Trump again defends decision to ‘send in the troops’
Donald Trump has again defended his decision to deploy the National Guard to LA, claiming if he hadn’t “that once beautiful and great city would be burning to the ground right now”.
As many have pointed out already, the demonstrations started out peacefully, and while some buildings have been vandalized and looted, some cars were set alight and there is graffiti downtown, much of Los Angeles has not been affected at all.
Trump then went on a tirade about rebuilding houses in LA and again attacked governor, Gavin Newsom, and mayor, Karen Bass. It’s unclear where Trump got the “25,000 houses burned to the ground from”, but if he’s referring to the most recent wildfires, which caused significant damage and displacement in the area, the number of homes, businesses and other structures destroyed was around 12,000, not 25,000.
Here’s Trump’s Truth Social post:
If I didn’t “SEND IN THE TROOPS” to Los Angeles the last three nights, that once beautiful and great City would be burning to the ground right now, much like 25,000 houses burned to the ground in L.A. do to an incompetent Governor and Mayor – Incidentally, the much more difficult, time consuming, and stringent FEDERAL PERMITTING PROCESS is virtually complete on these houses, while the easy and simple City and State Permits are disastrously bungled up and WAY BEHIND SCHEDULE! They are a total mess, and will be for a long time. People want to rebuild their houses. Call your incompetent Governor and Mayor, the Federal permitting is DONE!!!
Key events
Here are some pictures coming out of LA this morning.
Hegseth faces grilling on Capitol Hill for first time since Signal scandal and troops sent to LA
Defense secretary Pete Hegseth is expected to field sharp questions from members of Congress about his tumultuous start as Pentagon chief, including his sharing of sensitive military details over a Signal group chat, in three separate Capitol Hill hearings beginning today.
This will be his first appearance before a House committee since his epic and controversy-ridden Senate confirmation hearings over four months ago – and a lot has happened since then, so it could be a lengthy one.
Lawmakers are also sure to quiz Hegseth on the legality of his mobilization of 700 active-duty marines to assist more than 4,100 national guard troops in protecting federal buildings and personnel. We can expect questions about what the troops are expected to do and how much it will all cost.
Under the Posse Comitatus Act, troops are prohibited from policing US citizens on American soil. Invoking the Insurrection Act, which allows troops to do that, is incredibly rare, and Trump has downplayed suggestions that he plans to do that.
Hegseth’s conduct around Signalgate is bound to come up, both in terms of his sharing of attack plans in Yemen and his subsequent denials that the information was classified. We can also expect questions around the general sense of chaos around the Pentagon since he took charge, with a number of key staff being fired.
Lawmakers also have made it clear they are unhappy that Hegseth has not provided details on the administration’s first proposed defense budget, which Donald Trump has said would total $1tn, a significant increase over the current spending level of more than $800bn.
It will also be lawmakers’ first chance to ask Hegseth about a myriad of other controversial spending by the Pentagon, including plans to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on security upgrades to turn a Qatari jet into Air Force One and to pour as much as $45m into a parade recently added to the Army’s 250th birthday bash, which happens to coincide with Trump’s birthday on Saturday.
We did say a lot’s happened. We’ll bring you all the key lines here.
CNN reporters on the ground in downtown Los Angeles, the site of much of the anti-Ice protests over the past five days, report that while some buildings have been vandalized, and there is graffiti in downtown, much of LA has not been affected by the protests.
According to CNN – and very much contrary to Trump’s comments about the city – the damage was “not a sliver just of Los Angeles, it’s really a sliver of downtown. Much of the rest of the city is functioning as per normal.”
‘The language of authoritarianism’: how Trump and allies cast LA as a lawless city
Trump’s language in that last post is just another example of the familiar script of the president and his allies, who – as my colleague Tess Owen writes – over the last few days cast the sprawling city of Los Angeles in shades of fire and brimstone, a hub of dangerous lawlessness that required urgent military intervention in order to be contained.
But as we know, the demonstrations were actually confined to very small areas of the city and life generally went on as usual across much of LA.
This language is deliberate, says Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a history professor at New York University and scholar on fascist and authoritarian movements, who tells Tess the rhetoric coming from the Trump administration is “an authoritarian trick”.
You create a sense of existential fear that social anarchy is spreading, that criminal gangs are taking over. This is the language of authoritarianism all over the world.
What is the only recourse to violent mobs and agitators? Using all the force of the state. Thus we have the vision of the national guard, armed to the teeth. It’s like a war zone. That’s on purpose, it’s habituating Americans to see those armed forces as being in combat on the streets of American cities.
The protests turned violent when federal immigration authorities used flash bang grenades and tear gas against demonstrators. Over the weekend, fiery and chaotic scenes played out in downtown LA, Compton and Paramount. Dozens of people were arrested for an array of crimes, including an alleged tossing of a molotov cocktail towards Ice officers. Protesters shut down a freeway, several self-driving vehicles were torched and dumpsters were set alight, and there were scattered reports of looting.
Still, as mayor Karen Bass noted on CNN on Monday, on “a few streets downtown, it looks horrible”, but there was “not citywide civil unrest”.
Trump has also repeatedly suggested that some of the individuals involved in the protest were “paid”, invoking a popular rightwing conspiracy about dark money bankrolling liberal causes.
This, too, is another tactic out of the authoritarian playbook, according to Ben-Ghiat.
If there are any protests against the autocrat, you have to discredit them by saying they are crisis actors, they are foreign infiltrators. You have to discredit them in the public eye.
Trump again defends decision to ‘send in the troops’
Donald Trump has again defended his decision to deploy the National Guard to LA, claiming if he hadn’t “that once beautiful and great city would be burning to the ground right now”.
As many have pointed out already, the demonstrations started out peacefully, and while some buildings have been vandalized and looted, some cars were set alight and there is graffiti downtown, much of Los Angeles has not been affected at all.
Trump then went on a tirade about rebuilding houses in LA and again attacked governor, Gavin Newsom, and mayor, Karen Bass. It’s unclear where Trump got the “25,000 houses burned to the ground from”, but if he’s referring to the most recent wildfires, which caused significant damage and displacement in the area, the number of homes, businesses and other structures destroyed was around 12,000, not 25,000.
Here’s Trump’s Truth Social post:
If I didn’t “SEND IN THE TROOPS” to Los Angeles the last three nights, that once beautiful and great City would be burning to the ground right now, much like 25,000 houses burned to the ground in L.A. do to an incompetent Governor and Mayor – Incidentally, the much more difficult, time consuming, and stringent FEDERAL PERMITTING PROCESS is virtually complete on these houses, while the easy and simple City and State Permits are disastrously bungled up and WAY BEHIND SCHEDULE! They are a total mess, and will be for a long time. People want to rebuild their houses. Call your incompetent Governor and Mayor, the Federal permitting is DONE!!!
The day so far
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Last night Trump sent another 2,000 National Guard troops to LA, following the original 2,000 sent on Saturday.
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A battalion of 700 marines were also temporarily mobilized to Los Angeles, marking another escalation in Trump’s response to street protests over his aggressive immigration policies. LAPD said it had not been formally notified and the marines’ arrival would present “a significant logistical and operational challenge”.
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Gavin Newsom, California’s governor, said US marines are “not political pawns” and called the Trump administration’s deployment a “blatant abuse of power”. He again accused Trump of “trying to provoke chaos”.
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Dozens of people were arrested in California, as other protests sprung up in at least nine other US cities overnight, including New York, Philadelphia and San Francisco. In Austin, Texas, police fired nonlethal munitions and detained several people as they clashed with a crowd of several hundred protesters.
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California yesterday said Trump’s deployment of the National Guard was illegal and violated the state’s sovereignty and federal law, according to a court filing of its lawsuit against the US government.
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Australia’s prime minister denounced the “horrific” shooting of a rubber bullet at an Australian television reporter covering the unrest in LA. Anthony Albanese said the reporter could reasonably have expected not to be “targeted” with a rubber bullet while doing her job in Los Angeles. The footage showed she was “clearly identified” as a member of the media, with “no ambiguity”, he said. “We don’t find it acceptable that it occurred, and we think the role of the media is particularly important.” He said he had raised the incident with the Trump administration.
Army Secretary Dan Driscoll will also be at Tuesday’s event where Donald Trump will address US soldiers at Fort Bragg as the President deploys the military in an attempt to quiet immigration protests in Los Angeles.
Driscoll will attend along with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, service members, veterans and their families to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the US Army.
Fort Bragg, located near Fayetteville, North Carolina, serves as headquarters for US Army Special Operations Command. Highly trained units like the Green Berets and the Rangers are based there.
About 700 US marines were en route to Los Angeles on Tuesday after Donald Trump mobilized them the day before in response to protests over immigration raids. The president also doubled the number of national guard members to 4,000, in an extraordinary mobilization of troops against US residents that California leaders have called “authoritarian”.
The Pentagon mobilized the 700 active-duty marines after tensions between the federal government and the nation’s second-largest city dramatically escalated over the weekend, with residents taking to the streets to demonstrate against a series of brutal crackdowns on immigrant communities. The raids have affected garment district workers, day laborers and restaurants, and agents also arrested the president of a major California union who was serving as a community observer during the raids.
Read more here:
Donald Trump and his allies turned to a familiar script over the weekend, casting the sprawling city of Los Angeles in shades of fire and brimstone, a hub of dangerous lawlessness that required urgent military intervention in order to be contained.
“Looking really bad in L.A.,” Trump posted on Truth Social in the very early hours of Monday morning. “BRING IN THE TROOPS!!!”
But contrary to the Trump administration’s characterization of an entire city in tumult, the demonstrations were actually confined to very small areas and life generally went on as usual across much of the city.
Read the full report here:
Gaby Hinsliff thinks Trump has unleashed something terrifying in the US – that even he may be powerless to control:
She was live on air to viewers back home, her TV microphone clearly in hand, when the rubber bullet hit her. The Australian reporter Lauren Tomasi was the second journalist after the British photographer Nick Stern to be shot with non-lethal rounds while covering protests in Los Angeles sparked by immigration raids. But she was the first to be caught on camera and beamed around the world. There’s no excuse for not knowing what the US is becoming, now that anyone can watch that clip online. Not when you can hear her scream and see the cameraman quickly swing away to film a panicking crowd.
Gaby Hinsliff
Here are some more images coming to us over the wires from the protests:
Trump to address soldiers in North Carolina in visit with Hegseth
President Donald Trump will address US soldiers on Tuesday as his administration deploys 700 marines to Los Angeles in an escalating response to street protests over his immigration policies.
Trump and defense secretary Pete Hegseth are scheduled to visit Fort Bragg, North Carolina, home to around 50,000 active-duty soldiers, for long-scheduled commemorations of the US Army’s 250th anniversary ahead of a major parade in Washington on Saturday, Reuters reports.
Opinion: Trump is deliberately ratcheting up violence in Los Angeles
Moustafa Bayoumi
Donald Trump was on his way to Camp David for a meeting with military leaders on Sunday when he was asked by reporters about possibly invoking the Insurrection Act, allowing direct military involvement in civilian law enforcement. Demonstrations against Trump’s draconian immigration arrests had been growing in Los Angeles, and some of them had turned violent. Trump’s answer? “We’re going to have troops everywhere,” he said.
I know Trump is “a delusional narcissist and an orange-faced windbag”, to borrow the words of the Republican senator Rand Paul, and that this president governs using misdirection, evasion, and (especially) exaggeration, but we should still be worried by this prospect he raises of sending “troops everywhere”.
Already, Trump and his administration have taken the unprecedented steps of calling up thousands of national guard soldiers to Los Angeles against the wishes of the California governor, of deploying a battalion of hundreds of marines to “assist” law enforcement in Los Angeles, and of seeking to ban the use of masks by protesters while defending the use of masks for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents. Needless to say, none of this would be happening if these times were normal.
What makes this moment abnormal is not the fact that Los Angeles witnessed days of mostly peaceful protests against massive and destructive immigration arrests. We’ve seen such protests countless times before in this country. Nor is it the fact that pockets of such protests turned violent. That too is hardly an aberration in our national history. What makes these times abnormal is the administration’s deliberate escalation of the violence, a naked attempt to ratchet up conflict to justify the imposition of greater force and repression over the American people.
Read the full opinion piece here:
Kang Hyung-won, a photojournalist who reported for the Los Angeles Times during the 1992 race riots in Los Angeles, said on X, in a reply to Donald Trump Jr.’s post, the picture had been taken by him and it was used without his permission.
“You’re using the photo out of context. Please take it down,” Kang said.
Kang told Reuters by email his photograph depicted a different situation when law enforcers were not providing adequate protection.
“(The) current situation of people expressing a widespread disagreement about an excessive and aggressive enforcement by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, while LAPD is present and keeping the city in order is not even remotely similar to the dire situation for Korean Americans of those dark hours during the 1992 L.A. Riots,” he said.
Kang said he was consulting a lawyer after having no response to his request that Trump Jr. take down the post.
No-one from the Washington administration could immediately be reached for comment.
An association of Korean Americans in Los Angeles has criticised Donald Trump Jr., the son of the US president, for “reckless” comments on social media and urged him not to exploit a riot that devastated their community 33 years ago.
The Korean American Federation of Los Angeles also said an operation by the US administration to round up suspected undocumented immigrants lacked “due legal procedures”.
Donald Trump Jr. posted a photograph of a man with a rifle on a rooftop on X with a message: “Make Rooftop Koreans Great Again!” referring to actions by the Korean American community during the 1992 race riots in Los Angeles.
The federation in separate statements expressed concern over the developments in Los Angeles over the last week and said their businesses were seriously affected by the crackdown and arrests.
“While the unrest has not yet subsided, Donald Trump Jr …. showed the recklessness of posting a post on X on Sunday 8 June, mocking the current unrest by mentioning the ‘Rooftop Korean’ from the LA riots 33 years ago,” it said in a statement on Monday Los Angeles time.
“As the eldest son of the current president and an influencer with approximately 15 million followers, his actions could pose a huge risk in these icy times, and we strongly urge the past trauma of the Korean people be never, ever exploited for any purpose.”
Hundreds of deputies have been mobilised in Los Angeles County as law enforcement try to respond to widespread protests, the state governor Gavin Newsom’s office has said.
The Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, in coordination with the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services (Cal OES), has formally requested mutual aid assistance from law enforcement agencies within and outside of Los Angeles County to support LAPD.
It has approved the mobilisation of 20 deputies from San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department; 83 deputies from Orange County Sheriff’s Department; 32 deputies from Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Department; 44 deputies from Ventura County Sheriff’s Department and 80 officers from municipal police agencies within Los Angeles County
To bring further support to the region, the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department has already provided more than 200 deputies to support the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD).
Dozens arrested in California as other US cities protest overnight
The protests so far have resulted in a few dozen arrests and some property damage.
“What is happening effects every American, everyone who wants to live free, regardless of how long their family has lived here,” said Marzita Cerrato, 42, a first-generation immigrant whose parents are from Mexico and Honduras.
Protests also sprung up in at least nine other US cities overnight, including New York, Philadelphia and San Francisco, according to local news outlets.
In Austin, Texas, police fired nonlethal munitions and detained several people as they clashed with a crowd of several hundred protesters.
