Trump’s Fascist Invasion Of Home Depots Across Southern California— General Strike Is Needed Now

This Is What The Start Of An Authoritarian Seizure Looks Like

Trump’s MAGA base hates Los Angeles. Project 2025 advocated using military force against American cities. The MAGAts are celebrating what he’s doing here now. Normal Americans aren’t. Gestapo leaders Homan and Miller have troops squaring off against residents in Hispanic-majority neighborhoods like Paramount and Compton as I write this. It makes me sick. They’re using rubber bullets, chemical agents and flash-bang grenades against Angelenos. Miller, ultimately the smirking ghoul behind this policy, says this is just the beginning. He wants thousands of arrests per day— “every kind of criminal thug that you can imagine on planet earth.” That’s how he describes the backbone of California’s working class. That’s how he justifies a national purge— and his strategy. Political strategy. Trump’s people are treating Los Angeles like a dress rehearsal: provoke unrest, declare emergency powers, seize control of local functions of government, and by 2026, even voting. It’s a MAGA version of the Reichstag fire. And if it works— if Señor Trumpanzyy gets the chaos he wants— he’ll use it to suspend elections and as soon as he can, to seize control of blue-state voting and to keep himself and his party in power no matter how many Americans vote them out. Trump isn’t sleepwalking into 2026. He knows the stakes. And now we know the plan. Are we finally ready to treat this like the emergency it is?

The disgusting Señor TACO put this up on his social media platform before his troops had arrived to stoke fear and violence:

Aside from ICE, troops from the Border Patrol, the FBI and the U.S. Marshals Service have been drafted into the assault on L.A.  and Trump called up 2,000 California National Guard troops, “the first time since 1965 that a president has activated a state’s National Guard force without a request from that state’s governor,” wrote Shawn Hubler and Laurel Rosenhall. “The last time was when President Lyndon Johnson sent troops to Alabama to protect civil rights demonstrators in 1965.” Hegseth, likely drunk, offered to mobilize the Marine Corps to attack L.A.. Trump-enabler Kristi Noem, the one who shot her family’s dog a few years ago, now Secretary of Homeland Security  tweeted this ugly threat on Saturday:

Newsom on Trump’s decision to send in troops: “That move is purposefully inflammatory and will only escalate tensions… [T]his is the wrong mission and will erode public trust.” Hubler and Rosenhall noted that “Governors almost always control the deployment of National Guard troops in their states. But the directive signed by Trump cites 10 U.S.C. 12406, referring to a specific provision within Title 10 of the U.S. Code on Armed Services. Part of that provision allows the federal deployment of National Guard forces if ‘there is a rebellion or danger of a rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States.’ It also states that the president may call into federal service ‘members and units of the National Guard of any State in such numbers as he considers necessary to repel the invasion, suppress the rebellion, or execute those laws.’ Trump’s directive said, ‘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.’… Although some demonstrations have been unruly, local authorities in Los Angeles County did not indicate during the day that they needed federal assistance.”

On Saturday, Jonathan Dobrer wrote that “The head of ICE, Tom Homan, hates being accused of leading an American version of the Gestapo. However, if the jackboot fits, he must wear it. Tragically, for our nation, it fits. I’m using the singular because there’s a second major jackbooted thug, Todd Lyons, the acting head of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Homan and Lyons exude the cool bureaucratic dispassionate air of Adolph Eichmann, just carrying out their duties without anger or animus. They’re only doing their jobs and following orders. These are the faces of evil who are treating human beings as mere things, objects and problems to be disposed of— whatever it takes and by any means necessary. These two ruthless and brutal xenophobes are tasked with rounding up and deporting people who are here without papers and whose visas have lapsed or been revoked… They both have assured the American people that they were going after ‘the worst of the worst,’ implying that their focus would be on criminals— serious criminals and not status offenses, parking tickets and broken headlights. They lied.  They are running sweeps to fulfill quotas for arrests and deportations— quotas that were doubled this week despite having no decent place to hold the detained. They are not focusing on the worst of the worst. This week in Los Angeles, they raided the parking lot at a Home Depot where Hispanic men were trying to find work as day laborers. Hardly the worst of the worst.”

We have lost our moral compass and now send militarized forces to sweep our cities, our suburbs and our agricultural areas. Dressed in camo and bullet proof vests, faces covered by ski masks, toting automatic weapons and hurling flashbang grenades at protestors, they are bringing terror to our streets and into our immigrant community.

The terrorized immigrant community is made up of American citizens, Green Card holders, Dreamers and yes, people who have no legal right to be here and some criminals. How should enforcement agents tell the difference? What is the rubric of their triage? The short answer is: skin color. Brown and Black are “probable cause” for DHS and ICE to believe that they shouldn’t be here and can be stopped, interrogated, arrested and deported without any legal process. If they find supporting characteristics like tattoos, then it’s Game Set Match. They must be “bad dudes.”

They don’t believe they have to prove guilt in court or at a hearing, but they can cut to the chase and ship them out to El Salvador, Djibouti, South Sudan, Libya and Rwanda. They don’t believe in the rulings of our courts or the Constitution that they swore “to protect and defend against all enemies foreign and domestic.”

…Flashbang grenades and protestors? This makes sense because the ultimate purpose is to chill our freedom of speech, our freedom of assembly and frighten good people into cowed silence and passive acceptance of the unacceptable. The terror these thugs are spreading is meant for far more than undocumented immigrants. It’s aimed at us. Looking for domestic terrorists? Look at our government and the willing enablers who just follow orders without regard to decency, compassion or our Constitution which they dishonor with every grenade thrown and every baton swung. Convinced they are doing good— as most evil-doers sincerely believe— they perpetrate great violence against our nation, our people and our hopes for a better society.

The purpose of their noisy flashbang grenades is to assure our silence. They must not be successful. We must rise up and be seen, make noise and be heard.

Rhetorically, the L.A. Times asked if Trump understands what it means that his thugs arrested a California union leader. “Unions in California,” wrote Anita Chabria, “are different from those in other places. More than any state in our troubled country, their ranks are filled with people of color and immigrants. While unions have always been tied closely with the struggles of civil rights, that has become even more pronounced in the years since George Floyd was killed by a police officer in Minneapolis. In the subsequent national soul-searching, unions were forced to do a bit of their own. But where that conversation has largely broken down for general society under the pressure of Trump’s right-wing rage, it took hold inside of unions to a much greater degree— leading to more leadership from people of color, sometimes younger leadership and definitely an understanding from the rank and file that these are organizations that fight far beyond the workplace. Which is why the arrest of David Huerta, president of SEIU-USWW and [the 700,000 strong] SEIU California, by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Friday is going to have a major impact on the coming months as deportations continue.”

Chabria noted that “While unions have voiced their disapproval of mass deportations since the MAGA threat first manifested, the unions’ might has not gone full force against them, taking instead a bit of a wait-and-see approach. Well, folks, we’ve seen. We’ve seen the unidentified masked men rounding up immigrants across the country and shipping them into life sentences at torturous foreign prisons; we’ve watched a 9-year-old Southern California boy separated from his father and detained for deportation; and Friday, across Los Angeles, we saw an anonymous military-style force of federal agents sweep up our neighbors, family members and friends in what seemed to be a haphazard and deliberately cruel way.”

To say he is a beloved and respected leader in both the union and California in general is an understatement. You can still find his bio on the White House website, since he was honored as a “Champion of Change,” by President Obama. Within hours of his arrest, political leaders across the state were voicing support.

…Meanwhile, Stephen Miller, the Santa Monica native and architect of Trump’s deportation plans, has said the raids we are seeing now are just the beginning, and that he would like to see thousands of arrests every day, because our immigrant communities are filled with “every kind of criminal thug that you can imagine on planet earth.”

But in arresting Huerta, the battleground has been redrawn in ways we don’t fully yet appreciate. No doubt, Miller will have his way and the raids will not only continue, but increase.

But also, the unions are not going to back down.

“Right now, just in the last 14 hours, labor unions are joining together from far and wide, communities are reaching out in ways I’ve never seen,” Orr told me. “Something is different.”

Rosa Parks was just a woman on a bus, Orr pointed out, until she was something more. George Floyd was just another Black man stopped by police. Until he was something more.

Huerta is the something more of these immigration raids— not because he’s a union boss, but because he’s a union organizer with ties to both people in power and people in fear.

The coming months will show what happens when those two groups decide, together, that backing down is not an option.

On Sunday, David Frum warned that for Señor T this is a dress rehearsal. “[I]f the Trump-Hegseth threats have little purpose as law enforcement,” he wrote, “they signify great purpose as political strategy. Since Trump’s reelection, close observers of his presidency have feared a specific sequence of events that could play out ahead of midterm voting in 2026:

Step 1: Use federal powers in ways to provoke some kind of made-for-TV disturbance— flames, smoke, loud noises, waving of foreign flags.

Step 2: Invoke the disturbance to declare a state of emergency and deploy federal troops.

Step 3: Seize control of local operations of government— policing in June 2025; voting in November 2026.

Some of Trump’s most fervent supporters urged him to follow this plan in November 2020. But in 2020, they waited too long— until after the votes were cast. Using the military to overturn an election already completed was too extreme a step for a Department of Defense headed by a law-respecting Cabinet secretary such as Mark Esper. Trump turned to the courts instead. Only after the courts disappointed him did Trump attempt violence, and then the only available tool of violence was the lightly armed mob he summoned to Washington, D.C., on January 6, 2021. Harrowing as those events were, they never stood much chance of success: Without the support of any element of the military, Trump’s rioters could not impose the outcome Trump wanted.”

But the methods Trump threatened in Los Angeles this weekend could be much more effective in November 2026 than the attempted civilian coup of January 2021.

If Trump can incite disturbances in blue states before the midterm elections, he can assert emergency powers to impose federal control over the voting process, which is to say his control. Or he might suspend voting until, in his opinion, order has been restored. Either way, blue-state seats could be rendered vacant for some time.

… In his first term, Trump repeatedly talked more radically than he acted. He was usually constrained by his own appointees. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley rebuffed Trump’s suggestion during the George Floyd unrest that the military shoot protesters, which sufficed to dissuade Trump from upgrading the suggestion into a direct order.

But instead of Esper and Milley, the second Trump administration’s military is headed by a former talk-show host facing troubling allegations of heavy drinking and sexual misconduct. (He denies these claims.) Hegseth owes everything to Trump. The Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation are likewise  headed by radical partisans with dubious records, abjectly beholden to Trump. This Trump administration is sending masked agents into the streets to seize and detain people— and, in some cases, sending detainees to a prison in El Salvador without a hearing— on the basis of a 1798 law originally designed to defend the United States against invasion by the army and navy of revolutionary France. The presidency of 2025 has available a wide and messy array of emergency powers, as the legal scholar Elizabeth Goitein has described.

Second-term Trump and his new team are avidly using those powers in ways never intended or imagined.

Since Trump’s return to the presidency in January, many political observers have puzzled over a seeming paradox. On the one hand, Trump keeps doing corrupt and illegal things. If and when his party loses its majorities in Congress— and thus the ability to protect Trump from investigation and accountability— he will likely face severe legal danger. On the other hand, Trump is doing extreme and unpopular things that seem certain to doom his party’s majorities in the 2026 elections. Doesn’t Trump know that the midterms are coming? Why isn’t he more worried?

This weekend’s events suggest an answer. Trump knows full well that the midterms are coming. He is worried. But he might already be testing ways to protect himself that could end in subverting those elections’ integrity. So far, the results must be gratifying to him— and deeply ominous to anyone who hopes to preserve free and fair elections in the United States under this corrupt, authoritarian, and lawless presidency.

We all know that Huerta’s arrest wasn’t just a message to California’s immigrants. It was a shot across the bow of the resistance to Trump’s ugly, dystopian vision. It was Step 1 in the plan Frum laid out— manufacture chaos, trigger federal response, seize local control. But if Stephen Miller thinks the unions are going to fold, he’s misread history. The civil rights movement didn’t back down. The farmworker movement didn’t back down. Rosa Parks didn’t get off the bus. The question isn’t whether Trump is testing authoritarian control. He is. The question is whether Americans— especially the institutions with muscle and moral authority, like labor unions— are ready to fight back. The lines are being drawn now and they are unmistakably clear.

Yesterday, Tom Nichols wrote that “By militarizing the situation in L.A., Trump is goading Americans more generally to take him on in the streets of their own cities, thus enabling his attacks on their constitutional freedoms. As I’ve listened to him and his advisers over the past several days, they seem almost eager for public violence that would justify the use of armed force against Americans. The president and the men and women around him are acting with great ambition in this moment, and they are likely hoping to achieve three goals in one dramatic action. First, they will turn America’s attention away from Trump’s many failures and inane feuds, and reestablish his campaign persona as a strongman who will brush aside the law if that’s what it takes to keep order in the streets… Second, Trump is establishing that he is willing to use the military any way he pleases, perhaps as a proof of concept for suppressing free elections in 2026 or 2028. Trump sees the U.S. military as his personal honor guard and his private muscle… Third, Trump may be hoping to radicalize the citizen-soldiers drawn from the community who serve in the National Guard… In the longer run, Trump may be trying to create a national emergency that will enable him to exercise authoritarian control.”