What did Donald Trump do today?
He imagined that deploying the National Guard against protestors went very well.
Angelenos have been protesting the aggressive and militarized tactics used by ICE in raids this weekend, and police have responded with force. The LAPD has used tear gas and so-called "less-lethal" munitions gainst protestors and, according to widespread eyewitness reports, innocent bystanders.
The scale of the disturbances are relatively small, but yesterday Trump—or someone acting with his authority—seized on the opportunity to order the California National Guard to be federalized. That led to Trump posting this to his boutique microblogging website at 2:34 A.M. Washington time:
Great job by the National Guard in Los Angeles after two days of violence, clashes and unrest. We have an incompetent Governor (Newscum) and Mayor (Bass) who were, as usual (just look at how they handled the fires, and now their VERY SLOW PERMITTING disaster. Federal permitting is complete!), unable to to handle the task. These Radical Left protests, by instigators and often paid troublemakers, will NOT BE TOLERATED. Also, from now on, MASKS WILL NOT BE ALLOWED to be worn at protests. What do these people have to hide, and why??? Again, thank you to the National Guard for a job well done!
No part of this is really true. In particular, Trump seems to be confusing the protestors for the masked federal agents they were protesting. For the most part, this is about as "violent" as protestors got before tear gas canisters started flying:
The are line dancing in the middle of the protest while shouting Fuck ICE
— Tina-Desiree Berg (@tinadesireeberg.com) June 8, 2025 at 6:26 PM
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But as Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass pointed out shortly afterward, Trump had the basic fact he was celebrating wrong: the National Guard had not been deployed when he sent that message.
In the busy day that has unfolded since, the White House has still not explained what Trump thought was happening or who he was confusing the California National Guard with.
But Trump has been telegraphing for months that he wants an excuse to invoke the Insurrection Act against Americans who oppose him. That would allow him to turn the full force of the United States military—the regular Army, not just the National Guard—against protestors or anyone else he claimed was a threat.
People all over the country, from cities like Los Angeles and Minneapolis to tiny Missouri farm towns, have been reacting with increasing anger and fear to the way that ICE and other federal agencies are conducting themselves in American communities since Trump returned to office. Agents have been seizing small children at schools, arresting people on valid visas when they show up for appointments on their legal path to citizenship, and—in a disturbing number of cases—simply rushing individuals en masse in the street while masked and shoving them into unmarked vans.
Trump has made immigration a centerpiece of all of his political campaigns, but has never showed much personal interest in actually removing undocumented migrants. The work that they do in the United States is a major cost savings for business owners who break the law to hire them—as Trump himself is well aware as a business owner who repeatedly illegally employed immigrants with no valid work visa.
Instead, the thrust behind the new extremely aggressive and confrontational tactics is Stephen Miller. Miller is the winner, for the moment, in the messy soap-opera battle with Elon Musk to direct the Trump White House's agenda. An extremist even by Trump administration standards on immigration, Miller recently screamed at ICE officials for not meeting the targets he wanted for his mass deportation campaign.
In spite of, or rather because of, the hyper-aggressive approach ICE is taking under Trump, removals are down sharply from the last year of the Biden administration. Voluntary departures arranged without the involvement of masked police don't make for good TV drama, but are vastly cheaper and more effective.
Why does this matter?
- It's bad if a president is looking for any excuse to deploy the military against American citizens.
- It's worse if nobody really knows if the president is in the loop at all.