Donald Trump’s heavy-handed quest to punish liberal California as LA riots tackled by police, national guard
Donald Trump sees California as the dysfunctional child of liberal America and his ordering of 2000 national guard troops onto the streets of Los Angeles is the latest chapter in his escalating war against the state.
But the street protests in LA which prompted Trump’s actions may not be a one-off and could easily spread to other US states. Behind the angry protests and the subsequent over-reaction by Trump lies a growing tension over immigration policy as Trump steps up his election promise to deport one million illegal migrants a year.
Trump has a mandate to pursue this policy and he has never wavered from it, but the protests in LA were sparked by a switch to more aggressive tactics by immigration agents which saw them raid workplaces in their search for illegals.
Until now immigration raids have focused on gang members and others accused of crimes – a hugely popular target. But this new approach targets ordinary people – mums, dads and sons and daughters of immigrants – who might have arrived illegally but who are now living normal lives in the US working and paying taxes.
As such, Trump is getting pushback, not just from these people and their families, but from employers who need their labour at a time of high employment.
The new tougher tactics are driven by the fact that Trump’s deportations have fallen below the ambitious targets he set on the campaign trail and he fears he will not achieve them without more aggressive action.
But illegal immigration in the US is a fiendishly complicated matrix because there have traditionally been so many illegal immigrants in the US that the economy and the workforce have come to rely on these workers, mostly to do jobs that most Americans don’t want to do.
The irony of this controversy is that Trump’s promised crackdown on illegal immigration across the Mexican border has been his most successful achievement as president, with numbers flowing to a trickle since he took office compared with the disastrous first three years of the Biden administration.
Trump’s attempts to deport gang members and criminals is also popular. But sending his immigration agents directly into workplaces to haul people out and put them on planes is a step too far for some and was always going to inflame community tensions.
Trump, in a very Trumpian way, has overreacted to what are still relatively small-scale isolated protests in LA by being the first president since 1965 to send national guard troops to keep order in a state without the approval of the state governor.
Trump claims that LA is being “invaded and occupied” by “violent, insurrectionist mobs are swarming and attacking our Federal Agents to try and stop our deportation operations”.
California governor Gavin Newsom, whom Trump labels “Newscum’’, is on the money by stating that Trump’s action appears “intentionally designed to inflame the situation”.
For Trump the situation is a win-win politically. Although his deployment of the National Guard will be abhorred by his opponents, it will be seen by many of his MAGA faithful as being tough on illegal immigration in a city and a state despised by conservatives, no-one more so than Trump.
Trump has targeted staunchly Democratic California as the ugly product of liberal polices, citing its high levels of homelessness, drug problems, housing shortages and other social problems.
He has rich pickings to choose from because California has suffered from chronic mismanagement, with people leaving the state due to high taxes, safety fears and frustration with laws that fail to solve the homeless crisis.
But Trump has also made California his own punching bag, not least because it is the home state of his former presidential opponent Kamala Harris.
Trump’s claims about California often veer into the absurd. He has previously claimed the state has so little water that even rich people in Beverly Hills can’t take proper showers. He has said crime is so rampant that there is no solution except to shoot criminals on sight and he says illegal immigrants are offered pension funds and mansions and are allowed to vote repeatedly.
“The world is being dumped into California,” Trump has said. “Prisoners. Terrorists. Mental patients.”
So the decision to send the National Guard into his most hated state was probably not much of a stretch for the president. But the complex policy tensions which underpin these protests will last much longer than these street clashes.
More Coverage
Pick and flick: why did Slater stick with DCE in the first place?
It’s official: Queensland’s pick-and-stick philosophy is dead. Long live the pick-and-flick. Another loss and the QRL board might be pondering giving the coach the same treatment.
Commodore Thunberg sails through the looking glass
Greta Thunberg’s sail from Sicily to nowhere was never about better outcomes for Gazans. It was merely the shameless pursuit of celebrity, designed to prove her western enemies – on this occasion Israelis – were seen as the bad guys.