Trump's war on Los Angeles

Axios - 47% of U.S. adults disapprove of of deploying the Marines to LA, with 34% approval.  45% disapprove the National Guard deployment, while 38% said they approve.

 The Coop Scoop- Trump’s violent ICE agency is about to escalate its war against any or all “illegals” in a dramatic fashion while engaging local law enforcement in its repression. And this should come as no surprise to us. Every authoritarian regime in recent history has formed its own elite corps of feared special police and/or military units to suppress dissent and act as the spearhead of state repression.

The Revolutionary Guard and the Morality Police in Iran. The GRU and the Spetsnaz in Russia. Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard. The GOPE in Mexico. DINA in Chile. The AAA and the Federal Police during the Argentine dictatorship were inseparable from the horrific death squads. And, of course, the SS in Nazi Germany.

All these elite special forces had or have one thing in common – though they were created as relatively small special elites under the command of the central state, they eventually and progressively grew to influence and even dominate the broader, more common local law enforcement units.

The SS is the most singular example of this. Originally a small corps described as Hitler’s bodyguards, the black-uniformed agents came to control all law enforcement in Germany and even expanded into fully formed fighting units inside the German Army.

No, I am not about to declare that Donald Trump’s ICE are the new SS – not yet. But its heavily armed unaccountable tactical units are unquestionably starting down this same path and are becoming Trump’s special hammer in his domestic repression campaign.

 Washington Post -    The U.S. military deployments that President Donald Trump has directed in response to unrest in Los Angeles are expected to cost $134 million for 60 days of operations, a senior defense official said at a hearing Tuesday.

NY Times - “To the extent that protests or acts of violence directly inhibit the execution of the laws, they constitute a form of rebellion against the authority of the government of the United States,” Mr. Trump wrote in an executive order, which is not a law but rather a memo to the executive branch. Yet the closest this nation has come to such a definition of rebellion was when Mr. Trump’s own supporters (whom he incited, then mostly pardoned) sacked the U.S. Capitol in 2021.

Past presidents, from both parties, have rarely deployed troops inside the United States because they worried about using the military domestically and because the legal foundations for doing so are unclear. Congress should turn its attention to such deliberations promptly. If presidents hesitate before using the military to assist in recovery after natural disasters but feel free to send in soldiers after a few cars are set on fire, the law is alarmingly vague.

Some legal experts note that Mr. Trump’s order goes even further. He “has also authorized deployment of troops anywhere in the country where protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement are occurring or are likely to occur, even if they are entirely peaceful,” Liza Goitein, the senior director at the liberty and national security program at the Brennan Center for Justice, said in a social post. “That is unprecedented and a clear abuse of the law.”

NPR - Federal law generally prohibits active-duty military forces from participating in domestic law enforcement unless the president invokes the Insurrection Act, NPR’s Adrian Florido tells Up First. Trump has not yet invoked this act, but he has suggested he might. Newsom has filed a lawsuit challenging the president’s decision to take control of the state National Guard without his authorization. The governor also plans to sue regarding the deployment of Marines. Recently, Trump endorsed the idea of arresting Newsom, which is an extraordinary statement to make about a sitting governor, Florido says.  

 Zeeshan Aleem, MSNBC - President Donald Trump is trying to justify his decision to unleash National Guard troops on protesters in the Los Angeles area this weekend by describing them as violent “insurrectionists” hell-bent on destroying the city. It’s a dishonest claim meant to delegitimize protest — and it foreshadows a more sinister power grab.

Trump preposterously claims that he saved L.A. from being “completely obliterated,” when in reality he has only increased tensions between protesters and the police and made the clashes more high-profile.

And Trump’s attempts to describe the protesters as mounting a violent effort to overthrow the government ring hollow as the protests broadly are clearly dissenting against Trump’s mass deportation campaign. More

Hartmann Report - Marines who are trained in killing people. Quickly, efficiently, ruthlessly. Not crowd control, not defending the Constitutional right to protest, not arresting and Mirandizing: just shedding blood. Blowing things up and killing people is what this most lethal fighting force in the world does so well. And Trump just sent them into our civilian streets.

At the same time, Donald Trump is presiding over the most openly corrupt regime in the history of this country.

He’s looting the treasury in broad daylight, giving away a $4 trillion tax cut to his billionaire donors and golf buddies, repealing clean air and water protections while wildfires torch the West and hurricanes batter the South, and inviting domestic terrorists into the halls of power. His family and cronies are raking in billions from foreign governments — from Saudi royals to Russian oligarchs to Chinese front companies — with not even a fig leaf of legality.

Meanwhile, he’s gutted the FBI’s domestic terrorism unit, turned DHS into a political police force, and is laying off scientists from NOAA and NASA because they keep insisting that the Earth is, in fact, burning from the poisons his fossil fuel billionaire friends sell.