President Trump thinks it is a sign of strength to send in troops to deal with protesters in Los Angeles. To that end, he has federalized a portion of the California National Guard and mobilized nearby Marines to support Immigration and Customs Enforcement as it confronts large protests in opposition to its efforts to arrest and deport undocumented immigrant laborers in the city.
Trump wanted to do something like this in his first term, during the summer that sealed his fate as a failed first-term president. But Mark Esper, his secretary of defense, refused. The protests in Los Angeles are not nearly as large as those that consumed the country in 2020, but Trump wants a redo, and Pete Hegseth, Esper’s more sycophantic successor, is just as eager to unleash the coercive force of the United States government on the president’s political opponents as Trump is.
You can almost feel, emanating from the White House, a libidinal desire to do violence to protesters, as if that will, in one fell swoop, consolidate the Trump administration into a Trump regime, empowered to rule America both by force and the fear of force.
The problem for Trump, however, is that this immediate, and potentially unlawful, recourse to military force isn’t a show of strength; it’s a demonstration of weakness. It highlights the administration’s compromised political position and throws the overall weakness of its policy program into relief. Yes, a certain type of mind might see the president’s willingness to cross into outright despotism as evidence of brash confidence, of a White House that wants to fight it out on the streets with its most vocal opponents because it thinks it will win the war for the hearts and minds of the American people.
But strong, confident regimes are largely not in the habit of meeting protests with military force, nor do they escalate at the drop of the hat. The Trump administration seems to have exactly one tool at its disposal — blunt force — and it’s clear that it has no plan for what happens when Americans do not fear being hit.
Before I make the case for the president’s weakness, I want to offer a recap of the standoff in Los Angeles. What brought the city to this point?
It begins with Stephen Miller.
Last month, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal, the president’s senior aide confronted leadership at Immigration and Customs Enforcement with a demand: Deport more people. And while Trump promised during his campaign to focus on criminals and “the worst of the worst,” there was no way to meet his (and Miller’s) goals by carefully selecting targets.
Instead, Miller, who was raised in nearby Santa Monica, “directed them to target Home Depot, where day laborers typically gather for hire, or 7-Eleven convenience stores,” the Journal reported, which is what ICE opted to do, conducting an immigration sweep last Friday “at the Home Depot in the predominantly Latino neighborhood of Westlake in Los Angeles, helping set off a weekend of protests around Los Angeles County, including at the federal detention center in the city’s downtown.”
Why California? Well, Democratic-led cities in Democratic-led states have been a target of Trump’s since his first term. And given the extent to which Trump seems to inhabit a world in which the 1990s never ended, it is also possible that he wants his own crack at handling an event like the 1992 Los Angeles riots.
(Here it should be said that a few years earlier, in 1990, Trump praised the Chinese government for its handling of the protests at Tiananmen Square in 1989: “When the students poured into Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government almost blew it. Then they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength. That shows you the power of strength.”)
In any case, the administration’s crackdown on day laborers in the city sparked a predictable response from the community, which immediately rallied to their defense. Initially hundreds but soon thousands of residents went to the streets in what have been mostly peaceful protests, despite the police use of tear gas, flash-bang grenades, rubber bullets and other so-called less lethal armaments. But there has been property damage in the form of burned-out cars and broken windows. And this damage, along with a few instances of looting, is the president’s pretext for a military crackdown.
“A once great American City, Los Angeles, has been invaded and occupied by Illegal Aliens and Criminals,” Trump declared on Truth Social:
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. I am directing Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, and Attorney General Pam Bondi, in coordination with all other relevant Departments and Agencies, to take all such action necessary to liberate Los Angeles from the Migrant Invasion, and put an end to these Migrant riots.
On Saturday, the president mobilized 2,000 National Guard troops. On Monday, he deployed 700 marines and 2,000 additional guardsmen. Notably, Trump has not invoked the Insurrection Act. Instead, his directive cites a provision within Title 10 of the U.S. Code on Armed Services, 10 U.S.C. 12406, which allows federal deployment of National Guard forces if “the United States, or any of the Commonwealths or possessions, is invaded or is in danger of invasion by a foreign nation” or if “there is a rebellion or danger of a rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States” or if “the president is unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States.”
Except, there is no invasion nor is there a rebellion nor is the president unable to execute the laws. The other major complication is that 10 U.S.C. 12406 does not authorize any particular activity — it simply outlines conditions for bringing the National Guard under federal control.
If the president had also invoked the Insurrection Act, he could use the Guard to do ordinary law enforcement on behalf of the federal government. As it stands, it’s not clear that the Guard, once called out, can legally do anything. As for the Marines, the president has no authority under 10 U.S.C. 12406 to deploy them for law enforcement purposes, and the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act specifically forbids the federal government from using Marines, or any other regular defense force, to enforce domestic law.
In short, there is a strong chance that the president’s use of military force to stop protesters is an unlawful and unconstitutional expansion of presidential authority over the states. It is, however, in keeping with Trump’s monarchical vision of his authority. And it is striking that there are laws on the books that, in essence, extend the power of a king to the president. As Evan Bernick, an associate professor of law at the Northern Illinois University College of Law, told me over email, “This administration is excavating statutes that have no business being on the books in their current form at all. It’s abusing them, sure, but they should not exist to be abused.”
While the president’s defenders might argue that he is just following the path laid out by his predecessors, Trump’s use of the military is a far cry from the most celebrated examples of the second half of the 20th century.
When President Dwight Eisenhower called out the 101st Airborne in 1957, it was in response to a request from the mayor of Little Rock, Ark., to enforce the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Eisenhower stood against the state’s segregationist governor, Orval Faubus, to enforce the Constitution. When President John F. Kennedy federalized the Alabama National Guard in 1963 it was, similarly, to enforce the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown.
In both cases, the presidents — one a Republican, the other a Democrat — faced recalcitrant state leaders unwilling to submit to the authority of the Constitution out of their commitment to a system of rank oppression. Neither Gov. Gavin Newsom of California nor the people of Los Angeles are resisting a court order to integrate schools or extend the promise of equal rights. The protesters are exercising their constitutional right to assemble and express their grievances. While there has been property damage, there’s no evidence that anything is out of control. (Even the L.A.P.D. has said that it can handle the situation.)
What Trump is doing is sending in the military to trample on the right to free expression. It is a rejection of fundamental American values and represents the exact kind of despotism this country was founded to resist. And this is just the beginning. In an Oval Office news conference on Tuesday, Trump even suggested that he would use force against any protesters who challenged his scheduled military parade on Saturday. “And if there’s any protests they will be met with very big force,” he said. “This is people that hate our country but they will be met with very heavy force.”
You’ll notice the president said nothing about lawful or unlawful protest, peaceful or violent. To him, any dissent is unacceptable. He does not believe that anyone has a right to challenge him. He is the nation’s boss, and it is our job to obey.
The White House clearly believes its actions are a show of strength, but again, they are not. The immediate recourse to repressive force; the inability to handle even modest opposition to its plans; the threats, bullying and overheated rhetoric — it betrays a sense of brittleness and insecurity.
Power, real power, rests on legitimacy and consent. A regime that has to deploy force at the first sign of dissent is a regime that does not actually believe it can wield power short of coercion and open threats of violence.
It’s not all that hard to imagine a more confident administration that met protests with a firm but accommodating defense of its prerogatives. We understand your opposition to our deportation program but we have to enforce the law. A smarter White House might try to isolate its opponents with a performance of responsible stewardship. Instead, the actual White House may have given its opponents the ammunition they need to persuade the public of their cause.
As it stands, 34 percent of Americans approve of the use of the Marines in Los Angeles, according to a newly released survey by YouGov. Forty-seven percent disapprove and 19 percent say they aren’t sure. This gets to one of the fundamental facts of the political situation, which is that Trump just isn’t that popular. His net approval rating is underwater by eight percentage points, and more Americans say the country is on the wrong track now than at the start of his term.
Americans are not enamored of his signature legislative package, the Big Beautiful Bill. They don’t like his tariffs, nor do they like the actual implementation of his deportation plans. Overall, more Americans say that Trump is fighting against them than say that he is on their side.
Trump won a narrow victory in a close election. He did so on a promise to lower prices and close the United States to foreign criminals. This was less a mandate to remake America than it was a call, from the public, to return the United States to the status quo prepandemic. His refusal to do this and to pursue a radical agenda of authoritarian consolidation and state repression instead has led, predictably, to the makings of a backlash.
The White House wants us to think that Los Angeles is an advance, a forward march for its agenda. But there is the strong possibility that it is actually a tactical retreat to safe ground in the face of a poor strategic landscape. It is possible that the public is just not willing to endorse the kind of repression that Americans are more accustomed to seeing in fictional dystopias and foreign dictatorships than in their own country.
A wiser president would try to reverse course. Donald Trump, not so much. He imagines himself a strongman — to back down is to be weak. And he has surrounded himself with allies who don’t just encourage but relish his worst instincts.
Perhaps Trump will pull out a political victory from all of this. I think it is more likely that he will embarrass himself.
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Jamelle Bouie became a New York Times Opinion columnist in 2019. Before that he was the chief political correspondent for Slate magazine. He is based in Charlottesville, Va., and Washington. @jbouie
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