Trump 47 Is Not Trump 45, And The Left Hasn't Caught On

Michael LeBron, who posts as Lionel on his YouTube channel, makes a key point in the clip above. At 4:10:

This is not the same Donald Trump. . . . What Trump went through before in 2016 and elsewhere, what he went through was something he never, ever forgot, and he understands how things are done now. . . . He realized that he effed up when he did not do something, dare I say, a little more assiduously regarding the National Guard and others. January 6 was caused by Nancy Pelosi, who let this happen. Donald Trump told her flat out, "I want protection. . . . I want the National Guard." She's the one who said no. Why? Because that would destroy the plan. The was a LIHOP and a MIHOP, let it happen on purpose and make it happen on purpose, and Trump understands what's happening right now.

An interview at The Tablet with Kyle Shideler, a senior analyst at the Center for Security Policy, expands on this insight:

The key indicator that this was intended to become a major incident to capture national attention was the presence of the SEIU, the SEIU president getting arrested, and the degree to which this rapidly escalated. So clearly this was not a handful of antifa guys just tracking ICE and causing mischief; this was intended to provoke a larger event, an event that would nationalize, and we’re now seeing today that they’re trying to spur things up in Chicago, New York, Houston. My concern is that if you look back before the election, they were talking about how to confront a future Trump administration over immigration, so they have been preparing for this for some time. This is the conflict that they wanted, and it’s the topic that they wanted.

. . . Trump is responding to this in the way that he sort of talked about responding to the BLM riots in 2020. And what happened in 2020 probably confirms his prior assumptions that you have to nip these things in the bud. So he’s looking to draw a hard line early and try to break this thing in Los Angeles before it spreads. I think that’s probably the right move.

But then Shideler worries that the leftists may have gamed this out beforehand:

They ran war game scenarios about this sort of crisis before the election, and I would not be shocked if you see in there elements of what comes next.

The model in 2020 was to drive a wedge between the president and the military, the people actually responsible for the National Guard. And we saw that play out in the BLM riots in 2020 in Washington, D.C., where you had a split between Trump and his then secretary of defense over the use of the Insurrection Act. And you saw it again on Jan. 6, where you had DOD officials countermanding the president and not operating on his requests for a heavy National Guard presence to keep things calm. So I expect that that’s one of the places they’ll try to drive the wedge. I don’t think they can drive a wedge between Trump and the DOD or the FBI now, however, so where will they try to drive that wedge? The response to these things is always political, and success, victory, or loss is not measured in how many police cars get burned. It’s measured in achieving a political objective.

This is the key difference: Trump 47 is not Trump 45. His Defense Secretary in summer 2020 was Mark Esper. Esper detailed his resistance to Trump's ideas over the George Floyd riots in an interview with Judy Woodruff:

And it seemed to be that violence was breaking out, at least to him, all around the country as well.

And so his frustration really grew, to the point where he was talking about the invocation of the Insurrection Act and the deployment of 10,000 active-duty troops into the streets of the nation's capital. And it was at that point in time that I, Bill Barr, and with General Milley's assistance as well, began pushing back on that notion.

And my view was that this was a law enforcement problem that the — that the military, the National Guard, could support and should support as needed, but this was a law enforcement issue, not — certainly not a matter for the active-duty forces to be involved in.

Trump fired Esper after the election, replacing him with Chris Miller, who appears to have slow-walked or stopped the deployment of the National Guard to the Capitol in response to the January 6, 2021 riot. Miller testified to the House Oversight Committee in 2024:

“I was cognizant of the fears that the President would invoke the Insurrection Act to politicize the military in an anti-democratic manner. And, just before the Electoral College certification, 10 former Secretaries of Defense signed an op-ed piece published in The Washington Post warning of the dangers of politicizing and using inappropriately the military. No such thing was going to occur on my watch.”

. . . “There was absolutely -- there is absolutely no way I was putting U.S. military forces at the Capitol, period.”

. . . “The operational plan was this, let’s take the D.C. National Guard, keep them away from the Capitol.”

Exactly who prevented the National Guard from deploying to the Capitol on January 6 has never been completely clear, except that Trump and the Capitol Police both wanted it, but just about everyone else didn't:

In his testimony before the Senate in February, former US Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund said that he approached both Sergeants at Arms on the House and Senate side on January 4 to request the National Guard through an Emergency Declaration from the Capitol Police Board.

His request, according to Sund, was not approved. Instead, the Senate Sergeant at Arms Michael C. Stenger “suggested I ask (the National Guard) how quickly we could get support if needed and to ‘lean forward’ in case we had to request assistance on January 6,” according to Sund’s testimony.

Certainly those resisting the idea of deploying the National Guard, which Trump supported, included Trump's Acting Defense Secretary and the Capitol Police Board. Whether then-Speaker Pelosi was in a position to veto the deployment on January 6 isn't clear, although her recent accusation that Trump refused to deploy the Guard is incorrect.

On the other hand, Lionel's surmise that Trump 47 learned a big lesson from both the George Floyd riots and January 6 must be completely correct, with the reservation that Trump must also have recognized the absolute need to have a chain of command that didn't work against him, as William Barr, Mike Esper, and Chris Miller certainly did.

But now we also get to the question Kyle Shideler posed a few days ago in his interview: Trump learned a lesson and modified his tactics this time around, apparently fully expecting some type of George Floyd-style summer-of-violence from the left. But has the left already anticipated this predictable revised Trump strategy with its own new response?

Apparently not. What we've seen in the days since the Shideler interview has been, first, redoubled rioting in Los Angeles with self-defeating visuals, including rioters waving Mexican flags. A flaccid LAPD response over this period failed to control the downtown destruction, forcing Mayor Bass to impose a curfew as of yesterday evening. This all undercut the left's position that deploying the National Guard was an overreaction.

The second response from the left was simply an extensiion of the post-election lawfare stretagy, attempt to get a temporary restraining order from a federal judge to stop deployment of the National Guard to Los Angeles. Commentators generally gave this little chance, and they've been proved correct:

A federal judge on Tuesday night declined California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s request for an immediate temporary restraining order to restrict President Donald Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops and U.S. Marines to quell ongoing anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) riots in Los Angeles.

U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer, an appointee of former President Bill Clinton, declined to intervene by 1 p.m. PDT on Tuesday and instead set a hearing to consider California’s motion for a temporary restraining order on Thursday.

What this suggests to me is that although Shideler might have anticipated a change in the left's strategy, they're simply continuing the George Floyd 2020-January-6-post-2021-Trump-lawfare game plan, withut anticipating Trump would find the wherewithal to counter the original George Floyd strategy of 2020. In fact, with a Justice Department now willing to follow through, he's added the strategy of provoking far-left politicians like Rep Lamonica McIver into breaking the law and subjecting themselves to arrest and indictment.

This severely limits the discretion of other leftist opponents like Mayor Bass and Gov Newsom. I suspect that equivalent arrests of national riot organizers, as happened to the SEIU president, will also take the steam out of the movement. For the time being, I'm going to work under the assumption that the left has not in fact revised its strategy for George Floyd-style summer riots, Trump has, and Trump will prevail. The reasons there's been no innovation from the left on this front are worth a separate post.