‘Donald Trump’s Los Angeles Military Deployment Is an Assault on American Democracy’

The most valuable commodity in a democracy is not the quality of its constitution, the brilliance of its leaders, the strength of its institutions, the details of its laws, the independence of its media, or the vibrancy of its civic society, but trust.

Trust between the people and their government. Trust that politicians will honour the results of free and fair elections. Trust that leaders will try to represent the interests of every citizen, not just the ones that voted for them. Trust that Government officials will carry out their duties impartially and with integrity. Trust that government spokespeople, while undoubtedly putting a positive spin on events, will broadly tell the truth. Trust that laws will be applied fairly, and not twisted in order to go after political enemies, rivals or disfavoured groups. Trust that leaders will not abuse the powers of their position to enrich or benefit themselves, or their associates. Trust that the Government will seek to protect the poorest, the most vulnerable, or disadvantaged members of society, because who knows when some unhappy twist of fate might land any of us in a similar situation.

Trust is the invisible glue which holds democracies together. It cannot be written into the constitution. It cannot be legislated into being. It cannot be enforced upon leaders. Trust is an act of faith by voters in their leaders. Honouring that trust is a choice made by those leaders.

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Trust takes time to establish and, once broken, is not easily restored.

There are numerous ways in which Donald Trump’s administration is currently damaging America, both domestically and internationally  – launching self-defeating trade wars, trashing alliances, weakening its security agencies through making appointments based on loyalty rather than competence, roiling the federal bureaucracy, misdirecting its legal powers for political ends, targeting the weak and the vulnerable whilst pardoning the guilty and the corrupt, slashing programmes which protect Americans at home, and advance American values and interests overseas, rolling back decades of progress in science, health and environmental protections, attacking independent institutions such as universities, the media, and the arts sector, and grotesquely abusing the powers of office for personal enrichment.

But, of all its acts of wlilful destruction, the commodity which Donald Trump’s administration is damaging the most is trust.  

Trump has breached the nation’s trust in all the ways described above. But, perhaps, nowhere is this more visible than in the administration’s decision over the weekend to send National Guards to patrol the streets of Los Angeles, allegedly to protect federal agents and property, in response to protests against federal immigration raids in the city. Trump’s decision to send in the Guards took place over the objections of the Governor of California, Gavin Newsom, who said that Trump’s order was intended “to manufacture a crisis. He’s hoping for chaos so he can justify more crackdowns, more fear, more control.”  The Mayor of Los Angeles Karen Bass, described the decision to deploy troops as a “chaotic escalation.”

This feels more visceral, and more immediate, than any of the administration’s other actions, the consequences of which are either not yet felt directly by most Americans, are targeted at less sympathetic groups such as immigrants, or so-called “elites” based in Washington or other major cities, or will only play out over time, such as the economic costs of Trump’s trade wars.

Deploying federal troops in response to civil unrest, against the specific wishes of the local state authorities, is virtually unprecedented in America. The last time it occurred was in 1965, when President Johnson sent the National Guard to Alabama to protect civil rights demonstrators.

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Such action would also usually require the President to invoke the Insurrection Act. The last time this was done was in 1992, when the George H W Bush Administration sent US Marines to California to restore order during protests at the acquittal of four police officers in the beating of Rodney King. Unlike today, that was at the specific request of the then Governor of the state.

When unrest erupted in America in 2020 following the killing by police of George Floyd, the then Defence Secretary Mark Esper pushed back on Trump’s desire to deploy troops, stating “the option to use active-duty forces in a law enforcement role should only be used as a matter of last resort and only in the most urgent and dire of situations.”

This time, Trump didn’t even try to invoke the Insurrection Act. Instead, the White House memo justifying the decision to deploy the national guards said the protests may amount to “a form of rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States.” On his Truth Social site, Trump posted that “a once great American city, Los Angeles, has been invaded and occupied by Illegal Aliens and Criminals. Now violent, insurrectionist mobs are swarming and attacking our Federal Agents” and that he was directing his officials “to take all such action necessary to liberate Los Angeles from the Migrant Invasion, and put an end to these Migrant riots.”

Trump further suggested he might be willing to send in US Marines to quell further disorder. Speaking to the press on Sunday he said “We’ll send whatever we need to make sure there’s law and order.”. He added that the bar for determining whether that would be necessary is “what I think it is”, displaying extraordinary monarchical arrogance.

This time, moreover, no-one in the administration is trying to constrain Trump.  Trump’s Defence Secretary, Pete Hegseth declared that Marines at Camp Pendleton in Southern California were on “high alert”. On the Sunday talk shows, Speaker Mike Johnson dismissed the idea that this might be heavy handed, saying “we have to be prepared to do what is necessary.” Trump’s deputy Chief of Staff, Stephen Miller, posted on social media that “this is a fight to save civilization.” Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, said the administration would arrest anyone, including public officials, who interfered with immigration enforcement.

While the protests in Los Angeles reportedly did involve some acts of violence, including slashing tires, defacing public property, shouting and pushing against ICE officers, it is an obscene exaggeration to claim they involved gross disorder, tantamount to a rebellion.

Rather, it is not unreasonable to suspect that the administration deliberately planned the entire anti-immigrant operation in Los Angeles, a deep democrat state, precisely in order to provoke protests, send in troops to escalate the situation, and thereby justify further extreme measures. Governor Newsom himself described the President’s actions as “purposefully inflammatory.” He has since declared that he will file a lawsuit challenging the President’s order. In a statement, former Presidential candidate Kamala Harris described Trump’s actions “as part of the Trump administration’s cruel, calculated agenda to spread panic and division” and “not about public safety – they’re about stoking public fear.”

In a healthy democracy, leaders generally try to keep the country together, unite people of different political persuasions, and pledge to lead on behalf of all voters, not just their own supporters. What we are witnessing now in America is the complete opposite – a deliberate attempt to divide Americans against each other. Republicans are pitching themselves as defenders of “law and order”, against those who are “defending illegals and on the side of the people who break the law”, as former Republican Speaker Newt Gingrich, who backs Trump, described it.

“Defending law and order” is the language used by dictators everywhere to justify repression.

It’s not far-fetched to fear that the administration will continue these kind of provocative moves in the hope that widespread civic disorder breaks out, providing sufficient pretext for the President to declare a genuine insurrection. This would give him the legal authority to deploy tens of thousands of troops on America’s streets. The risk of the situation becoming genuinely violent is real, given the extent of private gun ownership in America.

One potential motive for the President and his associates wanting to engineer a true national crisis would be in order to justify emergency powers allowing them to suspend elections, for the simple reason that the more they abuse laws now, the more they will want to cling on in power, to avoid eventual accountability.

A civil society activist from the country of Georgia in the Caucasus, currently facing its own democratic crisis, recently wrote an article in which she warned that “democratic collapse can happen faster than anyone imagines” and that “complacency kills democracy – and yours might be next.”   

The warning is timely.  No-one should feel complacent about what is happening in America right now. The constitutional crisis which many of us feared might happen under a second Trump Presidency is approaching, far faster than most of us had anticipated, and with almost no effective pushback from America’s political classes, who are either divided among themselves, or actively complicit.   

It is hard to predict how this will end, other than badly. It will take years to rebuild America’s constitutional checks and balances, institutions, and international standing, but possibly decades to restore political trust.

Supporters of Trump accuse critics like me of suffering from “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” I fear it is them who are suffering from “Trump Denial Syndrome”. The threat to America’s democracy is clear, present and dangerous.