In 2020, as racial justice protests swept through the country over the murder of George Floyd, President Trump was itching to deploy the military to crush the unrest. He was talked out of it by his top national security advisers, who feared that such a decision would be viewed as moving toward martial law.
Five years later, as protests against his immigration policies began to swell in Los Angeles, Mr. Trump said he had learned his lesson.
“I’ll never do that again,” Mr. Trump said on Thursday, about waiting to send in the National Guard in 2020. “If I see problems brewing,” he added, “I’m not going to wait two weeks.”
With the Los Angeles protests, Mr. Trump has seized the chance to make up for his first-term regret.
His decision to send in federal troops right away, taking the extraordinary step of deploying active-duty military to deal with domestic unrest, fits into the larger pattern of Mr. Trump operating without any significant pushback from the people around him in his second term.
“He saw the military as his reactionary arm,” said Olivia Troye, a former homeland security official and aide to former Vice President Mike Pence. Ms. Troye said she witnessed multiple national security officials explain to Mr. Trump in 2020 that the military takes an oath to the Constitution — not Mr. Trump — and that it should not be turned against American citizens, even protesters.
“He took all the wrong lessons from that era,” Ms. Troye added. Mr. Trump’s aides are now “in lock step in giving him everything he wants.”
California has sued the Trump administration over sending in the National Guard, and the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom, argued that the president was bringing the nation to the brink of authoritarianism.
“Democracy is under assault right before our eyes — the moment we’ve feared has arrived,” he said.
But unlike in 2020, warnings of undermining state and individual rights or inflaming an already volatile situation have not deterred Mr. Trump, who has sought to carry out his political agenda with little regard for the Constitution or the courts.
That is not to say the federal response in 2020 was muted. Mr. Trump unleashed many federal agencies, including officers from Customs and Border Protection and the Bureau of Prisons, to suppress the protests then. Top Pentagon officials ordered National Guard helicopters to disperse protesters in the nation’s capital. The downward blast ripped signs from the sides of buildings and sent demonstrators scrambling for cover, only to find Bureau of Prisons agents marching toward them around the corner.
Like California officials, local officials dealing with protests in Portland, Ore., in 2020 argued the agents only inflamed tensions on the ground. A federal review later found many of the officers lacked training in riot and crowd control.
Still, the Trump administration has redoubled the militarized response, increasing the number of National Guard troops on the ground and sending hundreds of Marines in a second wave of deployments.
A federal judge on Thursday blocked the Trump administration’s mobilization of the Guard in Los Angeles, but within hours, an appeals court stopped the order from taking effect until at least Tuesday, when a hearing on the matter is scheduled.
The White House has argued that there is “overwhelming” public support for his agenda — one of his top campaign promises was to crack down on immigration and restore “law and order.” (Recent polls have shown Americans divided on Mr. Trump’s immigration crackdown, with many disapproving of his handling of the protests.)
The military appears to be key to that goal.
In his first term, Mr. Trump sent members of the military to the border, strictly to support the Border Patrol. But the military by law cannot usually detain migrants. Mr. Trump is allowing that now, however, by designating a roughly 200-mile strip along the U.S.-Mexico border as parts of nearby military bases.
The Department of Homeland Security has also requested more than 20,000 National Guard members to help with the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.
“President Trump will not hesitate to protect the American people from threats, foreign and domestic,” Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, said in a statement. “President Trump has fine-tuned his ability to pull the levers of executive power, including relying on our brave men and women in uniform in select instances to protect Americans in the wake of Democrat failures.”
While there have been incidents of vandalism and violence in Los Angeles, including episodes in which protesters have set self-driving cars on fire, thrown objects at law enforcement officials and looted stores, the protests have been limited to scattered blocks in the sprawling city. Many other people have gathered with signs and chanted slogans.
In 2020 and now, the Trump administration has characterized the demonstrations as overwhelmingly violent.
During the George Floyd protests, Mr. Trump had a proclamation drafted to invoke the Insurrection Act, a rarely used authority allowing presidents to use active-duty military for the purposes of law enforcement.
When he grew more incensed by the images of protesters overwhelming the streets of major cities, he raged about the country looking “weak,” and even inquired about whether the military could shoot protesters in the legs.
But top national security officials, such as Mark A. Milley, who served as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, or Mark Esper, then the defense secretary, pushed back, and Mr. Trump acquiesced. Mr. Trump never invoked the act; an adviser said at the time that the president was concerned that he would have “owned the problem” politically.
Those concerns are gone, along with the people trying to hold Mr. Trump back.
Stephen Miller, one of his top advisers in 2020 who proposed using the military to turn back migrants at the southwestern border, is now the architect of his domestic agenda, particularly on immigration. And the president’s defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, has become one of the fiercest champions of using the military in service of Mr. Trump’s policy goals.
Chad Wolf, Mr. Trump’s former acting homeland security secretary, said Mr. Trump appeared to be done waiting for or solely relying on local authorities. And he now has people around him who are committed to turning his impulses into policy.
“I think it always has to do with the people around him,” Mr. Wolf said. “The president listens to his cabinet advisers, and he’s taking into consideration who he’s got around him today. And they share the president’s view as they do on a lot of these issues.”
Civil rights and legal advocacy groups that have condemned Mr. Trump’s decision as an abuse of power and a threat to free speech also see a difference in his response.
They noted that Mr. Trump sees immigration as a winning issue, not just because of support for a crackdown on illegal immigration, but also because Black and brown communities are perceived to be easier targets.
“Part of his approach is to label certain people as enemies,” said Damon Hewitt, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.
“And he likely believes immigrants and people protesting ICE raids are less sympathetic than the people who protested police brutality after the murder of George Floyd,” he said, referring to Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents’ arrests of migrants.
Mr. Trump’s response to the 2020 protests crystallized about a week after they began. His administration cleared protesters in Lafayette Square with chemical agents so that he could walk to a church with boarded-up windows, and stand in front of it to be photographed holding a Bible.
A week after the Los Angeles protests, Mr. Trump will have a starkly different backdrop. On Saturday, as Mr. Trump celebrates the 250th birthday of the U.S. Army — and his own — tanks and artillery systems will parade through the streets of Washington.
Zolan Kanno-Youngs is a White House correspondent for The Times, covering President Trump and his administration.
Erica L. Green is a White House correspondent for The Times, covering President Trump and his administration.
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