12.06.2025
A city occupied
Donald Trump’s escalation of repression in Los Angeles serves to distract from recent embarrassments, but also displays the violence at the heart of the constitutional order, argues Paul Demarty
The last couple of weeks have given us a clear picture of Trump 2.0.
First there was the farcical chaos of Elon Musk’s exit from his DOGE, and subsequent public tiff with the president over the ‘One Big Beautiful Bill Act’ - a typically American giant omnibus funding bill. Then came a wave of raids by ICE agents on, by all appearances, perfectly lawful residents, which were met in Los Angeles especially with spirited and militant demonstrations. Trump responded by sending 2,000 national guardsmen and, when that failed to calm things (fancy that!), there followed the deployment of the Marine Corps.
The two stories seem connected. Trump’s political method, if you can call it that, is to drive the media agenda. It does not matter too much if the coverage is positive or negative: what matters is that he drives it, and the political currents of the country are thereby forced to shape themselves around him. The Musk fiasco was out of his control; the terroristic ICE raids give him back the initiative.
Musk
Musk’s tenure at the highest levels of state administration was always likely to be short. Trump simply does not have room for another man with, as the kids say, main-character energy. Beyond that, their personalities are ill-matched. Musk is a precocious nerd of a type Trump despises. He is, according to persistent media coverage, a habitual drug user. A recent New York Times claimed that Musk was “taking so much ketamine … that it was affecting his bladder”, along with ecstasy, magic mushrooms and the popular prescription, amphetamine Adderall (which would explain his apparently 24/7 social media use, the most crippling addiction of his)1. Trump is a teetotaller. Musk makes his money from government subsidy of electric vehicles; Trump hates them and prefers to “drill, baby, drill”. So it goes on.
DOGE immediately caused acrimony in Trump’s cabinet by unleashing a bureaucratic tornado on what was, after all, the turf of every other appointee. Its destructive activities pleased the more deranged elements of the American right, but put every Republican congress member in a tricky spot, since many government agencies on which core voters depend (apart from social security, veterans’ affairs) were rendered near inoperable. No amount of bluster about purging the ‘woke’ would compensate for such essentials.
After leaving DOGE, Musk denounced the Big Beautiful Bill as a monstrously wasteful handout and an “abomination” (it would also cut those precious electric vehicle subsidies). As things spiralled out of control, Musk declared that Trump was in the “Epstein files”, concerning the activities of the late and strangely well-connected underage sex trafficker, Jeffrey Epstein (not exactly a bombshell; Trump’s acquaintance with Epstein is already well documented). Rumours began to swirl that Musk had cuckolded homeland security advisor Stephen Miller, the long-time anti-immigrant ranter, who is one of the most repellent individuals in Trumpland (we will meet him again a little later). Trump, as is his wont, gave back as good as he got.
All this could have amounted to little more than a storm in the DC teacup, except that these were, after all, two ‘main characters’ going at it hammer and tongs, who represented distinct elements of the overall Trump phenomenon.
One of the great coups of the third Trump campaign was to peel sections of the tech elite off from their recent support of the Democrats. They all expected to get something in return; but Trump has a notorious habit of wriggling out from demands for payment. The numerically larger part of his electorate - leaving aside die-hard Republicans with nowhere else to go - is rust-belt, blue-collar and petty bourgeois. Punitive tariffs, especially on China, are a dagger to the heart of the tech bros’ business interests, but a key part of Trump’s sales pitch to middle Americans, whom he told that the US was being ripped off with the connivance of the Washington swamp. Musk’s aggression against the federal government gives heart to old-fashioned Reagan conservative think-tankers, but - as noted - directly attacks Trump’s core constituencies.
So the Trump-Musk feud was a more serious problem than, say, the extremely short tenure of Anthony Scaramucci as chief of staff in Trump’s first term, because it punctured the illusion of a vast coalition of ordinary Americans against their internal enemies. To be asked to pick a side between the two men was to be robbed of the political promises of both. The rightwing mediasphere was wrong-footed.
Flashpoint
What they needed, in the end, was some red meat, and got it with command over a heavily militarised ICE - a creation of George W Bush in his war-on-terror pomp, which has truly found its mission under Trump. The aforementioned Stephen Miller imposed arrest quotas on the agency, and so an escalation in its attacks on migrants ensued.
It found its flashpoint in LA on June 6, when ICE agents raided numerous downtown locations with their customary subtlety. Large groups of protestors appeared to confront them, at various points surrounding federal buildings in use by the agency. Protests continued over the weekend, during which time they were repeatedly and violently attacked by police armed with tear gas and rubber bullets. Two journalists were shot with such ‘less lethal’ rounds (lethality being very much a matter of degree in this case).
Instead of waiting for matters to die down, Trump deployed the national guard. By Monday, there were reports that he was preparing to send in 500 marines, and by Tuesday they had shown up. This is the sort of thing that gets called a dangerous escalation, and might be put down to the president’s incompetence. Yet it seems to me that escalation is precisely the point, and has been throughout. Trump has chosen tactics that make militant opposition very much more likely and, as far as he is concerned, it is all part of the script - as is the effective declaration of martial law in LA, with the military not due to withdraw for 60 days. Now we are back to the glamour of Trumpism - the battle between ‘real America’, on the one hand, and migrant invaders, along with their treacherous ‘woke’ allies, on the other.
It is important to note that this really is a rather well-crafted trap for the left. Either numbers turn out to confront these outrageous attacks or they do not. In the first case, we get the scenes we saw over the weekend, and a show of absurd, wilting cowardice on the part of Democratic officials - including, naturally, the pusillanimous LA mayor, Karen Bass, and the narcissistic California governor, Gavin Newsom. In the second case, Trump shows he can raid even the bluest cities with impunity. It is a matter of ‘Heads Trump wins, tails we lose’.
Traps, nevertheless, can be sprung. Suppose the movement was strong enough that even the Marines could not quickly restore order (order will be restored in the end, outside of moments of revolutionary crisis), then Trump’s victory would be Pyrrhic: the political costs of such assaults would be shown to be drastically higher than expected; morale in the ranks of the national guard and the Marines and even ICE would be affected; and so on.
Bernie Sanders
Consider Sanders, who told his Twitter followers: “Dr [Martin Luther] King defeated racist government officials and ended segregation through disciplined, non-violent resistance. Defeating Trumpism, oligarchy and authoritarianism requires that same level of discipline. Violent protests are counterproductive and play right into Trump’s playbook.”2
He is both right and wrong. Protests turning violent certainly do “play into Trump’s playbook”, as I have argued (though the implication in Sanders’s phrasing that it was protestors, rather than state forces, who initiated the violence, is unfortunate). Yet so does marching off like lambs to the slaughter. The truth, in any case, is that the civil rights movement was nothing like as “disciplined” in this respect as Sanders - and liberal opinion at large - seems to remember, with prudent self-defence measures frequently in evidence among the rank and file. King himself owned firearms for such purposes, as well he might.
It will be all too easy for this to turn into a sterile argument between soft-left legalists and anarchistic direct actionists about what works better: electoral campaigning and peaceful protests or militant direct action. The reality is that it is a matter of tactics. It is like arguing whether frontal assault or attrition is the ‘right’ way to fight battles. It depends on the battlefield, the strategic situation, the available forces, and so on. The British miners effectively brought down the government at the battle of Saltley Gate in 1972, which did not involve any actual fighting, because there were simply too many them (they were joined by a mass turnout from Birmingham’s engineering factories). The same tactics of militant mass picketing failed to deliver victory in the longer strike of the next decade. It is no simple matter to explain why: certainly not so simple as the contending dogmas of social pacifism and pseudo-Sorelianism would have us believe.
Discipline
That said, what the movement lacks is precisely a kind of discipline. It is not clear how the various community groups, left organisations and single-issue campaigns - never mind the ordinary citizens swept up in events - could choose a tactical approach that would really be binding on all of them. Trump, again, has the power of initiative. The transformation of events into near riots was not (fortunately) a positive choice for an urban guerrilla strategy, but forced on the movement by the violence of the police and the determination of the ghouls in DC to make an example.
That discipline might be provided by obedience to a charismatic leader - like Martin Luther King perhaps (or indeed Trump … ). Yet such movements tend to have a shelf life. In the end, the leader - like everyone else - is mortal. Even before that, he (usually, indeed, he) is fallible. Whether via death or disgrace, the question is posed - who next? And we are back to the beginning: an irreducibly collective decision that we have no means of making in such a way that it is binding on all.
The more durable answer, regular readers will be unsurprised to hear, is a party, and one whose life is conducted according to radically democratic norms, which will not submerge divergent trends under a leader cult or an endless series of momentary expediencies, but will have them fight things out in the open to the moment of decision; and, if necessary, to the re-evaluation and overturning a decision. Such an organisation could really try different tactics, and synthesise the results. It could take bold initiatives, but also hold back and retreat in good order, if necessary (necessities badly underplayed by many on the far left, alas).
Such a party would confront a very dangerous situation in today’s US. There can be little doubt that Trump’s willingness to deploy armed force to crush protests and humiliate his enemies takes us into dangerous territory. Wherever one falls in the ‘fascism debate’, we must acknowledge recent events as a major step change, in a most unwelcome direction.
Trump’s instruments, however, are just those provided him by the perfectly legal and ordinary progress of US state power over decades, even centuries. Defensive employment of constitutional provisions - particularly the first and second amendments, which the US left has rather fallen out of love with in recent years - is all well and good, but the fight must be to delegitimise and replace the constitution.
The Democrat mantra that ‘this is not who we are’ must be silenced: in an important sense, this really is what America is. But it need not be, so long as the American left recognises the historical depths of US tyranny and the scope of the tasks before it.