We're all learning to navigate uncharted territory.
Sunday, June 15, 2025
Not Enough Paid Instigators?
As far as I can tell, the only extended violence anywhere in the country in yesterday's No Kings Day demonstrations was in Los Angeles, where things had been simmering since last weekend. All I can think is that LAPD somehow talked sense into Mayor Bass and convinced her that the way to stop riots, as was finally done in the 1992 Rodney King episode, was to have the media show people being arrested, not just looting stores. Thus photos like the one above, showing people retreating from tear gas, have finally begun to appear, unlike last weekend's shots of rioters waving Mexican flags:
But also, note that the people in the top photo, retreating from tear gas, are young, countercultural, and dressed to storm the barricades. The people at No Kings Day events anywhere else in the country apparenty weren't in this demographic:
Not...really.
From a basic scan of the pics, it's an insanely old, white, female, middle-middle class (not upper or lower or working), neurotic/masked crowd.
"No Kings Day of Defiance," a nationwide series of protests scheduled for Saturday, was planned as a counter to the military parade taking place in Washington, D.C., on the same day. That parade is being held in honor of the U.S. Army's 250th anniversary, which coincides with Mr. Trump's 79th birthday.
"On June 14—Flag Day—President Trump wants tanks in the street and a made-for-TV display of dominance for his birthday," organizers said. "A spectacle meant to look like strength. But real power isn't staged in Washington. It rises up everywhere else."
But it sounds like pretty much all they could come up with was cat ladies and the sort of people who still wear masks in public, although there are plenty of those left. But I'm still scratching my head about basic questions of prudence:
LOS ANGELES: police are using tear gas and crowd control munitions to break up the crowd
Though I identified as press and had my badges / credentials displayed, an officer still shot me with a rubber bullet
Why on earth would anyone deliberately attend an event where there was even the slightest potential for violence? Or even if it was part of your job as a reporter, why would you put yourself into the part of the crowd that was being pushed back or kettled in? But it's also worth stressing that LA was the only place yesterday where anything like this occurred at all. In Philadelphia, the cat ladies calmly marched to the art museum and went home.
The RealClearPolitics average of polls keeps a running comparison between the polling of Trump and former Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush at the same point in their second terms. Right now, Trump’s job approval stands at 46.6%. On this day in 2013, Obama’s job approval rating was…46.6%. And at this moment in 2005, Bush’s approval rating was a touch lower, at 45.6%.
The presidents and the events of their presidencies were entirely different. And yet, in mid-June of the first year of their second term, all were in almost precisely the same place in terms of job approval.
What does it mean? For one thing, it means the efforts to portray Trump as a uniquely dangerous threat to American democracy — to denormalize him — aren’t working.
. . . The premise of such a critique is that Trump is doing outrageous things that Americans should never accept. The problem is that many Americans, in some cases, majorities of Americans, don’t think Trump’s actions are outrageous. They support what he is doing on immigration. They support what he is doing for the economy. They support what he is doing to cut federal spending on wokeism and Left-wing causes. That’s what is keeping Trump’s job approval numbers in the same place as Obama’s and Bush’s.
The No Kings Day planners had weeks to plan things out, and they apparently had megabucks to finance it, but it fizzled. The only spot that remotely resembled the 2020 BLM riots was LA, but the outcome, after what must have been a week of intense behind-the-scenes pressure on Mayor Bass from law enforcment, was photos of dispirited wannabes running from tear gas and a reporter complaining he'd been hit by a rubber bullet even though he had a press pass. Poor baby.
They had all the Walmart fortune behind them and apparently couldn't hire enough paid instigators. On the other hand, I suspect law enforcement had very good intelligence as well.
This meme emerged in the wake of Sen Padilla's stunt at Secretary Noem's press conference Thursday. It's funny in and of itself, but it raises an intriguing point: where's the wave of new riots? Last weekend's Los Angeles riot got started Friday night, but all indications are that things were quiet here in advance of No Kings Day. But here's what legacy media anticipates:
"'No Kings Day' [note the editorial lapse with single vs double quotes] is the largest single-day, peaceful protest in recent American history, made up of millions of normal, everyday Americans who are showing up in more than 2,000 communities around the country to say, 'we don't do kings in America,'" Ezra Levin, the co-executive director of progressive organizing group Indivisible, told ABC News on Thursday.
Indivisible and other organizations involved with the coalition coordinating the protests have said that the protests are meant to protest what they say is overreach by the Trump administration on immigration enforcement and deportations, civil rights and cuts to the federal government.
They've also pointed to how the military parade is being held on Trump's birthday. Trump has denied any connection between the parade's timing and his birthday, pointing to how June 14 is Flag Day.
As I write this, it's late morning on the East Coast, but there isn't much in the news -- but back in 2020, the parties started on Friday night. As I check YouTube, yesterday's spike in interest over the Israel-Iran war seems to have passed, while speculation continues over Thursday's Air India crash. But legacy media headlines focus on No Kings Day: No Kings Day LIVE: Protesters Flood Streets in 50 States Against Trump’s Military Parade in DC; LIVE: No Kings Day protests across America | Trump military parade; No Kings Day: Anti-Trump protests taking place in cities across the US | LIVE.
I'm wondering if the Padilla stunt was part of a scripted plan to inflame public sentiment leading up to No Kings Day, which seems to have every indication of being an astro-turfed event concocted by the Old Media cabal.
"No Kings" day merch for sale on Amazon, Temu and other e-commerce siteshttps://t.co/mJ4GFS0PnO
Commentary on a planned Philadelphia demonstration, said to be one of the biggest, says protestors are expected to gather at LOVE park and march to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Are they gonna attend a Thomas Eakins exhibit, or what? This has all the ingredients of being a real snoozer, but we'll have to see, I guess.
Sen Alex Padilla's attempt to storm Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem at a Los Angeles press conference yesterday goes to my instinct that the Democrats don't have an effective strategy for the Trump deportation policy. Over the week of fading Los Angeles riots, Trump's approval on the issue has risen from 54% as of Monday to 57% as of this morning.
Exactly why Padilla suddenly left Washington Wednesday night -- he was at the annual congressional baseball game but apparently left early -- to turn up at Secretary Noem's press conference yesterday morning in Los Angeles isn't clear.
Who paid for @AlexPadilla4CA’s private air travel to CA today?
How was he in California today if he was at the Congressional baseball game last night?
Padilla left Washington earlier in the week to be in LA during the riots. The senator was supposed to start at first base for the Democrats in the Congressional Baseball Game on Wednesday night.
waiting for a scheduled briefing with federal officials and the head of U.S Northern Command, General Gregory Guillot, when he went to listen to Noem's speech. He explained that he was trying to get information about DHS's immigration enforcement actions around the L.A. area and the state.
At that point, he apparently heard about a press conference being held in the building by Secretary Noem. At the link,
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was in Los Angeles Thursday morning providing an update on immigration operations and protests in the area, when she was interrupted by Democratic Sen. Alex Padilla, who was then forcibly removed from the room.
Noem was describing what she called the "burdensome leadership" of California's governor and the mayor of Los Angeles, when Padilla interrupted and attempted to ask a question before being pushed from the room. He could be heard yelling, "I'm Sen. Alex Padilla and I have questions for the secretary," as he was escorted out of the room.
The full sequence of the episode begins at 7:40 in the video below:
As Secretary Noem is speaking, there's a commotion to the rear and right of the camera, which belatedly swings to catch the scene. Padilla is making muffled shouts as agents -- variously referred to as FBI or Secret Service -- surround him saying, "Sir! Sir!". As he's being hustled out of the room, he identifies himself as Sen Alex Padilla, but only after the agents have responded. Every indication seems to be that Padilla rushed the podium before he identified himself:
White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a statement, “Padilla stormed a press conference, without wearing his Senate pin or previously identifying himself to security, yelled, and lunged toward Secretary Noem.”
The video of the incident does not appear to show Padilla wearing the pin that identifies senators, but it also does not include images of him lunging at Noem. Moreover, he clearly does inform the agents who swarm him that he is a senator. The White House’s argument is that he did not do so early enough in the encounter.
Jackson added, “Padilla didn’t want answers; he wanted attention.”
The official X account of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) also contended that Padilla had “interrupted a live press conference without identifying himself” and had “lunged” at Noem.
The DHS also alleged that Padilla was “told repeatedly to back away and did not comply with officers’ repeated commands.”
This clip from CNN gives a law enforcement analysis of the episode:
Even CNN's legal expert shames @kasie with the facts about @SenAlexPadilla's unhinged actions during the press conference.
"At that point [Padilla] is going to now be escorted out. You can't interrupt something like that that's already in progress without those consequences." pic.twitter.com/bjDlXeC1Gu
There will likely be repercussions in the Senate. Although House Speaker Johnson made clear that he doesn't speak for the Senate, he did say,
I think there needs to be a message sent by the body as a whole that this is not what we are going to do. That's not how we're going to act. We're not going to have branches fighting physically and having senators charging Cabinet secretaries. We have got to do better. And I hope that we will.
Republican Senate Majority Leader John Thune, of South Dakota, said he has spoken to Padilla and is working to "gather all the relevant information" after the Democrat was forcibly removed from Noem's press conference.
Thune said he has also spoken with Senate Sergeant at Arms Jennifer Hemingway, who is in charge of senators' security, and is trying to reach Noem but has not yet spoken with her.
"We want to get the full scope of what happened and do what we would do in any incident like this involving a senator and try to gather all the relevant information," Thune said.
It's hard to avoid thinking that this incident was planned and scripted following the original template of the May 9 confrontation between ICE and Democrat politicians in Newark, NJ. One questipn that I've seen raised is that Padilla had to have worn his Senate pin to be able to enter the Westwood federal building, but apparently removed it before rushing Noem's press conference. This strongly suggests planning, not a spontaneous reaction.
The overall problem I see is that the Newark paradigm hasn't been successful for the Democrats so far; the immigration issue has polled the best of any for Trump, and angry confrontations have so far been self-defeating; Rep Lamonica McIver has been indicted for her role in the Newark confrontation. The planning for the LA episode seems to have been last-minute and desperate.
But it's also likely that Israel's attack on Iran's nuclear facilities has taken this episode out of the headlines.
In yesterday's post, I referred to an interview with Kyle Shideler, who said he was expecting the Democrats opposed to Trump's deportations to game out an effective counter-strategy to his deployment of the National Guard to stop anti-ICE riots. The interview was published this past Monday. but it probably took place earlier -- the upshot is that whatever their strategy may have been when the riots started Friday, it doesn't seem to have changed, and that strategy hasn't been effective.
Trump's strategy, on the other hand, has been to undertake what his cabinet prevented him from doing in 2020 with the George Floyd riots and on January 6, 2021, which was to deploy the National Guard. This in turn appears to have forced Mayor Bass and the LAPD to declare a curfew in downtown Los Angeles and make significant numbers of arrests. The result over the course of the week has been a gradual restoration of calm. As of last night,
Roughly 45 minutes after the curfew took effect, downtown LA appears fairly quiet, a departure from the last few evenings.
There are no signs of Marines or National Guard members.
In fact, the left's plan for this coming weekend appears to be an attempt to nationalize the Los Angeles outbreak, which itself was a more ambitious version of a May 9 protest in Newark, NJ, in which Mayor Ras Baraka was arrested (charges were subsequently dropped) and Rep Lamonica McIver was later indicted for assaulting federal officers. This turned out to be little more than a vehicle for self-promotion on the part of local politicians, while the bad visuals of the LA riot appear only to be putting Mayor Bass and Gov Newsom on the wrong side of public opinion.
Now, first, the messaging and branding here is just totally retarded. No kings? This is almost as bad as TACO, Trump always chickens out. Remember the video where all the congressional representatives on the Democrat side were pretending they were like, fighters in the Street Fighter trailer. or something like that? Everything they do is cringe. And this is just more of it. But where this money is coming from is Christy Walton, the Walmart heiress worth $20 billion.
Entrepreneur and political commentator Patrick Bet-David (PBD) dropped a truth bomb that Democrats and their NGO allies are reportedly planning over 1,500 coordinated protests across all 50 states—a setup, he warns, designed to sabotage President Trump and ignite another wave of nationwide unrest heading into the midterm election.
According to PBD, this isn’t grassroots activism—it’s astroturfed chaos, funded by a shadowy coalition of over 100 progressive organizations, wealthy elites, and Democrat-aligned NGOs, including those reportedly tied to billionaire and Walmart heiress Christy Walton, whose name surfaced in a New York Times exposé on the sprawling protest network.
The administration is fully aware of this plan, it appears that it will implement the strategy of deploying the National Guard where necessary and aggressively prosecuting rioters, while, despite Kyle Shideler's concerns, it looks like the left is simply going to repeat its 2020 strategy, which succeeded only because Trump's cabinet resisted deploying the National Guard at that time.
Why is the left reverting to same old-same old cringe? I think the answer is that when you talk about "a shadowy coalition of over 100 progressive organizations, wealthy elites, and Democrat-aligned NGOs", you're actually talking about Nancy Pelosi. According to Wikipedia,
Early in her political career, Pelosi established herself as a prominent fundraiser in the party. She was one of the party's most prolific fundraisers, transferring significant funds to committees for other candidates.
The secret to her rise was the ability to raise funds from liberal donors and use those funds to control the Democrat party, promoting leftist candidates and privileging leftists in the House. The people who are funding the latest attempt at national riots include Christy Walton, Laurene Powell Jobs, and Alex Soros, all of them billionaire rentiers, and all of them apparently following Pelosi's lead.
Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) claim that President Donald Trump is being hypocritical in calling up the National Guard to back Los Angeles police when he wouldn’t on Jan. 6, 2021, was just ripped by the former chief of the U.S. Capitol Police on the day of the riots.
Steven Sund said that contrary to Pelosi’s claim on Tuesday that Trump “would not do it” when asked for National Guard troops to protect the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, it was the former House speaker who ignored his request for troops.
Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters of California claimed Wednesday President Donald Trump “started” five days of riots in Los Angeles after previously claiming no violence was occurring in the city.
. . . “There had been no violence where anybody that was protesting hit anybody, shot anybody, threatened anybody,” Waters told “The Situation Room” co-hosts Wolf Blitzer and Pamela Brown. “Nothing had happened. And so he doesn’t know what to do, probably, because this is a sanctuary city, and the police don’t have the authority. All that he’s got to do is work with the governor.”
It's pretty plain that there's no new strategy because Pelosi is still in de facto control of the Democrats. This is because she still controls the donors and the donations, which is how she was the decisive voice in getting Joe to withdraw from the 2024 campaign. If the existing strategy is retarded and cringe, it's because every Democrat except Sen Fetterman is terrified of her -- but nobody's sure if Fetterman is quite right anyhow.
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.
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.
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum criticized the ICE raids that catalyzed days-long protests in Los Angeles, saying the city "wouldn't be what it is" without migrants.
"They migrate out of need and send resources to their families from there," the president added. "Mexicans will always have our backing and demand that their human rights be respected. They must know that, should they wish to return to Mexico, we will welcome them with open arms."
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum defended migrants living in Los Angeles, and claimed that at least 35 Mexicans had been detained in the recent raids carried out by immigration officers of the Trump administration.
. . . "Mexicans living in the United States are good men and women, honest people who went to the United States to seek a better life for themselves and to support their families. They are not criminals! They are good men and women!" Sheinbaum was quoted as saying in a speech.
Mexico’s lackluster economic performance has been the subject of much study, including by economists Gordon H. Hanson and, more recently, Santiago Levy. Factors holding back productivity growth include poorly functioning credit markets that limit borrowing; extensive monopolies in certain industries that limit competition and drive up costs; and a large informal sector that reduces tax revenue and limits firm size.
An informal economy is made up of mostly small businesses that are not taxed or regulated, with workers who lack benefits such as health care and pensions. Because informal firms are off the books, they typically cannot borrow from banks. In Mexico, the informal sector accounts for a staggering 24 percent of GDP and 55 percent of employment.
Approximately 12.3 million Mexicans live abroad, both legally and illegally, with 97% of them living and working in the United States, according to BBVA Research. Last year Mexicans living abroad sent $64.75 billion back home in remittances, largely from Texas and California to states in central and western Mexico.
According to data recently released, in April of this year remittances back to Mexico dropped 12.1%. The Mexico central bank said April saw 8.1% fewer transactions than a year earlier, that’s down to 12.4 million transactions. For Mexico this is a devastating outcome.
How dependent is the Mexican Govt on these remittances? Remittances sent home by Mexicans working outside the country surpassed petroleum revenues in 2015. Oil Revenue in 2015 was 23.4 billion; remittances were $24.8 billion. Last year in 2024 remittances were $64.75 billion…. and in April of this year the remittances dropped by 12.1%.
If you don’t think there is a critical financial motive in this, think again.
In just under two weeks, the House of Representatives introduced, modified and passed the One Big, Beautiful Bill of 2025 (the “House Tax Bill”). This Memorandum addresses a new proposed tax on certain persons sending money outside the United States (the “Remittance Proposal”).
. . . The Remittance Proposal, if enacted, would generally require certain senders to pay an excise tax equal to 3.5% on electronic transfers of funds to recipients outside of the United States.
. . . Remittance transfer providers would be required to collect this amount and deposit it with the Internal Revenue Service (“IRS”) on a quarterly basis. Remittance transfer providers would have secondary liability for the failure to collect this amount.
Verified U.S. citizens and nationals who send remittances via qualified remittance transfer providers would not be subject to this tax. For this purpose, a “qualified remittance transfer provider” means a remittance transfer provider that enters into a written agreement with the IRS, under which the provider agrees to verify the status of senders as U.S. citizens or nationals.
This would provide additional discouragement to illegal migration, as well as providing a way to cover expenses illegal migration cause to the US. But in discouraging migration to the US generally, Trump's policies eliminate the safety valve migration gives the Mexican government: if it's harder for Mexicans to leave, that increases pressure for economic reform. The "informal economy", after all, includes employment with drug cartels. Controlling the cartels would put more pressure on the government to expand formal-sector job opportunities.
Mexico's problem in providing economic opportunity to its own citizens also complicates the issue of anti-ICE protesters waving Mexican flags. What's so good about Mexico if so many Mexicans have to emigrate to survive? In addition,
"These idiots waiving Mexican flags during the LA riots just gave Donald Trump the greatest political gift," Republican strategist Matt Wylie, who founded Freedom Project USA, told Newsweek. "It will be 'Exhibit A' as proof of an invasion. Those images have done more in the last few days to strengthen his ability to crackdown on illegal immigration than weeks of messaging ever could."
Like many politicians on the US side, President Sheinbaum is playing local Mexican politics in front of a national US audience, but she's also ignoring the issue that if Mexico had serious internal reform, the problems on both sides of the border would begin to disappear.
California Gov Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Bass are playing local politics in front of a national audience. And this is something Trump has planned and anticipated:
When racial justice protests roiled cities across America at the depths of the pandemic, President Trump, then in his first term, demonstrated restraint. Threats to invoke the Insurrection Act and to federalize the National Guard never materialized.
This time, it took less than 24 hours of isolated protests in Los Angeles County for Trump, more aggressive than ever in his use of executive power, to issue a historic order.
“The federal government will step in and solve the problem,” he said on social media Saturday night, issuing executive action not seen since civil unrest gripped the nation in the 1960s.
. . . Local officials were clear that they did not want, or need, federal assistance. And they are concerned that Trump’s heavy-handed response risks escalating what was a series of isolated, heated clashes consisting of a few hundred people into a larger law enforcement challenge that could roil the city.
"We tried to talk to the administration and tell them that there was absolutely no need to have troops on the ground here in Los Angeles — the protests that happened last night in L.A. were relatively minor, about 100 protesters," Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said. "So this is unnecessary."
Leaked reports have surfaced, revealing that Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass ordered the LAPD to stand down during riots, overriding emergency protocols and blocking police from assisting federal officers. The allegations suggest that Bass ignored calls for reinforcements, preventing the LAPD’s Incident Commander from deploying aid to overwhelmed federal agents.
The reports detail a direct intervention by Bass, bypassing established emergency response procedures. Instead of allowing law enforcement to act, she allegedly called the Incident Commander for a briefing, then instructed the Chief of Police on how to proceed, effectively taking control of operations. This move violated the City’s Emergency Operations Plan and National Incident Management System protocols, disrupting the chain of command.
Federal officers were left without critical support. The Department of Homeland Security and FBI reportedly requested LAPD assistance as riots escalated, but the police force remained idle, waiting for direction. The delay put federal personnel at risk, forcing them to handle violent unrest without backup.
“It’s an interesting question because I would have said that … we could handle this. I believe that we would have gone through a number of steps before we’d have deployed the National Guard or requested deployment of the National Guard,” McDonnell said. “We would normally go to 50 percent deployment to handle radio calls and do the business of policing, and everybody else would be focused on the initial problem. Beyond that, then we would request, through the sheriff, mutual aid, and that would bring in members of the 44 other police departments in LA County, as well as the sheriff’s office.”
When asked again if the National Guard was needed, McDonnell said the riots have “gotten out of control” and noted that “looking at the violence tonight,” he thought his department may need to “make a reassessment.”
The problem seems to be that Mayor Bass appears to have ordered the LAPD not to undertake those preliminary steps, giving Trump no choice but to order the National Guard in himself. I've looked at Trump's negotiating strategy before, citing a business-school analysis of his strengths:
Trump’s orientation is distinctly more coercive: “Learn your adversary’s strengths and weaknesses: Find out who your adversaries are, what resources they have, who is backing them, how much they want, why they want it, how much they will settle for, and how much they will pay or insist on receiving”. Trump does not empathize with his opponents; he sizes them up.
As much as Trump watches others, he is aware of being watched: “life is a performance art,” he wrote Think Like a Champion. “Understand that as a performer, you have a responsibility to your audience to perform to the best of your ability”. Indeed, as he walked down the stairs of the U.S. Capitol on Inauguration Day, January 20, 2017, President‐elect Trump paused to look directly into the camera, prompting television commentator George Stephanopoulos to exclaim: “He smiles for the camera! He is always aware … [that] the cameras are every step of the way”.
Trump has thought this through. The Newark confrontation a couple of weeks ago with Mayor Baraka and Rep LaMonica McIver set the paradigm: get politicians playing to a local audience to push the limits protesting ICE enforcement actions, and play to the national audience in defending ICE and, if necessary, take a very public national role in defending the enforcement. He understood that, just like Mayor Baraka and Rep McIver, Gov Newsom and Mayor Bass would be at best passive-aggressive in resisting ICE enforcement in LA, setting the stage for his ordering the National Guard in. The California politicians acted predictably:
Democratic California Rep. Maxine Waters on Sunday strongly rebuked the president's decision to deploy the National Guard, calling the situation "outrageous" and "horrible" and adding that she believes Mr. Trump is using L.A., a sanctuary city, as an example.
"He's using deportation as a way to enhance his position with all those right-wingers out there who do not want this country to be a country of people coming from other places," the Democrat told a reporter outside the Metropolitan Detention Center. "I think he's up to creating martial law."
The National Guard deployment clearly risks politicizing the military. But it’s a political no-brainer for the White House.
Images of troops in combat gear, and the administration’s vows to enforce order if local leaders won’t, boost Trump’s tough-guy image, which is an important factor in his appeal to his supporters. It bolsters Republican claims of fecklessness in liberal-run cities that have been plagued by homelessness and crime.
By sending troops in over Newsom’s head, Trump escalates his feud with the governor, who is one of the most prominent national Democrats at a time when Trump is threatening to pull federal funding to the state. This may also serve as a warning to other blue states that they could see the militarization of the deportation program if they don’t cooperate.
Rasmussen put up a post on X saying that overnight polling as of Sunday had Trump's approval at 54.49%.
UPDATE: Chris Cilizza, formerly of the Washington Post and CNN but now claims to be "independent", agrees with this view 100%:
