“As unsatisfying as it may be for some citizens to hear, the last thing anyone should do is take to the streets of Los Angeles and try to confront the military or any of California’s law-enforcement authorities,” Tom Nichols pleaded in The Atlantic on Sunday. Fearing Trump is searching for a “pretext” to use force (as if Trump requires a pretext), he cautioned the protesters: “Be warned: Trump is expecting resistance. You will not be heroes. You will be the pretext.”
This line of reasoning, which can be readily found among the center-left and center-right commentariat, makes a number of fatal mistakes. We all know (or should know by now) that Trump doesn’t actually need a pretext to do whatever he wants to do. And for many Angelinos, whatever Trump attempts to do next is hardly front of mind; as far as they’re concerned, the worst-case scenario is happening to them right now. ICE is snatching up family members, neighbors, friends, and co-workers at their workplaces. The terror has already reached their doorstep, even if it has not yet reached the pundits’.
Nichols’s Atlantic colleague David Frum seemed largely in concurrence, arguing that Trump’s actions in L.A. constitute, per the essay’s headline, a “dress rehearsal” for future deployments, when the president might use the military to challenge elections. Any perception of widespread disorder, Frum argued, could serve Trump’s purposes. “If Trump can incite disturbances in blue states before the midterm elections,” Frum contended, “he can assert emergency powers to impose federal control over the voting process, which is to say his control.” The problem, though, is that Trump is already doing this: He issued an executive order in March outlining such a plan and providing justification for the trimming of voter rolls. If we don’t show that we’re willing to fight back, peacefully but forcefully, there may be no midterm—at least not a wholly legitimate one.
It’s also a bit ironic given Trump’s very own lawlessness. He’s constantly pardoning MAGA members who’ve committed serious offenses, including the January 6 attackers; has suffered no true legal consequences for his own lawlessness; is, by any reasonable measure, the most corrupt president in history; and recently called on border czar Tom Homan to arrest California Governor Gavin Newsom for allegedly obstructing federal immigration enforcement. Trump’s very sending in of the National Guard and Marines—now totaling 4,700 soldiers—likely violates the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which prohibits using the military for general policing purposes. Trump could invoke the Insurrection Act, as he’s threatened to do in the past, but he’s forgotten about that one so far. (It would be outlandish to argue that the protests constitute an insurrection, but the letter of the law has never concerned him.)
Yet, while we definitely want to avoid violence, we should not want to avoid tension. In fact, we want the “creative tension” that MLK called for in his Letter From a Birmingham Jail—a form of direct action that brings injustices to the surface. There’s a history of this: the Boston Tea Party, the Selma march, the AIDS die-ins, the lunch counter sit-ins—all were deemed illegal, as were various Vietnam protests. The Kent State and Attica tragedies, meanwhile, both occurred after the National Guard was called in—legally—supposedly to keep order.
Measures taken to curtail that right should only be instituted with great diligence and only in circumstances where a clear and extraordinary danger to the public requires it. That’s not what we’re witnessing here; the federal government isn’t stopping the danger, it’s creating it. It is Trump who is causing the conflagration through his instigation and escalation, which was surely the goal the entire time (predictably, top Trump aide Stephen Miller was the architect of the ICE crackdown in Los Angeles). The monster isn’t attacking from outside; it’s in the house. And that house is the White House.
Now’s the time to stand up and fight. Otherwise, we’ll watch democracy die on the operating table in front of us. A plurality of Americans oppose Trump’s military campaign in L.A.; their numbers will likely grow if he escalates it and expands it to other cities where protests are spreading. But if protesters were to stand down, out of fear that any potential conflict with law enforcement empowers Trump, then that would make an inept buffoon of a leader appear to be strong.
Some pundits may prefer that we all just sit home and hope the whole Trump problem goes away. But I prefer the doctrine of the famed AIDS activist and gay rights leader Larry Kramer, who said simply, “Shove it in their faces.”
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