Trump vs Chatsworth Osborne, Jr

From one of the last Rush Limbaugh shows:

RUSH: Do you know who Chatsworth Osborne, Jr. was?

CALLER: No, I don’t.

RUSH: Do you ever remember watching a television show — how old are you?

CALLER: Sixty. I didn’t watch much TV, though.

RUSH: Okay. Well, there was a very, very popular TV show in the 1960s called Dobie Gillis.

CALLER: Okay. I never saw that. That’s why.

RUSH: It was a college kids’ program. Dobie Gillis was a college student, and his buddies were college kids. It was kind of like a college kid version of Leave It To Beaver. And one of the characters was this uppity, elitist, snobbish, know-nothing character named Chatsworth Osborne, Jr. You know, who would name a kid Chatsworth? It’s obviously somebody’s last name. Chatsworth Osborne, Jr. So the kid was a preppie. And it’s a very affectionate nickname that I have developed for Tucker Carlson. I haven’t used it in a long time. But that is the source of it. You should YouTube Dobie Gillis and you’ll see the character.

Wikipedia has an extensive biography that definitely reinforces the idea that Tucker is a preppie.

When Carlson was in first grade, his father moved Tucker and his brother to the La Jolla neighborhood of San Diego, California, and raised them there. Carlson attended La Jolla Country Day School and grew up in a home overlooking the La Jolla Beach and Tennis Club. His father owned property in Nevada and Vermont, and islands in Maine and Nova Scotia.

. . . In 1979, Carlson's father married Patricia Caroline Swanson, an heiress to Swanson Enterprises, daughter of Gilbert Carl Swanson and niece of Senator J. William Fulbright. Though Patricia remained a beneficiary of the family fortune, the Swansons had sold the brand to the Campbell Soup Company in 1955 and did not own it by the time of Carlson's father's marriage. This was the third marriage for Swanson, who legally adopted Tucker Carlson and his brother.

. . . Carlson was briefly enrolled at Collège du Léman, a boarding school in the Canton of Geneva in French-speaking Switzerland, but said he was "kicked out". He attained his secondary education at St. George's School, a boarding school in Middletown, Rhode Island, where he started dating his future wife, Susan Andrews, the headmaster's daughter. He then spent four years attending Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut and graduated in 1991 with a B.A. in history.

Trinity is upper-upper Episcopalian, but it isn't an Ivy. It's a little puzzling to me that Tucker didn't get into an Ivy; with a wealthy family background and a prep school graduate, his chances of getting into an Ivy -- maybe not Harvard, but certainly Brown or Penn -- should have been quite good. (Trinity was one of my safety schools.) But there's another problem:

After college, Carlson tried to join the Central Intelligence Agency, but his application was denied, after which he decided to pursue a career in journalism with the encouragement of his father, who advised him that "they'll take anybody".

Again, with high social standing, a prep achool background, and at least a Trinity degree, he should have been a prime candidate for the CIA, but something was off. Look at his dad's resume, which included director of Voice of America, president of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the U.S. ambassador to the Seychelles. Dad Carlson hired and fired journalists. Instead, Tucker has worked for a whole series of networks, all of which fired him, most recently Fox. Somehow I suspect his dad knew something when he said, "they'll take anybody".

So yesterday,

Tucker Carlson sounded the alarm about the looming danger of a U.S. war with Iran under President Donald Trump’s leadership, warning that such a move would not only devastate America’s global standing but end Trump’s presidency outright.

During an interview with Steve Bannon, Carlson laid bare the stakes, accusing globalist elites and war-hungry neocons of pushing America toward a disastrous conflict that could “scuttle” the nation on the “shores of Iran.”

“I actually really love Trump. I think he’s a deeply humane, kind person,” Carlson said.

“I’m saying this because I’m really afraid that my country is going to be further weakened by this. I think we’re going to see the end of the American Empire, obviously. Other nations would like to see that, and this is a perfect way to scuttle the U.S. on the shores of Iran. But it’s also going to end, I believe, Trump’s presidency—effectively end it. And so that’s why I’m saying this.”

Trump replied later in the day,

“I don’t know what Tucker Carlson is saying. Let him go get a television network and say it so that people listen,” Trump told reporters when asked about Carlson’s comments during a meeting with the British prime minister at the Group of Seven summit.

. . . The former Fox News host’s opposition to U.S. involvement in any conflict in the Middle East underscores a looming divide among parts of Trump’s base over how to proceed toward Iran.

Limbaugh has had other pertinent things to say that apply to the current situation:

Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh on Sunday criticized the media, saying members of the press will fail to destroy President Trump.

“The media did not make Donald Trump and they can’t destroy him,” Limbaugh said on “Fox News Sunday.”

. . . ”It’s not going to work on Trump. He doesn’t fit that mold. They’re trying to every day. It’s kind of comical to watch.

. . . “Trump has a connection with his voters that most politicians don’t have…and that connection that he has is not anything that anybody else can break. Only he can break it.”

Tucker's problem is that he isn't even that good at media.

"He’s Pulling The Trigger On Everything All At Once"

The quote above is from Dana Williamson, Gavin Newsom's former chief of staff, referring to Trump in an article in Politico from Saturday. The piece refers to California:

Between the deployment of federal agents to Los Angeles, the gutting of climate standards and the manhandling of the state’s senior U.S. senator, the state absorbed one show of force after another from the president. And in the balance of power between the Trump administration and the nation’s most populous state, California was on the losing end.

But it looks like California is just one piece of the story:

The United States is shifting military resources, including ships, in the Middle East in response to Israel’s strikes on Iran and a possible retaliatory attack by Tehran, two U.S. officials said Friday.

. . . President Donald Trump is meeting with his National Security Council principals Friday to discuss the situation. The U.S. officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to provide details not yet made public.

. . . The Navy has additional assets that it could surge to the Middle East if needed, particularly its aircraft carriers and the warships that sail with them. The aircraft carrier Carl Vinson is in the Arabian Sea — the only aircraft carrier in the region.

Via Real Clear Politics:

In a matter of days, Israel’s pre-emptive strikes have shattered Iran’s defensive shield. Iran’s air defence systems were swiftly eliminated, opening the skies to unimpeded Israeli air power. Simultaneously, precision strikes and covert operations decapitated key nodes of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) command, missile bases, nuclear facilities, and other military targets; too many to list here.

. . . One looming issue remains unresolved: the Fordow uranium enrichment complex. Fordow is Iran’s most challenging nuclear site, buried half a mile deep under a mountain, and it has survived the initial onslaught intact. As long as Fordow remains operational, Iran’s regime keeps a dangerous ace up its sleeve. The facility houses advanced centrifuges enriching uranium to near-weapons-grade levels and could potentially expedite a crash nuclear weapons effort if the leadership feels cornered. In Israeli eyes, allowing Fordow to remain unscathed would be a grave mistake.

As of yesterday afternoon:

A massive explosion can be seen in the distance along the Tehran-Qom road, coinciding with reports of an earthquake in Qom, near the Fordow nuclear facility. pic.twitter.com/RcGTQzKXKV

— Ariel Oseran أريئل أوسيران (@ariel_oseran) June 15, 2025

Reuters has confirmed that the US military redeployed a large number of aerial refueling tankers to Europe to provide “options” to President Trump amid the ongoing Israel-Iran conflict. https://t.co/FVJjQLzt7x

— OSINTtechnical (@Osinttechnical) June 16, 2025

From Eli Lake at The Free Press:

As I reported earlier this year, even before Trump’s second presidency began, the restrainers inside the MAGA movement had hoped to create an America First foreign policy that pares down America’s global military footprint. On the other side, a mix of pro-Israel evangelicals, Jews, and the remnants of GOP hawks have sought to keep America engaged in the world.

. . . One reason for the public spats between various Trump allies is that the inner circle deliberating on Iran policy is very small and has been fairly tight-lipped, according to administration officials who spoke on condition of anonymity. The inner circle consists of Trump himself, along with his chief of staff, Susie Wiles; his chief negotiator, Steve Witkoff; Secretary of State Marco Rubio; Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth; CIA director John Ratcliffe; and Vice President J.D. Vance.

. . . the president said nothing in the first eight hours of the hostilities. The only official statement from the administration was a chilly one from Secretary of State Marco Rubio, emphasizing that Israel was acting unilaterally. But at 5:56 a.m. on Friday morning, Trump weighed in on Israel’s side. “I gave Iran chance after chance to make a deal,” he posted on Truth Social. “But no matter how hard they tried, no matter how close they got, they just couldn’t get it done.” That was not an accident, one administration official told me. “Trump was waiting to see if the Israeli mission was a success before he weighed in on it.”

. . . Ultimately, the fortunes of the Trump administration’s restrainers and hawks depend above all else on factors out of their control: the performance of the Israel Defense Forces and the decision of Iran’s supreme leader. Three days into the war, the anxious predictions of the restrainers have not come to pass.

But meanwhile, Trump is off to Canada for the G7:

[A]s the G7 kicks off it is very interesting to notice who shows up on President Trump’s G7 schedule in Canada – that has absolutely no bearing on the G7 meeting in Canada.

According to the schedule, President Trump has meetings with both Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum.

Neither Mexico or Ukraine are in the G7 (Italy, Germany, France, USA, Canada, Japan, U.K).

. . . Obviously Zelenskyy is traveling to Canada at the behest of the global intelligence network because they are afraid President Trump may no longer keep Zelenskyy at the center of the foreign policy universe.

. . . President Trump’s rapid deportation program is making it very difficult for Mexicans in the USA to send money back to Mexico. This is quickly becoming an urgent matter for Mexican officials who will be forced to intervene in support of the local Mexican economy if President Trump keeps impeding the accumulation of illegal wages in the USA.

I'm not sure if we've seen anything like this level of activity from any administration, ever.

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.

The people at the Army's birthday parade....looked like America. https://t.co/uPglJp7po0

— Wilfred Reilly (@wil_da_beast630) June 15, 2025

A lot of commentators have noted that the No Kings Day organizers had weeks to prepare for the event, even before last weekend's LA riots and Sen Padilla's stunt:

"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

Another shot a tear gas can at me. They are targeting press pic.twitter.com/Y2gWVX4WhK

— E (@ElijahSchaffer) June 15, 2025

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.

Byron York makes a related point in the Washington Examiner:

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.

Jorge Floyd!

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

— CBS News (@CBSNews) June 14, 2025

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.

Doing The Same Thing Over And Over

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?

It’s pretty obvious he took a Private Jet.

Who paid for it? Whose plane? https://t.co/160Cb4Afus

— Laura Loomer (@LauraLoomer) June 12, 2025

According to the New York Post,

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.

It does sound like this was an abrupt change of plan. The semi-official story appears to be that Padilla was in the Westwood federal building in LA

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

— Steven Cheung (@StevenCheung47) June 12, 2025

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.

On the Senate side,

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.

Why Don't The Democrats Have A Smarter Strategy?

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.

Mark Mitchell of Rasmussen Reports suggests that the plans for "No Kings Day" this coming Saturday are more of the same:

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.

In fact, there's a consensus that demonstrations that may hopefully metastasize into BLM-style riots are funded by a wide coalition of leftist donors:

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.

Pelosi seems to have slowed down since her broken hip last December, and she's only recently taken the public stage over the anti-ICE riots, only to make the counterfactual claim that Trump denied her request to send the National Guard on January 6, 2021:

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.

But over the LA riots, she's allowed Rep Maxine Waters to take the lead:

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.

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.