WASHINGTON DC – The city of Los Angeles is often a beacon for Americans seeking to get away from it all. The sunshine, the amusement parks, the celebrity culture and the nation’s most vibrant restaurant scene attract the affluent whenever they seek to unwind. But in Los Angeles, Donald Trump has found the ideal location for him to manufacture a perfect political storm.
The city is now Ground Zero, not just for Trump’s determination to pursue his mass deportation of immigrants. It is also where his Republican party’s nascent campaign strategy is emerging for the midterm elections in November 2026.
Division is always at the core of Trump’s election brand, and thus it will be for the next 17 months as he seeks to retain Republican majorities in the House of Representatives and the US Senate. In Los Angeles, Trump has lit upon an opportunity simultaneously to attack three of his most loathed opponents: illegal immigrants, rioting protestors and Democratic Party political leaders.
Whether the protests in Los Angeles fizzle out – as seemed possible after Monday’s relatively quiet night in the city – or intensify, the US President is already proclaiming victory. “If I didn’t ‘SEND IN THE TROOPS’ to Los Angeles…that once beautiful and great City would be burning to the ground right now”, he exclaimed via social media on Tuesday.
Twenty-four hours earlier, having falsely claimed that the protestors were all “Illegal Aliens and Criminals”, he pledged to “liberate Los Angeles from the Migrant Invasion”. In reality, many of the demonstrators objecting to Trump’s programme of mass deportations are not illegal immigrants, but concerned Americans who have viewed images of masked federal agents seizing people off the streets and fear the country is rapidly descending into a police state.
Several cars were set on fire, sending large plumes of black smoke into the sky in Los Angeles as crowds protested immigration raids (Photo: Ringo Chiu/AFP)But Trump is playing to polling that shows the majority of voters approve of his determination to remove illegal immigrants from communities all over the country. His base adores the US President’s activities, with a whopping 93 per cent of Republicans telling a CBS News poll last weekend that they back his campaign. Those numbers may be helped by the fake images and conspiracy theories about events in Los Angeles that are flooding X and other social media platforms, eagerly distributed and shared by Trump’s “Make America Great Again” faithful.
The US President claims protestors are trying to stymie the mandate he secured in last November’s Presidential election and are being facilitated by his political opponents. Over the weekend, he argued the demonstrations were abetted by “California’s feckless Democrat leaders who have completely abdicated their responsibility to protect their citizens”.
square PATRICK COCKBURN Trump's Los Angeles tactics prove it: America is hurtling to autocracy
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That the protests are taking place only in small pockets of Los Angeles is irrelevant to Trump’s narrative. The images of cars being set alight, police vehicles being pelted with cinderblocks, and lawlessness even on a handful of streets are fueling the US President’s argument that he was forced to take action while Governor Gavin Newsom and Mayor Karen Bass sat on their hands.
The Governor, who has presidential aspirations of his own, is publicly apoplectic, fuming over Trump’s decision to deploy California’s National Guard on the streets of Los Angeles without his approval (the first time such an incident in the United States since 1965). He also reacted with fury when Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, suggested that he and the Mayor would be at risk of arrest if they attempted to undercut ongoing and sweeping efforts by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to rid Los Angeles of illegal immigrants.
“He knows where to find me…Come after me”, Newsom raged on MSNBC. “Arrest me. Let’s just get this over with”, he said, sarcastically describing Homan as a “tough guy”. Hours later, Trump doubled down on the threat to arrest the Governor, telling reporters that “I’d do it…he’s done a terrible job”.
Trump’s willingness to flood Los Angeles with thousands of National Guard troops was accompanied by his description of the protestors as “insurrectionists”. That description may not prove to be coincidental, with the US President’s critics fearing that he may soon invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807 to deploy troops in any state where even early-stage protests against his mass deportations are occurring.
Whether he turns to the Act now or keeps it in his arsenal for later will depend in large measure on the protestors’ direction of travel over the next few days. In a worst-case scenario for American democracy, he could go even further and declare a state of emergency that might upend the prospects of the mid-terms taking place on schedule next year.
Less than a week after the country was bingeing on the social media slanging match between the US President and his former protégé Elon Musk, suddenly the White House believes everything is coming up Trump. “We couldn’t script this any better”, one White House official told the website Politico on Tuesday. The script’s plot is still being written, but Trump currently likes the way his new storyline is moving.
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