It's a real-life film noir in the City of Angels. US President Donald Trump is once again hurling Americans through the looking glass, this time – fittingly – in Los Angeles. It feels lifted from 1930s hard-boiled pulp fiction in which nothing is as it appears and everything is the inverse of what powerful men assert.
It's genuinely shocking, while also seemingly inevitable, that US military forces are being deployed to major cities with the express purpose of trying to intimidate, quash and, ultimately, violently confront Americans who dare raise their voices against Mr Trump’s policies and practices. It is one of the most significant inflection points since the last election took America on the road away from constitutional democracy and towards the kind of repressive lawlessness this President admires in other leaders and is seeking to emulate in the US.
Yet the astonishing gap between rhetoric and reality, and what this underlying system of untruth versus truth reveals, bears precise unpacking. It reveals much about the current national condition and trajectory.
Mr Trump says Los Angeles has been invaded, and so it has. But not by the protesters, who appear to be almost entirely Southern California locals outraged that federal immigration authorities are now using school pickup zones, areas where men gather seeking day labour, and, worst of all, routine immigration check-ins – thereby punishing the law-abiding – for seemingly arbitrary deportations.
The evolving "system" typically lacks due process – or any legal process whatsoever. That this outrages communities that directly overlap with targeted or threatened migrants and their (often US citizen) families is hardly surprising. But it has shocked consciences sufficiently to bring out thousands of protesters in Southern California and gain the rest of the country’s attention in the process.
It's exactly what Mr Trump has been waiting for, not just for months or even years, but very possibly decades, if his rhetoric on immigration over his adult lifetime is taken seriously. The President didn't wait for the situation to get out of hand or even become remotely challenging to local authorities and systems. Los Angeles police and other authorities were having no apparent difficulty in handling largely peaceful crowds. These were mainly made up of chanting protesters relying on words and not deeds, punctuated by the occasional extremist, hothead or agitator employing excessive rhetoric and engaging in vandalism.
By all accounts, including countless independent live video streams flowing online beyond the control of any content creator or editor, the protests were almost entirely peaceful and manageable. Some youths threw bottles, rocks and concrete at police, but few if any major injuries, and no deaths, have occurred. It really wasn't a big deal and certainly no crisis.
There was never a question of either the California governor or Los Angeles mayor – albeit both are liberal Democrats – requesting federal troops. The soldiers weren’t wanted and they clearly weren’t needed.
Yet Mr Trump jumped at the soonest opportunity to deploy federal troops under his control to a staunchly Democratic city experiencing angry protests against his policies. Six thousand federalised California National Guard troops and 700 Marines were dispatched to deal with Americans who Mr Trump called "animals" who "hate our country".
Offering the usual complete absence of evidence, he accused California Governor Gavin Newsom of financing the protests, presumably because he called the troop deployment “unconstitutional” and "authoritarian". California is suing the White House, hoping a court orders Mr Trump to remove his forces. The president preposterously countered that without the soldiers, Los Angeles would be "burning to the ground right now" as it did when wildfires ravaged the city in January.
The deeper purpose of the deployments – and especially the open-ended executive order authorising them that apparently applies to any protest or even potential protests anywhere in the country in the coming weeks – is to acculturate Americans and their political system to the use of the military to suppress peaceful political demonstrations.
It's likely Mr Trump is anticipating a growing wave of such protests over the next three years, and he's probably not wrong. During his first term, Mr Trump wanted to deploy federal troops against protesters insisting that "black lives matter" after the murder of George Floyd in May 2020. He was rebuffed by then-defence secretary Mark Esper and military Chief of Staff Mike Milley.
But both men and all the other "adults in the room” during the first Trump term are gone, replaced by personal loyalists without any evident allegiance to US institutions or even the Constitution beyond this president's personal and political interests.
This same lack of institutional or personal restraints has led the military to disgracefully agree to stage a highly provocative, entirely improper military parade through the streets of Washington DC on Saturday – Mr. Trump's 79th birthday.
In his first term, he was bluntly told that the US military did not perform such sycophantic spectacles, which are incompatible with American republican traditions. Now, Mr Trump is getting everything he wants, at least from all of his executive branch subordinates, no questions asked.
Mr Trump knows that peaceful street protests are a highly effective tool against would-be strongmen, and he's making it clear at the earliest possible opportunity to let everyone know that he intends to use the military to suppress street-level opposition to his policies and rule. They could, after all, be the nucleus of an American "colour revolution," in the style of European and Asian societies that resisted their own aspiring caudillos not merely at the ballot box but also the barricades.
Mr Trump has been clear that, unlike most previous presidents, he doesn’t regard peaceful protests as legitimate opposition, threatening that, "those people that want to protest, they're going to be met with very big force".
Once upon a time in America, peaceful demonstrations constituted free speech and assembly, steeped in the finest traditions of a country literally founded upon political protests. But Mr Trump wants protesters who burn US flags to express outrage – which the Supreme Court repeatedly found to be protected speech – to be subjected to an “automatic” year in prison.
The land of the free is certainly “going through some things”. As Los Angeles, home of Hollywood and setting of many of the greatest films noir, famously explained about arbitrary power, "forget about it, Jake. It's Chinatown".
