Posing as a wartime leader, President Donald Trump is building a political case to use American troops not in a foreign conflict, but at home, to bolster his mass deportation sweeps.
But California Gov. Gavin Newsom, the Democrat who heads the state leading resistance to a president with a taste for unchecked power, says a long-feared moment of peril is at hand for US democracy.
In an emerging campaign with stark constitutional implications, Trump is conjuring a narrative of invasion and insurrection. He’s exaggerating disorder in the relatively contained unrest, looting and protests in Los Angeles. And he’s implying that, to keep the country safe, he’s ready to deploy soldiers across the country.
Trump repeatedly and falsely claimed on Tuesday that if he’d failed to dispatch the National Guard and US Marines to Los Angeles, it would be “burning to the ground.” The president also warned that he was looking beyond Los Angeles, as other cities, and states – especially those run by Democrats – brace for expanded sweeps against undocumented migrants and protests that could follow.
“You know, if we didn’t attack this one very strongly, you’d have them all over the country,” Trump said in the Oval Office. “But I can inform the rest of the country that when they do it, if they do it, they are going to be met with equal or greater force that we met right here.”
Then, in a highly politicized speech to troops at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, later Tuesday, the president portrayed entire neighborhoods of Los Angeles as locked in the grip of an occupying force of “transnational gangs and criminal networks.”
“We will liberate Los Angeles,” Trump said, as if he was referring to a city seized by a hostile foreign army. “We will use every asset at our disposal to quell the violence and restore law and order right away. We’re not going to wait seven days and eight days and wait for a governor that’s never going to call and watch cities burn.”
A day earlier, Trump had suggested that Los Angeles is just the start, saying at the White House, “We are going to have troops everywhere.”
