We’ve discussed in a number of posts over the spring that Donald Trump’s effort to build a dictatorial, autocratic presidency is fundamentally a battle over public opinion. I’ve also noted in a series of posts that the states and their separate sovereignties are a key, defensive source of strength in the effort to defeat Trump. Since they are a source of strength, they are by definition also a target. We’re seeing both these realities play out in the chaotic situation in Los Angeles.
Let me start with a few observations about the general situation.
President Trump’s dream of mass deportations has always suffered from logistical and practical obstacles that make the entire exercise part cruelty, part performance, and part salve of his fragile ego.
It falls to White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller to keep all the plates spinning, a role he happily embraces, but which comes with the inherent challenge of putting the “mass” in mass deportations.
And so it was that ICE officials found themselves being berated by Miller in late May that their arrest numbers weren’t high enough and the rhetorical focus on the worst of the worst needed to shift on the ground to focus on all undocumented immigrants, the WSJ reports:
Agents didn’t need to develop target lists of immigrants suspected of being in the U.S. illegally, a longstanding practice, Miller said. Instead, he directed them to target Home Depot, where day laborers typically gather for hire, or 7-Eleven convenience stores. Miller bet that he and a handful of agents could go out on the streets of Washington, D.C., and arrest 30 people right away.
That kind of indiscriminate enforcement action has had the effect of sweeping up documented and undocumented, citizen and noncitizen, workers and criminals in a Kafkaesque crackdown that was sure to enflame tensions in immigrant and minority communities that were hardest hit.
The WSJ report on the indiscriminate and aggressive nature of the ICE sweeps is worth your time. No one anecdote captures the entire picture, but repeated over and over across the country, a pattern emerges – and the grievances associated with it.
It’s not hard to draw a straight line from reckless roundups to civil unrest to military action from Trump.
In other developments:
In federal court in San Francisco, California sued Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth over the deployment of the National Guard over state objections.
Some 2,000 guardsman and 500-700 marines have been deployed to Los Angeles, and the Pentagon said Monday night that another 2,000 National Guard troops were being mobilized.
Attorney General Pam Bondi said violent Los Angeles protesters will face federal charges. At least nine have been charged so far.
As Politico reports about Trump’s troop deployment:
Trump’s stated rationale, legal scholars say, appears to be a flimsy and even contrived basis for such a rare and dramatic step. The real purpose, they worry, may be to amass more power over blue states that have resisted Trump’s deportation agenda. And the effect, whether intentional or not, may be to inflame the tension in L.A., potentially leading to a vicious cycle in which Trump calls up even more troops or broadens their mission.
The Brennan Center’s Liza Goitein cut through some of the legalese with a good thread that makes this important point: “But it would be a mistake to focus too much on which statutory power is being used here. What matters it that Trump is federalizing the Guard for the purpose of policing Americans’ protest activity. That’s dangerous for both public safety and democracy.”
For The Record
Kristi Noem on LA: "They're not a city of immigrants. They're a city of criminals."
While overseeing a historic deployment of U.S. troops on American streets, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is, well, still Pete Hegseth:
The White House is struggling to find qualified people to fill roles as senior advisers to Pete Hegseth because they either don’t want to work for him or don’t fit the bill politically, NBC News reports.
The Pentagon inspector general looking into Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s Signal group chats is focused on whether the details of a military operation he shared were classified and if anyone ordered texts to be deleted, the WSJ reports.
The Pentagon was allegedly “duped” by a DOGE staffer who falsely claimed to know of warrantless surveillance conducted by the National Security Agency (NSA) that had identified DoD leakers, The Guardian reports. The DOGE staffer denies the allegation.
Anti-Immigration Cases: Rule Of Law Update
Alien Enemies Act: U.S. District Judge David Briones of El Paso ruled on the substance that President Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act to target the Tren de Aragua gang was unlawful.
CECOT detainees: The Trump administration is appealing U.S. District Judge James Boasberg’s ruling last week that it violated the due process rights of Venezuelan nationals when it deported them to a prison in El Salvador without notice or hearing.
South Sudan: The detainees originally slated to be deported to South Sudan remain at a military base in Djibouti, the Trump administration told a court yesterday, and have been given attorney contact info and will be given access to telephones.
The Corruption: DOJ Edition
The White House dismantling of the crime-fighting capabilities of the Justice Department in the white collar realm is going to end up being the defining issue of this decade, with a cascading series of consequences ranging from simply more unbridled public corruption to the dire risk of a culture of corruption developing and implanting itself in American life. (I’ll concede that there’s a good argument such a culture already exists and produced two Trump presidencies.) Here’s the latest:
Reuters goes deep on the Trump White House’s crippling of the DOJ’s Public Integrity Section: dismantling its staff, bypassing it on charging decisions, and stripping its authority to file new cases.
The Trump DOJ will only pursue a parred down range of foreign-bribery cases, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche announced. This come after a Trump executive order in February essentially froze cases under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.
IMPORTANT: Déjà Vu All Over Again
The Trump White House is pushing hard for a rare and super controversial midterm redistricting in Texas to try to redraw the congressional map and give it a few more GOP seats so that it can hold on to the House majority.
In a sign of how serious the move is, the Texas House GOP delegation held an emergency meeting on the Hill last evening, the NYT reports. There’s a natural tension in such a scheme because drawing a map more favorable to the GOP overall means narrowing the partisan margins in the districts of GOP incumbents, which makes them more vulnerable.
You’ll recall that former Rep. Tom Delay (R-TX) muscled through a hugely controversial midterm redistricting in Texas in 2003 that shaped the national political landscape for years.
RFK Jr. Watch: Anti-Vax Edition
In an extraordinary move, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., announced in a WSJ op-ed that he has fired all 17 members of the committee that advises the CDC on immunizations. The decision directly contradicts a promise Kennedy made to Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), the decisive vote during his confirmation hearings, when he said he would not alter the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, the NYT reports.
The Last True Fascist
John Ganz on the recent passing of Michael Leeden:
Ledeen might appear like a mere callous political opportunist, a dirty trickster, and he was, but it seems to me he was also a secret idealist, holding on to a dream of a non- or even anti-Nazi fascismo vero, something he took very seriously as an ideological project as he strenuously rejected the “opera buffa” interpretation of Italian fascism.
The Trump administration’s decision to federalize the California National Guard to crack down on protesters demonstrating against ICE detentions in the city, absent a request from the state’s governor — and even despite assurances from local law enforcement that things were, for the most part, under control — is itself the convergence of two threats Trump made on the campaign trail.
TPM will have a new editor and a new reporter next week. This is very exciting for us, allowing us to expand our coverage capacity and, hopefully, reach new audiences during what is a wild moment — both for democracy and for journalism — with new stories and unprecedented events flying at us by the hour.
“Border Czar” Tom Homan has been, along with Stephen Miller, the public face of Trump border enforcement and anti-immigration politics going back to President Trump’s first administration, when he was briefly acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). But in recent days, in a series of increasingly belligerent and menacing interviews, he’s appeared in either faux military uniforms or, in most cases, civilian garb clearly meant to appear like military-style fatigues along with a ever-changing run of camo or olive drab baseball caps.
National Guard troops are mobilized fairly frequently for domestic purposes, usually during natural disasters. Having them federalized isn’t that uncommon. But having them federalized over the objections of a state’s civil authorities is extremely uncommon and hasn’t happened in more than half a century. As this was unfolding over the weekend, I knew generally that this had last happened under LBJ as a part of enforcement of federal law during the Civil Rights Era. But I didn’t remember that the last time was specifically during the Selma-to-Montgomery March in March 1965. I was reminded of this this morning by a piece in NOTUS. This 2016 piece in Politico gives the specific details of how and why the federalization took place, which are interesting in themselves. A federal judge ruled that the march was protected under the First Amendment and that the state was responsible for ensuring its safety. Wallace refused to use state police power to do that, thus deliberately forcing Johnson’s hands (Johnson was pissed), figuring that he would gain politically if federal troops got into violent in encounters with anti-civil rights counter-protestors. As it happened, the larger spectacle was a key part of building momentum for the passage of the Voting Rights Act that August.
We come into the new week with more weekend news to process than we’ve had since February or March, so I’m going to jump right into it. I tried to condense it as much as possible, grouping like things together, in roughly descending order of importance. One note: I wrote extensively about the return of Abrego Garcia on Friday so I didn’t include it here given the volume of other news, but we’ll come back to this, especially the news that the criminal division chief in Nashville resigned over the Abrego Garcia indictment. In the meantime, Abrego Garcia’s lawyers filed a flaming retort last night to the Trump DOJ’s attempt to end the original case and sidestep the contempt of court proceeding entirely.
Civil Unrest As A Pretext For Presidential Lawlessness
We can’t talk about the protests in Los Angeles against mass deportation and President Trump itching to send in the military without a quick reminder that we all knew there was an extremely high risk that if Trump were re-elected he would provoke civil unrest in order to use it as a pretext for lawless actions he was already determined to take.
It’s too early to say whether this particular incident ends up being the defining episode of the erosion of the line between the military and domestic law enforcement. But it’s understandable why everyone has a hair trigger about Trump sending in the National Guard over the objections of California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D).
Two things in particular:
The President’s memo was concerningly open-ended. It didn’t specify Los Angeles or California; it applies anywhere. It empowered the defense secretary “to employ any other members of the regular Armed Forces as necessary.” It broadly defined protests as rebellion: “To the extent that protests or acts of violence directly inhibit the execution of the laws, they constitute a form of rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made a big deal over the weekend about a detachment of 500 Marines at Twentynine Palms being ready to provide backup to the National Guard.
A former acting vice chief of the National Guard Bureau told Fox News: “This is an inappropriate use of the National Guard and is not warranted.”
National Guard Call Up: Legal Analysis And Discussion
The most astute analysis:
Law professor Chris Mirasola, who used to work in the DoD Office of General Counsel, unpacks the presidential memo.
Georgetown law professor Steve Vladeck on what the presidential proclamation did and did not do and why it remains alarming.
A helpful thread from Carrie A. Lee, a former associate professor at the US Army War College:
OK, I know more about the CA case and we have more information on the deployments coming out, so a few thoughts.1. This is a massive overreach of POTUS authority. Using Section 12406 to federalize/deploy military forces w/out also invoking the Insurrection Act is literally unprecedented. 1/
“I’ll say it over and over again; you can’t build the mass deportation machine without first building the police state machine.”–Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council
‘He Eats His Hate’
ABC News suspended veteran newsman Terry Moran for a blistering tweet about White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller. Here’s the tweet:
Breaking: ABC News says senior national correspondent Terry Moran "has been suspended pending further evaluation." This since-deleted tweet is the reason for the suspension:
A great visualization from Amanda Shendruk and Catherine Rampell on the people Trump doesn’t want to exist:
This is part of a broader campaign to delete the statistical and visual evidence of undesirables, or at least those who may not fit into President Donald Trump’s conception of the new American “golden age.” Entire demographics are being scrubbed from records of both America’s past and present — including people of color, transgender people, women, immigrants and people with disabilities. They are now among America’s “missing persons.”
The Purges: FBI Retribution Edition
The Trump administration has forced out two senior FBI officials and punished a third for his friendship with former FBI agent Peter Strzok, the longtime Trump target.
Two Time Losers
Damian Williams, the former U.S. attorney in Manhattan, is leaving Paul Weiss, which cut a deal with President Trump, and joining Jenner & Block, which in contrast sued over Trump’s executive order against it and won.
Proud Boys Sue Over Jan. 6
Proud Boys Enrique Tarrio, Zachary Rehl, Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs and Dominic Pezzola – all convicted in the Jan. 6 attack then given clemency by President Trump – have sued prosecutors and FBI agents in federal court in Florida over their prosecutions, demanding $100 million in punitive damages.
A Mother Lode Of Extremist Materials
An alleged series of thefts of combat equipment from an Army Ranger regiment in Washington state led to the arrest earlier this month of two veterans at a home full of Nazi and white supremacy paraphernalia and a stockpile of stolen weapons, the NYT reports.
What Happened To The ADL?
The Forward: ADL chief Jonathan Greenblatt compared pro-Palestinian student protesters to ISIS and al-Qaeda in an address to Republican attorneys general.
DOGE Watch
A 6-3 Supreme Court granted DOGE access to confidential Social Security records, with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson blasting the decision in a written dissent joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor.
Over the objections of the three liberal justices, the Supreme Court cut back the scope of discovery the watchdog group CREW can seek from DOGE.
Frank Bisignano, the new head of the Social Security Administration, declared himself to be “fundamentally a DOGE person.”
Trump’s Ban On AP Reinstated
In a widely panned decision, two Trump appointees on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals largely reinstated the Trump White House’s ban on the Associated Press in retaliation for not using “Gulf of America” in its stories.
Federal Judges Are Begging Us to Pay Attention
Adam Bonica used computational text analysis to examine judicial decisions in nearly 300 cases involving the Trump administration and found what he called an “institutional chorus of constitutional alarm“:
The sharp language from the bench isn’t judicial activism; it’s the sound of democracy’s defense mechanisms under unprecedented stress. These interventions span the political spectrum. Judges were responding not to partisan disagreement but to actions that crossed fundamental legal and constitutional lines.
The alarm is being sounded by conservative and liberal judges in a range of cases, many of which you’ll be familiar with from Morning Memo.
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at The Conversation.
Responding to street protests in Los Angeles against federal immigration enforcement raids, President Donald Trump ordered 2,000 soldiers from the California National Guard into the city on June 7, 2025, to protect agents carrying out the raids. Trump also authorized the Pentagon to dispatch regular U.S. troops “as necessary” to support the California National Guard.
The president’s orders did not specify rules of engagement about when and how force could be used. California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who did not request the National Guard and asserted it was not needed, criticized the president’s decision as “inflammatory” and warned it “will only escalate tensions.”
I am a historian who has written several books about the Vietnam War, one of the most divisive episodes in our nation’s past. My recent book, “Kent State: An American Tragedy,” examines a historic clash on May 4, 1970, between anti-war protesters and National Guard troops at Kent State University in Ohio.
The confrontation escalated into violence: troops opened fire on the demonstrators, killing four students and wounding nine others, including one who was paralyzed for life.
In my view, dispatching California National Guard troops against civilian protesters in Los Angeles chillingly echoes decisions and actions that led to the tragic Kent State shooting. Some active-duty units, as well as National Guard troops, are better prepared today than in 1970 to respond to riots and violent protests – but the vast majority of their training and their primary mission remains to fight, to kill, and to win wars.
Federalizing the Guard
The National Guard is a force of state militias under the command of governors. It can be federalized by the president during times of national emergency, or for deployment on combat missions overseas. Guardsmen train for one weekend per month and two weeks every summer.
Presidents rarely deploy National Guard troops without state governors’ consent. The main modern exceptions occurred in the 1950s and 1960s during the Civil Rights Movement, when Southern governors defied federal court orders to desegregate schools in Arkansas, Mississippi and Alabama. In each case, the federal government sent troops to protect Black students from crowds of white protesters.
The 1807 Insurrection Act grants presidents authority to use active-duty troops or National Guard forces to restore order within the United States. President Trump did not invoke the Insurrection Act. Instead, he relied on Section 12406 of Title 10 of the U.S. Code, a narrower federal statute that allows the president to mobilize the National Guard in situations including “rebellion or danger of a rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States.”
ICE officers and national guards confront protesters outside of the Metropolitan Detention Center in Los Angeles on June 8, 2025. Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu via Getty Images
The standoff at Kent State
The war in Vietnam had grown increasingly unpopular by early 1970, but protests intensified on April 30 when President Richard Nixon authorized expanding the conflict into Cambodia. At Kent State, after a noontime anti-war rally on campus on May 1, alcohol-fueled students harassed passing motorists in town and smashed storefront windows that night. On May 2, anti-war protesters set fire to the building where military officers trained Kent State students enrolled in the armed forces’ Reserve Officer Training Corps program.
In response, Republican Governor Jim Rhodes dispatched National Guard troops, against the advice of university and many local officials, who understood the mood in the town of Kent and on campus far better than Rhodes did. County prosecutor Ron Kane had vehemently warned Rhodes that deploying the National Guard could spark conflict and lead to fatalities.
Nonetheless, Rhodes – who was trailing in an impending Republican primary for a U.S. Senate seat – struck the pose of a take-charge leader who wasn’t going to be pushed around by a long-haired rabble. “We’re going to put a stop to this!” he shouted, pounding the table at a press conference in Kent on May 3.
Hundreds of National Guard troops were deployed across town and on campus. University officials announced that further rallies were banned. Nonetheless, on May 4, some 2,000 to 3,000 students gathered on the campus Commons for another anti-war rally. They were met by 96 National Guardsmen, led by eight officers.
There was confrontation in the air as student anger over Nixon’s expansion of the war blended with resentment over the Guard’s presence. Protesters chanted antiwar slogans, shouted epithets at the Guardsmen and made obscene gestures.
Archival footage from CBS News of the clash between campus anti-war protesters and Ohio National Guard troops at Kent State University on May 4, 1970.
‘Fire in the air!’
The Guardsmen sent to Kent State had no training in de-escalating tension or minimizing the use of force. Nonetheless, their commanding officer that day, Ohio Army National Guard Assistant Adjutant General Robert Canterbury, decided to use them to break up what the Department of Justice later deemed a legal assembly.
In my view, it was a reckless judgment that inflamed an already volatile situation. Students started showering the greatly outnumbered Guardsmen with rocks and other objects. In violation of Ohio Army National Guard regulations, Canterbury neglected to warn the students that he had ordered Guardsmens’ rifles loaded with live ammunition.
As tension mounted, Canterbury failed to adequately supervise his increasingly fearful troops – a cardinal responsibility of the commanding officer on the scene. This fundamental failure of leadership increased confusion and resulted in a breakdown of fire control discipline – officers’ responsibility to maintain tight control over their troops’ discharge of weapons.
When protesters neared the Guardsmen, platoon sergeant Mathew McManus shouted “Fire in the air!” in a desperate attempt to prevent bloodshed. McManus intended for troops to shoot above the students’ heads to warn them off. But some Guardsmen, wearing gas masks that made it hard to hear amid the noise and confusion, only heard or reacted to the first word of McManus’ order, and fired at the students.
The troops had not been trained to fire warning shots, which was contrary to National Guard regulations. And McManus had no authority to issue an order to fire if officers were nearby, as they were.
Many National Guardsmen who were at Kent State on May 4 later questioned why they had been deployed there. “Loaded rifles and fixed bayonets are pretty harsh solutions for students exercising free speech on an American campus,” one of them told an oral history interviewer. Another plaintively asked me in a 2023 interview, “Why would you put soldiers trained to kill on a university campus to serve a police function?”
Doug Guthrie, a student at Kent State in 1970, looks back 54 years later at the events of May 4.
A fighting force
National Guard equipment and training have improved significantly in the decades since Kent State. But Guardsmen are still military troops who are fundamentally trained to fight, not to control crowds.
In 2020, then-National Guard Bureau Chief General Joseph Lengyel told reporters that “the civil unrest mission is one of the most difficult and dangerous missions … in our domestic portfolio.”
In my view, the tragedy of Kent State shows how critical it is for authorities to be thoughtful in responding to protests, and extremely cautious in deploying military troops to deal with them. The application of force is inherently unpredictable, often uncontrollable, and can lead to fatal mistakes and lasting human suffering. And while protests sometimes break rules, they may not be disruptive or harmful enough to merit responding with force.
Aggressive displays of force, in fact, can heighten tensions and worsen situations. Conversely, research shows that if protesters perceive authorities are acting with restraint and treating them with respect, they are more likely to remain nonviolent. The shooting at Kent State demonstrated that using military force in these situations is an option fraught with grave risks.
This is an updated version of an article originally published Aug. 27, 2024. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
In my first post I wanted to make clear the specifics of what was happening with the National Guard. The President has the power to federalize the State National Guards. I wanted to make sure everyone knew that this is not a power Trump made up. It’s within his power and authority. As far as I know the last time this was done over the objection of state’s governor was during the Civil Rights era to enforce federal civil rights law. But every Presidential power can be abused and this is the one perhaps most liable to abuse. This whole situation is a definitional abuse of power. It is a wholly manufactured crisis. The President has the authority to federalize the National Guard. But the powers he takes from that decision are far from unlimited.
This is serious enough to break in on the weekend.
You’ve seen the intentionally provocative ICE raids in LA and the protests spawned by them. A short time ago White House immigration Czar Tom Homan said he was sending in the National Guard to control the situation. It wasn’t clear what he meant since the California National Guard reports to the Governor of California. The President has to nationalize the Guard to put it under his command. About fifteen minutes ago Gov. Newsom tweeted out a statement that the President is in fact nationalizing the California State Guard. The exact words from his statement were “the federal government is moving to take over the California National Guard and deploy 2,000 soldiers.” But that’s clear what that means.
