Donald Trump didn’t call out the National Guard when thousands of MAGA rioters overran the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, despite multiple requests.
Why do you think he sent the National Guard to Los Angeles County last night after a few dozen protestors amassed outside a Home Depot?
It wasn’t because California Gov. Gavin Newsom requested the “help.”
“The federal government is taking over the California National Guard and deploying 2,000 soldiers in Los Angeles — not because there is a shortage of law enforcement, but because they want a spectacle,” Newsom said in a statement on Twitter.
The Trump administration has failed miserably to meet its pledge to deport “millions” of violent criminal immigrants, so the effort has been refocused on targeting law-abiding legal and undocumented immigrants and those seeking asylum to try to meet the inflated roundup quotas.
ICYMI
- Harrisonburg: Immigrants rounded up by ICE were covered in dirt, appeared scared
- Kilmar Abrego Garcia returned to U.S., but Trump administration not giving in
The push to round up people whose only crimes are brown skin and speaking English as a second language has led to predictable pushback in cities across the country, in red states and blue.
The motivation to the move by the Trump administration to pick a fight with California is obvious: California is a blue state, and Los Angeles is the bluest part.
They’re doing this to send a message, basically.
It would be easier to pick a fight with, for example, Houston, where the mayor is a Democrat, the governor is Republican, and the population is 47 percent Latino.
That would be shooting fish in a barrel, and now that I have thought that one through, I’m more than half-expecting that one to happen, sooner rather than later.
Back to LA: the odd thing to the deployment of the National Guard there is that local Angelinos are reporting on the socials today that the vast majority of people in Los Angeles County – which has 10 million residents and spans 4,000 square miles – aren’t even aware of what is going on.
One account that I read from a reporter for BBC noted that even in the area where the protests were ongoing, traffic was able to flow through pretty much as normal, and a few blocks away from the protests, life was proceeding as it otherwise would on a Sunday.
This is what got Trump to call out the National Guard, and has Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth threatening to deploy Marines?
It feels like a dry run for something bigger, just as Jan. 6 felt like a dry run for something bigger.
On that note about Jan. 6: it’s probably a good thing Trump didn’t call up the Guard on Jan. 6, because you’d have to wonder what orders he would have given – to protect Congress and the vice president from the siege, or to help the rioters finish the job.
This episode in LA needs to be after-actioned to assess how anti-fascist governors and mayors can better use the resources available to them to prevent the Trump regime from overstepping its constitutional bounds.
You know this is already happening.
For us in Virginia, this raises the stakes of our statewide elections in November.
We absolutely have to get control of the National Guard out of the hands of the MAGAs.
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Chris Graham
