight of paratroopers cheering him, to the inevitable strains of the execrable Lee Greenwood—was deeply depressing….and worrying.

Anne Applebaum writes that “Trump reverted to the dehumanizing rhetoric he used during the election campaign, calling protesters ‘animals’ and ‘a foreign enemy,’ language that seems to give permission to the Marines to kill people.” Among the things he told the troops was: “We will liberate Los Angeles and make it free, clean, and safe again,” he said. “We will not allow an American city to be invaded and conquered by a foreign enemy.”

What “foreign enemy” did he mean? Maybe someone shoulda asked.

In another piece for The Atlantic called “The Silence of the Generals,” Tom Nichols called it less a speech than “a ramble, full of grievance and anger, just like his many political-rally performances.” Trump also pointed to the reporters present, calling them “fake news,” and encouraging the assembled troops to jeer at them.

He mocked former President Joe Biden and attacked various other political rivals. He elicited cheers from the crowd by announcing that he would rename US bases (or re-rename them) after Confederate traitors. He repeated his hallucinatory narrative about the invasion of America by foreign criminals and lunatics. He referred to 2024 as the “election of a president who loves you,” to a scatter of cheers and applause. And then he attacked the governor of California and the mayor of Los Angeles, again presiding over jeers at elected officials of the United States.

Nichols notes that while “Trump, himself a convicted felon, doesn’t care about rules and laws,” there are regulations against active duty military members in uniform attending political rallies, expressing partisan views, and showing disrespect for elected officials, and called on the Army’s senior leadership to push back against this shitbag of a commander-in-chief and enforce those rules.

Will any of these men say one word? Will any of them defend the Army and the other services from a would-be caudillo, a man who would probably be strutting around in a giant hat and a golden shoulder braid if he could get away with it?....

They command the power of life and death itself on the field of battle. But those ranks also carry immense responsibility. If they are truly Washington’s heirs, they should speak up—now—and stand with the first commander in chief against the rogue 47th.

Do we really expect military officers to do that? Doesn’t that violate that exact same principle of the military mixing in politics? Answers: Yes we do and no it doesn’t. If the brass doesn’t stand up and call out this obscenity on Trump’s part, they will be effectively blessing it, and opening the door to further—and even worse—abuses.

Do your job, fellas, or turn in your fucking stars.

THE DESCENT INTO HELL

Where might all this lead? Nowhere good.

Some have called this the most dangerous week in American history. It’s certainly in the running, though the week of January 6, 2021 is also a strong contender.

Trump is suggesting in his Henry II / mob boss /plausible deniability way that his border czar Tom Homan should arrest Gavin Newsom, on the heels of his Stepford-like spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt threatened the same at Chief Justice John Roberts back in April. The administration has already arrested and charged Congresswoman LaMonica McIver (D-NJ) and a Wisconsin judge, Hannah Dugan, both for spurious grounds related to the mass deportations, and thrown Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) and handcuffed him when he tried to confront Kristi DHS Secretary at a press conference. Did we expect any different from the part of “lock her up”?

Hey, where are all those Second Amendment enthusiasts who told us that they needed their guns in case a tyrannical regime came to power in the US? I guess I missed the fine print that said “does not apply to tyrants we like.”

In the coming weeks and months, we will almost certainly see this use of military force spread to other cities and states. Already governors are staking out their positions on the deployment, of active duty troops or federalized National Guard units in their states, from Democrats Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania and Bob Ferguson in Washington to—Republican Greg Abbott in Texas, who is already deploying the Texas Guard on his own initiative.

In The Federalist Papers No. 48, Madison wrote of “some favorable emergency” upon which a tyrant asserts his right and authority to resort to brute force. If no such emergency is available, one can usually be created. As false flags go, the Reichstag fire is the go-to example, but we can also cite the Gulf of Tonkin incident, or the sinking of the Maine.

But Madison’s longer quote bears repeating:

In a government where numerous and extensive prerogatives are placed in the hands of an hereditary monarch, the executive department is very justly regarded as the source of danger, and watched with all the jealousy which a zeal for liberty ought to inspire. In a democracy, where a multitude of people exercise in person the legislative functions, and are continually exposed, by their incapacity for regular deliberation and concerted measures, to the ambitious intrigues of their executive magistrates, tyranny may well be apprehended, on some favorable emergency, to start up in the same quarter.

We have long known that Trump wants to be a dictator, and has been slowly usurping power to that end, looking for the moment and the excuse when he can go all the way. The question that’s been hanging over us for almost a decade—what the military will do when we get to this decisive moment?—is now looming near.

Warning: Obsidian darkness ahead.

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Photo: The Reichstag in flames, Berlin, February 27, 1933