“I knew it would come.”
“This won’t end well.”
Those were my initial reactions to President Donald Trump’s announcement that he had activated the California National Guard and to sources on Monday saying Marines would serve as backup. I’m not claiming much prescience. Like his breakup with Elon Musk last week, his deploying the military against protesters could not have been more foreseeable. The only uncertainty was about timing and pretext.
Let me be clear: If you follow the timeline about what happened in Paramount, a community in greater Los Angeles, I don’t think calling in the National Guard (or the Marines)—over the wishes of the governor, Gavin Newsom—was warranted. The last time a president activated the guard without a request from a governor was 1965, when Alabama Gov. George Wallace refused to protect civil rights marchers in his state. Newsom’s objection that the guard’s presence would unnecessarily inflame the situation seems eminently plausible. Newsom is suing the Trump administration for illegally deploying the guard.
I’m skeptical. Trump’s order does not seem unlawful on its face—yet. He has not invoked the Insurrection Act but rather Section 12406 of Title 10 of the U.S. Code, which authorizes the president to deploy the guard to protect federal agents in the course of performing their duties. But it does violate one of the more serious “democratic norms” both parties seem to revere only when the other party is in power. And it’s a norm worth honoring.
One of the reasons it’s worth honoring is that norm violations beget more norm violations. Indeed, that was partly Newsom’s point. The mere announcement of activating the National Guard appeared to arouse even more mayhem, and that in turn makes Trump’s decision more politically advantageous.
And that brings me to why this won’t end well.
Every time a protester burns a car, hurls a rock, or smashes a window, the protester ceases to be a lawful demonstrator and becomes a rioter. And contrary to a lot of left-wing romantic nonsense, rioting is not only wrong and illegal, it’s politically unpopular. Then-Massachusetts Gov. Calvin Coolidge became a national star by calling in the Massachusetts Guard in response to the 1919 Boston police strike, which had ignited riots and looting. In the 1968 election, Richard Nixon used the riots after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination to win the presidency on a promise of restoring law and order.
The fringe left has a long love affair with the “propaganda of the deed,” a stupid concept holding that direct or revolutionary action persuades the masses to align with their cause. In America, it almost never works. But for some reason, too many mainstream progressives get tongue-tied when it comes to condemning their fringe unequivocally.
The political utility of domestic unrest is far more acute and consequential under Donald Trump because he subscribes to his own theory of the propaganda of the deed. Trump has long been enamored of using the military to quash domestic unrest. In a 1990 Playboy interview, he expressed admiration for the Chinese Communist Party’s willingness to display “the power of strength” in crushing the Tiananmen protests. In his first term, he reportedly wanted troops to fire on protesters after the murder of George Floyd. Since the beginning of his second term, his administration has been pushing political, legal, and rhetorical claims that he should be granted wartime powers, most notably on trade and immigration.
I think those claims are largely sinister nonsense as a matter of law, facts, and those pesky democratic norms. And politically, when the headlines are full of stories about families being separated or legal immigrants being arrested for writing college newspaper editorials, the administration is on defense. But when rioters are setting Waymo cabs on fire, the debate is exactly where he wants it. Democrats and many media figures get caught splitting hairs, mouthing pieties about the right to protest, while social media and cable news are flooded with images of violence and destruction.
I see no reason to doubt that there will be enough people willing to give Trump exactly what he wants. And portentously, unlike during his first term, the enablers aren’t just in the streets, they’re in the White House. Various Cabinet secretaries, White House officials and the vice president are all trying to one-up each other with talk of invasion, insurrection, and “liberate Los Angeles.”
I sincerely hope I am wrong, but given the cowardice of Congress and the limitations of the courts, I think this is leading, perhaps inexorably, to a contest of competing theories of the propaganda of the deed. That may or may not end well for Trump but it will certainly end poorly for the United States.
