What's Tony Thinking

Playing Into Trump’s Hands

Surely, I am not the only one thinking that what’s unfolding in L.A. is Trump’s fondest fantasy?

Gavin Newsom is right, mass deportation of people who have committed no crime is wrong. It is not what was promised and not what the American people supported. A majority did support sending those immigrants, without legal status and guilty of committing criminal acts here, back where they came from. But not the round-ups of people who are playing by the hard-to-decipher and often changing  rules of the immigration game. Not people who were not only not harming anyone, but actively contributing by working and paying taxes.

Meanwhile the rock throwing, car burning and assaults on federal agents is playing right into Trump’s hands. Americans have a right to assembly and to peaceful protest, but no right to commit acts of violence. To the extent that Trump can highlight, and provoke, the latter, he is getting exactly what he wants.

At “The Dispatch” newsletter, founded by now NYT columnist David French and his friend, Jonah Goldberg, Goldberg cites a few instructive historical precedents for how this all works.

“Every time a protester burns a car, hurls a rock, or smashes a window, the protester ceases to be a lawful demonstrator and becomes a rioter. And contrary to a lot of left-wing romantic nonsense, rioting is not only wrong and illegal, it’s politically unpopular. Then-Massachusetts Gov. Calvin Coolidge became a national star by calling in the Massachusetts Guard in response to the 1919 Boston police strike, which had ignited riots and looting. In the 1968 election, Richard Nixon used the riots after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination to win the presidency on a promise of restoring law and order.”

Goldberg might also have added 1968 in Chicago, and how that undid Hubert Humphrey’s presidential candidacy.

It is not clear that Newsom’s claim that Trump’s deployment of the National Guard is illegal. In 1965 LBJ deployed the National Guard in support of school integration and against then Alabama Governor, George Wallace. But it is clear that Newsom and L.A. Mayor, Karen Bass, needed to exercise enough push back against mayhem and bad actors that those who were willing to turn a legitimate and peaceful protest into a riot didn’t give Trump what he wanted. Newsom could himself have called out a smaller number of  the National Guard to indicate he would not tolerate violence.

I marvel at how things seem, again and again, to work out for — i.e. to the benefit of — Donald J. Trump. He loses an election but is able to sell the Big Lie. Somehow he walks away from January 6 and get re-elected. He’s indicted, even in one case convicted, but runs out the clock on the most legitimate and important cases against him while casting himself as the victim of lawfare. He survives an assassination attempt and emerges as an heroic figure complete with iconic photographic image. This cat definitely has nine lives.

And now, just when it appeared that with the Musk mess and the TACO tariffs, Trump was starting to unravel, along comes this to shore him up and change the narrative. His terrible, and expensive ($50 million), military birthday parade would have incited real, and justified protest and opposition, not least from veterans who are seeing their benefits cut allegedly as a “money savings” step. But now this awful Soviet-style parade will undoubtedly have Trump wrapping himself in the mantle of “law and order” and the American flag, as the Republicans genuflect.

A salutary reminder and a last word from Jonah G. “The president isn’t your commander in chief or mine. He’s not even Gavin Newsom’s commander in chief. He’s the commander of the armed forces, and that’s it. But like all statists before him, he thinks he can convince you otherwise—if he can first convince you that we’re at war.”

Long ago the prophet Jeremiah lamented unto God so long ago, “Why do the wicked prosper?” The question still stands