What a gift to this aspiring autocrat: a manufactured crisis, replete with online videos - some real, some AI generated fakes - of a so-called violent uprising that he must control and extinguish! Truly, an autocrat’s dream playbook.

Trump couldn’t have hoped for a better time to manufacture a crisis. He is floundering, in need of a victory of any kind, as he falls short on just about every campaign promise. With the crisis he is manufacturing, he hopes to shift the topic from failure, to show of force! Suddenly, the top story at every news outlet is no longer his ugly break up with Musk, or his failures on foreign policy, or the fact that 62 days into his 90 day tariff pause not a single deal has been struck, or most importantly, his failure on the main issue he ran on both times, immigration! We’ll get to that.

What *Actually* Sparked the Protests?

NYT reports social media is replete with AI generated photographs and videos, as well as conspiracy theories about what provoked the protests. One is that former President Barack Obama has a secret plot to impose socialism! Another, from the folks who are so ardently defending us from antisemitism {insert sarcasm emoji}, is the all time favorite that the protests were organized by nonprofit organizations supported by George Soros. But what actually ignited these protest?

In week 30, we covered that White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller excoriated leaders of ICE about their lack of progress. To date, Trump has actually deported fewer migrants than Biden did in his final year. How embarrassing! Shortly after the meeting, heads of senior ICE officials went rolling.

As you will recall, Trump promised repeatedly on the campaign trail to carry out the largest deportation operation in U.S. history. Miller said in May that the regime’s goal is for ICE to make a “minimum of 3,000 arrests” every day, up from the roughly 660 arrests a day that the regime actually carried out during its first 100 days.

That meant transitioning from targeting migrants with any sort of criminal or civil record, or what Trump termed “the worst of the worst,” to picking up anyone in sight and asking questions later.

No One Asked for Trump’s Help

This is an important distinction: neither Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, nor California Governor Gavin Newsom asked Trump for help. In fact, quite the opposite - both said sending troops would only inflame a situation that Trump had already provoked!

It is highly unusual, and likely illegal for Trump to federalize California’s National Guard as he did, an action that California is already challenging in court. The last time a president did this was in 1965, when, ironically, former President Lyndon Johnson sent troops to Alabama to protect civil rights demonstrators. In 1992, former President George W. Bush federalized troops at the request {my emphasis added} of the California’s then governor, to control riots after police officers were acquitted in the beating of Rodney King.