Señor TACO’s Counter-Revolution Is Failing— And Getting More Dangerous

The Deployment Of Marines to L.A. Isn’t About Law And Order— It’s A Desperate Provocation By A Flailing Regime 

ROTFLMAO-- convicted felon salutes

Musk, probably down from a ketamine high, tweeted a white flag yesterday. Trump has immense power over Musk’s businesses and he has threatened to use it. Soon that promised $100 million check will be flowing to MAGA, Inc, Trump’s shady SuperPAC. He’s a strongman in Musk’s world— but less so in Jamelle Bouie’s, who makes the case that Trump is more of a weak man, one who “thinks it is a sign of strength to send in troops to deal with protesters in Los Angeles. To that end, he has federalized a portion of the California National Guard and mobilized nearby Marines to support Immigration and Customs Enforcement as it confronts large protests in opposition to its efforts to arrest and deport undocumented immigrant laborers in the city. Trump wanted to do something like this in his first term, during the summer that sealed his fate as a failed first-term president. But Mark Esper, his secretary of defense, refused. The protests in Los Angeles are not nearly as large as those that consumed the country in 2020, but Trump wants a redo, and Pete Hegseth, Esper’s more sycophantic successor, is just as eager to unleash the coercive force of the United States government on the president’s political opponents as Trump is. You can almost feel, emanating from the White House, a libidinal desire to do violence to protesters, as if that will, in one fell swoop, consolidate the Trump administration into a Trump regime, empowered to rule America both by force and the fear of force.”

The problem for Trump, however, is that this immediate, and potentially unlawful, recourse to military force isn’t a show of strength; it’s a demonstration of weakness. It highlights the administration’s compromised political position and throws the overall weakness of its policy program into relief. Yes, a certain type of mind might see the president’s willingness to cross into outright despotism as evidence of brash confidence, of a White House that wants to fight it out on the streets with its most vocal opponents because it thinks it will win the war for the hearts and minds of the American people.

But strong, confident regimes are largely not in the habit of meeting protests with military force, nor do they escalate at the drop of the hat. The Trump administration seems to have exactly one tool at its disposal— blunt force— and it’s clear that it has no plan for what happens when Americans do not fear being hit.

…Why California? Well, Democrat-led cities in Democrat-led states have been a target of Trump’s since his first term. And given the extent to which Trump seems to inhabit a world in which the 1990s never ended, it is also possible that he wants his own crack at handling an event like the 1992 Los Angeles riots.

(Here it should be said that in 1990, Trump praised the Chinese government for its handling of the protests at Tiananmen Square in 1989: “When the students poured into Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government almost blew it. Then they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength. That shows you the power of strength.”)

In any case, the administration’s crackdown on day laborers in the city sparked a predictable response from the community, which immediately rallied to their defense. Initially hundreds but soon thousands of residents went to the streets in what have been mostly peaceful protests, despite the police use of tear gas, flash-bang grenades, rubber bullets and other so-called less lethal armaments. But there has been property damage in the form of burned-out cars and broken windows. And this damage, along with a few instances of looting, is the president’s pretext for a military crackdown.

“A once great American City, Los Angeles, has been invaded and occupied by Illegal Aliens and Criminals,” Trump declared on Truth Social:

Now violent, insurrectionist mobs are swarming and attacking our Federal Agents to try and stop our deportation operations — But these lawless riots only strengthen our resolve. I am directing Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, and Attorney General Pam Bondi, in coordination with all other relevant Departments and Agencies, to take all such action necessary to liberate Los Angeles from the Migrant Invasion, and put an end to these Migrant riots.

On Saturday, the president mobilized 2,000 National Guard troops. On Monday, he deployed 700 Marines and 2,000 additional guardsmen. Notably, Trump has not invoked the Insurrection Act. Instead, his directive cites a provision within Title 10 of the U.S. Code on Armed Services, 10 U.S.C. 12406,  which allows federal deployment of National Guard forces if “the United States, or any of the Commonwealths or possessions, is invaded or is in danger of invasion by a foreign nation” or if “there is a rebellion or danger of a rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States” or if “the president is unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States.”

Except there is no invasion nor is there a rebellion nor is the president unable to execute the laws. The other major complication is that 10 U.S.C. 12406 does not authorize any particular activity— it simply outlines conditions for bringing the National Guard under federal control.

If the president had also invoked the Insurrection Act, he could use the Guard to do ordinary law enforcement on behalf of the federal government. As it stands, it’s not clear that the Guard, once called out, can legally do anything. As for the Marines, the president has no authority under 10 U.S.C. 12406 to deploy them for law enforcement purposes, and the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act specifically forbids the federal government from using Marines, or any other regular defense force, to enforce domestic law.

In short, there is a strong chance that the president’s use of military force to stop protesters is an unlawful and unconstitutional expansion of presidential authority over the states. It is, however, in keeping with Trump’s monarchical vision of his authority. And it is striking that there are laws on the books that, in essence, extend the power of a king to the president. As Evan Bernick, an associate professor of law at the Northern Illinois University College of Law, told me over email, “This administration is excavating statutes that have no business being on the books in their current form at all. It’s abusing them, sure, but they should not exist to be abused.”

… What Trump is doing is sending in the military to trample on the right to free expression. It is a rejection of fundamental American values and represents the exact kind of despotism this country was founded to resist. And this is just the beginning. In an Oval Office news conference on Tuesday, Trump even suggested that he would use force against any protesters who challenged his scheduled military parade on Saturday. “And if there’s any protests they will be met with very big force,” he said. “This is people that hate our country but they will be met with very heavy force.”

You’ll notice the president said nothing about lawful or unlawful protest, peaceful or violent. To him, any dissent is unacceptable. He does not believe that anyone has a right to challenge him. He is the nation’s boss, and it is our job to obey.

The White House clearly believes its actions are a show of strength, but again, they are not. The immediate recourse to repressive force; the inability to handle even modest opposition to its plans; the threats, bullying and overheated rhetoric— it betrays a sense of brittleness and insecurity.

Power, real power, rests on legitimacy and consent. A regime that has to deploy force at the first sign of dissent is a regime that does not actually believe it can wield power short of coercion and open threats of violence.

It’s not all that hard to imagine a more confident administration that met protests with a firm but accommodating defense of its prerogatives. We understand your opposition to our deportation program but we have to enforce the law. A smarter White House might try to isolate its opponents with a performance of responsible stewardship. Instead, the actual White House may have given its opponents the ammunition they need to persuade the public of their cause.

As it stands, 34 percent of Americans approve of the use of the Marines in Los Angeles, according to a newly released survey by YouGov. Forty-seven percent disapprove and 19 percent say they aren’t sure. This gets to one of the fundamental facts of the political situation, which is that Trump just isn’t that popular. His net approval rating is underwater by eight percentage points, and more Americans say the country is on the wrong track now than at the start of his term

…  Trump won a narrow victory in a close election. He did so on a promise to lower prices and close the United States to foreign criminals. This was less a mandate to remake America than it was a call, from the public, to return the United States to the status quo prepandemic. His refusal to do this and his pursuance of a radical agenda of authoritarian consolidation and state repression instead has led, predictably, to the makings of a backlash.

The White House wants us to think that Los Angeles is an advance, a forward march for its agenda. But there is the strong possibility that it is actually a tactical retreat to safe ground in the face of a poor strategic landscape. It is possible that the public is just not willing to endorse the kind of repression that Americans are more accustomed to seeing in fictional dystopias and foreign dictatorships than in their own country.

A wiser president would try to reverse course. Donald Trump, not so much. He imagines himself a strongman— to back down is to be weak. And he has surrounded himself with allies who don’t just encourage but also relish his worst instincts.

Perhaps Trump will pull out a political victory from all of this. I think it is more likely that he will embarrass himself.

Anne Applebaum takes that weak man thing a step further: This Is What Trump Does When His Revolution Sputters. Señor TACO “is now leading an assault on what some around him call the administrative state, which the rest of us call the U.S. government. This assault is revolutionary in nature. Trump’s henchmen have a set of radical, sometimes competing goals, all of which require fundamental changes in the nature of the American state. The concentration of power in the hands of the president. The replacement of the federal civil service with loyalists. The transfer of resources from the poor to the rich, especially rich insiders with connections to Trump. The removal, to the extent possible, of brown-skinned people from America, and the return to an older American racial hierarchy. Trump and his allies also have revolutionary methods. Elon Musk sent DOGE engineers, some the same age as Mao’s Red Guards, into one government department after the next to capture computers, take data, and fire staff. Trump has launched targeted attacks on institutions that symbolize the power and prestige of the old regime: Harvard, the television networks, the National Institutes of Health. ICE has sent agents in military gear to conduct mass arrests of people who may or may not be undocumented immigrants, but whose arrests will frighten and silence whole communities. Trump’s family and friends have rapidly destroyed a matrix of ethical checks and balances in order to enrich the president and themselves.”

Problem: Applebaum sees reality as the problem their “revolutionary project is now running into… More than 200 times, courts have questioned the legality of Trump’s decisions, including the arbitrary tariffs and the deportations of people without due process. Judges have ordered the administration to rehire people who were illegally fired. DOGE is slowly being revealed as a failure, maybe even a hoax: Not only has it not saved much money, but the damage done by Musk’s engineers might prove even more expensive to fix, once the costs of lawsuits, broken contracts, and the loss of government capacity are calculated. The president’s signature legislation, his budget bill, has met resistance from senior Republicans and Wall Street CEOs who fear that it will destroy the U.S. government’s credibility, and even resistance from Musk himself. Now Trump faces the same choice as his revolutionary predecessors: Give up— or radicalize. Find compromises— or polarize society further. Slow down— or use violence. Like his revolutionary predecessors, Trump has chosen radicalization and polarization, and he is openly seeking to provoke violence. For the moment, the administration’s demonstration of force is mostly performative, a made-for-TV show designed to pit the United States military against protesters in a big Democratic city. The choice of venue for sweeping, indiscriminate raids— Home Depot stores around Los Angeles, and not, say, a golf club in Florida— seems orchestrated to appeal to Trump voters. The deployment of the U.S. military is designed to create frightening images, not to fulfill an actual need. The governor of California did not ask for U.S. troops; the mayor of Los Angeles did not ask for U.S. troops; even the L.A. police made clear that there was no emergency, and that they did not require U.S. troops.”

But this is not the final stage of the revolution. The Marines in Los Angeles may provoke more violence, and that may indeed be the true purpose of their mission; after all, the Marines are primarily trained not to do civilian crowd control, but to kill the enemies of the United States. In an ominous speech at Fort Bragg yesterday, Trump reverted to the dehumanizing rhetoric he used during the election campaign, calling protesters “animals” and “a foreign enemy,” language that seems to give permission to the Marines to kill people. Even if this confrontation ends without violence, the presence of the military in Los Angeles breaks another set of norms and prepares the way for another escalation, another set of emergency decrees, another opportunity to discard the rule of law later on.

The logic of revolution often traps revolutionaries: They start out thinking that the task will be swift and easy. The people will support them. Their cause is just. But as their project falters, their vision narrows. At each obstacle, after each catastrophe, the turn to violence becomes that much swifter, the harsh decisions that much easier. If not stopped, by Congress or the courts, the Trump revolution will follow that logic too.

And yet... for all the outrage this should provoke, the most powerful Republicans in Washington are treating it as little more than business as usual. MAGA Mike has nothing to say— other than “tar and feather Newsom”— about troops storming Home Depot parking lots in a major American city. John Thune offers platitudes about law and order but shows no concern about the accelerating breakdown of constitutional norms. And in the marble silence of the Supreme Court, the conservative majority looks on like passive aristocrats watching a fire from their balconies— too enamored with their own power, too implicated in the project, or simply too cowardly to intervene. Or happily agreeing with everything Trump is doing. What Trump is doing is not regular order. It is not a normal policy disagreement. It is a creeping coup, one act of institutional vandalism at a time. And the men and women enabling it will be remembered not as guardians of stability, but as accessories to a historic crime.”

“Regular order” is the comforting fiction that everything in Washington is proceeding according to established norms— that laws are being passed through debate and consensus, that agencies are functioning as intended, that the courts are serving as a check on executive power. But that fiction collapses when the Supreme Court majority starts rewriting the Constitution on Trump’s behalf. Alito, fresh from waving an upside-down flag in his front yard, pens opinions that read like campaign literature for the authoritarian right. Thomas, mired in scandals involving undisclosed gifts and lavish vacations from conservative billionaires, rules as though he's on the payroll of the movement to dismantle the federal government. Together with Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and— at least most of the time— Barrett, who were handpicked by the same dark-money forces now fueling Trump’s second revolution, they have abandoned judicial restraint in favor of ideological warfare. This Court isn't refereeing the game; it's moving the goalposts for the side that wants to end it. And calling that “regular order” is as absurd as calling martial law a traffic stop.

This Saturday you can choose between a dictator-style birthday parade in DC or one of about 1,800 patriotic “No Kings” demonstrations across the country. Tim Dickinson wrote that Señor TACO “is organizing spectacle befitting a tin-pot tyrant, including a procession of tanks, Howitzers, mobile rocket launchers and other war machines rolling through the streets of Washington, D.C., as military aircraft, including Apache helicopters, soar overhead. Protest organizers have billed June 14 as a ‘nationwide day of defiance,’ during which Americans across the country stand up to ‘reject authoritarianism’ and reclaim patriotism in the name of democracy. ‘The flag doesn’t belong to President Trump. It belongs to us,’ the protest website declares. 

Trump has menaced demonstrators planning to show up at his military procession: “If any protester wants to come out, they will be met with very big force,” he said Tuesday. Anticipating such a reaction, protest organizers specifically decided not to target the Trump parade route; there is not even a No Kings event planned in D.C. They envision, instead, demonstrators “showing up everywhere [Trump] isn’t— to say no thrones, no crowns, no kings.”

Turnout at the nationwide demonstrations is expected to surpass the April 5 “Hands Off” protests, which drew more than 3 million protesters to oppose the Trump government, then dominated by Elon Musk, who was imposing draconian cuts on federal services through the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. 

… Now that Trump has ordered troops into the streets of Los Angeles— to crack down on Americans exercising their First Amendment rights by protesting actions by Immigration and Customs Enforcement— the reasons to demonstrate just got a lot more concrete… [Originally, t]he idea was to mass-mobilize Americans of all walks of life— in big cities and small towns and rural communities— as a counter-weight to Trump’s authoritarian ambitions. (Trump’s birthday bash is wildly unpopular; a new poll finds the military parade is opposed by 3 out of 4 Americans, including a majority of Republicans.)

The federal escalation in Southern California is rocket fuel for the protest mission.

…No Kings will be a show of nonviolent resistance, adding that Trump’s ugly show of force— including deploying National Guard troops and Marines in Los Angeles over the governor’s objections— must be met with a combination of mass turnout and immaculate vibes. “When they crack down on peaceful protests, what you need is overwhelmingly large, peaceful protests. That’s the way you respond to the authoritarian playbook… We need non-violence in the streets. The alternative is giving the authoritarian the excuse that he wants to crack down on yet more peaceful protesters outside of L.A.”