Newsom loses bid to exit fracking lawsuits
A Kern County judge ruled Thursday that Gov. Gavin Newsom will remain a defendant in a trio of lawsuits brought against his administration by local oil producers arguing the governor overstepped his authority when he imposed a de-facto ban on fracking in 2021.
Kern County Superior Court Judge Bernard C. Barmann Jr. denied the administration's request for summary judgment that would have excused the governor from the cases. State agencies were to remain defendants regardless.
The lawsuits, which are headed for a bench trial set to start Sept. 2, could decide the fate of a controversial oil-field technique that at one point accounted for up to a fifth of all oil produced in California, virtually all of it in Kern County.
Plaintiffs Chevron USA Inc., Aera Energy LLC and the trade group Western States Petroleum Association allege Newsom had acknowledged prior to imposing the de-facto ban that he lacked legal power to prohibit fracking but did it anyway to appease environmental groups.
Fracking injects water, sand and small concentrations of toxic chemicals deep underground at high pressure to release oil and gas that is otherwise hard to access. Environmental groups say the practice risks polluting groundwater and air. California's oil industry says there is no evidence of such contamination despite decades of use in the state.
The state Legislature went through a long process more than a decade ago to establish regulations governing fracking. But in 2021, the state oil and gas supervisor began denying oil producers' permit applications for the stated purpose of climate action rather than technical reasons.
The administration carried out an administrative ban on fracking last year in order, it said, to protect life, health, safety, property and natural resources, as well as reducing greenhouse gas emissions. It remains to be seen whether the lawsuits against Newsom will have any effect on that formal prohibition.
Meanwhile, it has been almost four years since California has authorized a frack job in the state.
Deputy Attorney General Clint Woods argued in Barmann's courtroom Thursday morning that there is no dispute the state oil and gas supervisor at the time denied fracking permits, not the governor, and so the appropriate remedy is to consider whether to order permits be issued by the primary permitting agency involved, now called the California Geologic Energy Management Division.
"You don't get to sue up the chain of command every time there is a directive from the executive" branch of government, Woods said.
He added that the plaintiffs' request that Newsom not tell his appointees to issue fracking permits amounts to a violation of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Woods emphasized it is not the administration's intent to imply the governor can't be sued.
"We're not arguing that the governor's above the law. We're not," he said.
Plaintiffs attorney Jeffrey Dintzer, in his counter-argument, referred to statements made by the state oil and gas supervisor at the time, Uduak-Joe Ntuk.
Ntuk said in a deposition that a member of Newsom's cabinet, Secretary Wade Crowfoot of the California Natural Resources Agency, told him that "the governor was no longer comfortable with (Ntuk) approving any more (fracking) permits" and told Ntuk "to find a way to stop issuing permits" or face termination.
Dintzer said the state Legislature has decided oil producers are entitled to fracking permits and that the governor must stop telling the acting state oil and gas supervisor not to issue them.
"All the evidence is that this is a case of abuse of authority by a governor who knowingly and illegally issued an order and threatened an officer of government to issue a ban on (fracking) permits legally sought and (which) … met all the technical requirements," Dintzer said.
He added later, "This is a case about the governor and his unlawful activities."
Chevron said in a statement after Thursday's hearing that its fracking permit application at issue in the case met CalGEM's technical requirements and that the agency's permit denial was illegal.
"The hearing brings visibility to the executive office's attempt to sidestep the law to advance a political agenda against an industry that is essential to providing affordable, reliable and lower carbon energy to Californians," the company stated.
"The state's politically motivated effort to decrease oil production in California increases energy prices for inflation weary California consumers and makes the state more dependent on oil imported from other parts of the world."
Many possible outcomes of the case remain on the table, including approval of previously denied fracking permits and possibly an end to the existing ban on the procedure.
The next hearing in the case is set for March 12.
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The Danger of Trump's Clash with the Conservative Legal Movement
FOR NEARLY A DECADE, the conservative legal movement has endured a marriage of convenience with Donald J. Trump. The president has now unequivocally asked for a divorce. The signs of trouble in this relationship were there from the beginning. The conservative legal movement owes its remarkable success to three things: principle, persuasion, and persistence. These are qualities Trump does not appreciate. His wins flow from other characteristics. Over the years, they tried to make it work. Trump held up the core of his bargain—the nomination of traditional constitutionalist judges. He appointed men and women of generally high caliber, in the model of judges we might have expected from a President Rubio, Cruz, or Jeb Bush. That transformed judiciary led to many victories, including strengthened First and Second Amendments, a fatal blow to racial preferences, a historic turn against the administrative state, and the reversal of the conservative legal movement's great white whale—the jurisprudentially appalling Roe v. Wade. But, over time, Trump's dalliances with illegality and his failure to live up to his oath of fidelity to the Constitution grew harder to ignore. His actions following the 2020 election, culminating in the events of January 6th, nearly ruptured the relationship. Yet somehow, with some work and wishful thinking, the parties moved past that unpleasantness and looked to 2025 with hope. At the jubilant post-election Federalist Society dinner in November 2024, one leader boasted from the podium that he had just gotten off the phone with the once and future president and had told him he was about to dine with thousands of his favorite lawyers. Share Yet soon, the trouble, which anyone outside the dysfunctional relationship could see coming, materialized. Again in power, Trump engaged in brazen corruption, enabled and promoted unfit characters to positions of public trust, broke faith with the rule of law, and recklessly flirted with constitutional crisis. Mocking the very notion of 'law,' Trump infamously tweeted: 'He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.' Much of the conservative legal movement closed its eyes and thought of the judges. But if anybody in the conservative legal movement thought the toxic relationship could still survive all this bad behavior, the president has moved to end things. He has turned his back on the movement that enabled his rise and made possible his most lasting (constructive) legacy: the transformation of the federal judiciary. Conservatives hoping for more judges like those of his first term should prepare for disappointment. He's seeing other people. The break came in two steps in late May. First, Trump nominated Emil Bove to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals—a figure known not for commitment to conservative jurisprudence but for loyalty to Trump, including his role in the politicization of the Justice Department. Then, on social media, Trump expressed regret for ever having listened to the Federalist Society and called Leonard Leo, one of its longtime leaders, 'a sleazebag' and 'a bad person' who 'probably hates America.' IN THE MID-TWENTIETH CENTURY, progressives controlled the judiciary, the bar, and the legal academy. Conservatives struggled to push back. Eisenhower regretted appointing Brennan and Warren to the Supreme Court. Nixon campaigned against the Supreme Court and had an opportunity to change it with four vacancies in his time in office. Yet he struggled to find qualified candidates, saw multiple nominations fail spectacularly, and his successful nominations included Justice Blackmun, who would shortly author Roe v. Wade. Republicans had neither the arguments, nor the bench of talent, nor the political support network to reliably confirm justices cut from a different cloth. In the 1970s, the conservative legal movement began to take shape. Over the half century that followed, it transformed legal culture and became a central player in the staffing of Republican administrations and a pipeline for judicial talent. By the time Donald Trump became president in 2017, it could plausibly claim to have played the decisive role in his victory, after which it partnered with him to help advance one of its primary goals: the transformation of the federal judiciary. What explains this success? Principle, persuasion, and persistence. Early conservative slogans favored in the Nixon era—like 'strict construction' or 'law and order'—lacked coherence. Over time, the movement developed intellectually robust doctrines—textualism and originalism. These insisted that judges interpret the law as written, based on its meaning at the time of enactment. The fundamental principles have guided the conservative legal movement—indeed, adherence to them defines what constitutes that movement. Contrary to popular perception, the movement is not monolithic. It includes a multitude of institutions, both academic and litigation centers. The Federalist Society, founded in 1982, is among the most prominent institutions of the movement, but it includes many members with diverse perspectives. It's a well-worn observation that the Federalist Society is a 'they, not an it.' Members of the conservative legal movement have differed in politics and law. They might describe themselves as conservative or libertarian, Burkean or Hayekian. They continue to have debates about how to apply originalism, whether courts should exhibit 'restraint' or 'engagement,' about whether and to what degree the courts should defer to legislatures, about the legitimacy of the administrative state, and more. The center of gravity in the community on some of these questions has shifted over time. Members of the conservative legal movement remained united, though, in the belief that law matters, that the law is knowable, and that the law serves as an important constraint on judges as well as on the other branches. These are the principles to which it held and the constancy with which it held them throughout changing circumstances gave them force and gave the movement coherence. For more deep, clear-eyed, historically informed essays from sometimes unexpected points of view, sign up for a free or paid Bulwark subscription. To be sure, some individuals were drawn to the cause with partisan or policy motivations. And it cannot be denied that the correlation of conservative theory with some conservative policy ends (for example, restricting abortion, protecting gun rights, or banning affirmative action) supercharged the movement. But the claim of the critics on the left that the legal principles merely cloaked a pursuit of a particular agenda never held, either among the legal theorists who debated the fine points of originalism or even among the ranks of the lawyers who staffed Republican administrations and congressional offices. Ideas, as every young conservative will tell you, have consequences. But not without persuasion. Conservative lawyers, in particular, understood that persuasion is not merely a political tactic—it is a civic duty. Ours is a system built on consent, not coercion; on the give-and-take of argument, not the imposition of will. A commitment to persuasion lay at the heart of the conservative legal movement for decades. It could be seen at Federalist Society events featuring panels showcasing diverse views and in signature debates between legal luminaries, right and left. But, in a genuine republic, the law cannot be left merely to the lawyers, and the conservative legal movement worked hard to convince a popular audience. Edwin Meese, President Reagan's attorney general, championed the cause of originalism. Justice Antonin Scalia famously traveled widely giving speeches and debating before general audiences and giving interviews to popular media. The core ideas of originalism became broadly accepted by Republican-leaning voters and, soon, even Supreme Court nominees of Democratic presidents seemed to embrace them in their confirmation hearings. Lasting change in America requires one further element: persistence. Our Framers gave us a constitutional system where even a decisive electoral triumph does not yield transformation. A political intellectual movement must stay true to its course over successive administrations, through successes and setbacks. And the conservative legal movement saw its share of setbacks as it saw close defeats on cases ranging from abortion, affirmative action, property rights, same-sex marriage, and more. But despite these defeats, the conservative legal movement stayed the course. It did not succumb to the temptations of jurisdiction-stripping, court packing, or judicial impeachments. It stuck to principle. It kept up the work of persuasion, and with persistence, it prevailed, at least as far as its project to transform the judiciary goes. Leonard Leo, in response to Trump's attacks, stated—correctly, from a conservative and originalist perspective—that 'the Federal Judiciary is better than it's ever been in modern history.' That doesn't mean the judiciary has been wholly remade; even today's conservative Supreme Court can deliver opinions no originalist could love. But by any measure, the conservative legal movement has had remarkable success. Now Trump threatens to burn it all down. Join now EVEN TRUMP CRITICS ON THE RIGHT must acknowledge that we arrived at this point, in part, through the willingness of the conservative legal movement to work closely with a president who has never had much fondness for conservatism or the law. Yet politics demands a measure of practicality and prudence. The Democratic party had long ago rejected originalism and limited-government constitutionalism. For the conservative legal movement, the GOP remained the only viable path for its political project. Not long before Donald Trump emerged as the presumptive Republican nominee in 2016, Justice Scalia had passed away; a vacancy remained on the Court, and the remaining justices were evenly divided on key questions. The Court hung in the balance like never before. The conservative legal movement made a deal with the GOP nominee. He pledged to nominate originalist jurists, including by taking the unprecedented step of publishing a list of prospective options for the Supreme Court. In exchange, much of the conservative legal movement supported his candidacy. Following his surprise election, many seasoned veterans of the conservative legal movement staffed his administration and soon worked productively with others on the outside to deliver on Trump's pledge. The success of the judicial project, however, came at a deep civic cost. The conservative legal movement's fixation on the judiciary led many of its members to ignore (or worse, excuse) the degradation of the other two branches of government and damage to constitutional norms and values. While there were many notable exceptions, much of the movement, particularly in circles closest to power, held their tongues. A community built on principles became increasingly transactional, and Trump learned that he could get away with quite a lot of constitutional arson without losing the support of self-described constitutional conservatives. America is a two-party system. Many interest groups will find that one party seems implacably opposed to their cause and, naturally, fall into an alliance with the other. But the alliance must serve known ends, and the interest group must retain some leverage. Legal conservatives must remain the constitutional conscience of the GOP, not merely captives. Trump found that he could count on many of them to be the latter, so long as he kept delivering judges. Reasonable conservatives can disagree whether the bargain was ever worth it. (I have grave doubts.) But now that Trump has threatened to walk away from his prior commitment to nominating conservative judges, what remains for the conservative legal movement in the alliance? It's time for conservatives, even those who support the president, to rebel. It's time for them to do what they have done best: stand on principle, persuade, and persist. Zip this to a friend or zap it onto social media: Share When George W. Bush went around the conservative legal movement and nominated his White House counsel to the Supreme Court, it divided the right. But the nomination of Harriet Miers ultimately failed because a growing chorus of conservative legal thinkers and their allies in the Senate asked hard questions and spoke important truths. They especially recoiled at the argument from the White House that they should support Miers because she had the president's confidence and she would vote the 'correct' way. As much as they may have admired President Bush, conservative lawyers were not about to throw away their leverage or their values to support whomever the president wished to see on the bench. They insisted that Republican presidents appoint principled legal conservatives, not presidential lackeys or outcome-driven jurists. They must continue to insist that now. Join now WHATEVER ONE THINKS ABOUT the relationship between Trump and the conservative legal movement to date, the breach portends ill not only for conservatives, but for all Americans. Even MAGA voters will likely soon have reasons to regret it. The first Trump administration relied on stalwarts of the conservative legal movement in the White House, the Justice Department, and at many key agencies. Their counsel helped restrain the president's worst impulses and enabled his more lasting accomplishments. Trump 2.0, instead, drips with contempt for the law. The president has removed internal safeguards and watchdogs, replaced seasoned lawyers with loyalists, and put MAGA movement hacks in essential positions. Ed Martin, briefly an interim U.S. attorney and now the pardon attorney in the Department of Justice, is but one example of a disturbingly common type. An administration acting without the guidance of serious lawyers will prove more chaotic, more likely to abuse the rights of citizens, and less likely to accomplish meaningful positive reforms. We have already seen some of this. But the bigger, lasting damage could come to the judiciary. As every middle schooler learns, our system rests on checks and balances upon which our liberties depend. Each branch checks the others. We do not have the option of stopping an overreaching president with a vote of no confidence or a recall election. We count on Congress and the judiciary to perform their constitutional roles. With a supine Congress, the duty to hold the president accountable to the law increasingly falls to the courts. Checked by judges, including his appointees, who uphold the law rather than follow presidential whim, the president and his allies have grown irate. They've deployed incendiary rhetoric, pushed for impeachment, and mused about suspending the writ of habeas corpus. All this amounts to a sustained campaign against the authority and legitimacy of the courts. The judges, to date, have responded with courage and firmness. In breaking with the conservative legal movement, the president must hope to find nominees made of more pliable stuff, more loyal to him personally. Or, instead of weak judges, the president might find fighters—fighters committed to advancing his agenda from the bench. For years, a small but growing band of right-wing academics and agitators has called for a different type of judicial nominee. No longer should the right be satisfied, they have argued, with a commitment to the law and neutral principles in judging. Instead, they have hoped for a future where Republican presidents would install on the bench loyalists and fighters for their view of the good. This is not merely a more aggressive posture than that taken by the traditional conservative legal movement; it is a complete inversion of all that it held dear. Constitutionalists should take little comfort from knowing that legislating from the bench points in a rightward direction. Share The Bulwark Other dangers lurk in abandoning the conservative legal movement's talent pipeline. For one, it has produced remarkably high-quality judges, as it did empirically in Trump's first term, despite the characterization of critics. A Trump appointment process that cuts out the conservative legal movement likely will name less-qualified candidates, from which all litigants will suffer. Trump's recent decision to fully end the American Bar Association's (deeply flawed) review of judicial nominees will further enable lower-quality nominations. Conservatives should also worry about a return to nominations based on patronage, political relationships, personal loyalty, or objective qualifications absent clear jurisprudential commitments. These approaches to judicial nominations yielded jurists like Warren, Blackmun, and Souter. Who knows what surprises a lawyer who happens to enjoy the favor of Trump at the moment might bring to the bench? In cutting out the conservative legal movement from the process of judicial selection, the Trump administration would also shift the gravity of the nomination and confirmation process toward the White House and away from the Senate. Several process changes in the Senate have weakened the hand of senators in influencing nominations, but historically, a collaborative process between the branches often yielded higher-quality nominees possessing an appropriate judicial temperament. On the Republican side, the conservative legal movement fostered a dialogue between presidents and senators based on shared principles. Given Trump's well-known gift for self-inflicted wounds, it shouldn't surprise that his decision to sideline the conservative legal movement in judicial nominations also undermines his goals. Judges tend to retire when they have the confidence that the president will replace them with nominees of whom they would approve. Conservative judges will no longer have that confidence and may defer retiring or taking senior status as a result, giving him far less of a chance to shape the judiciary this term than he otherwise would. Furthermore, even if one agreed that a turn toward a more outcome-oriented right-wing judiciary was desirable, it would be a generational project, as the traditional conservative legal movement has seen. And without the principle, persuasion, and persistence modeled by the conservative legal movement, its odds of success are long. Furthermore, the type of sharp-elbowed 'fighter' MAGA wants on the bench would only complicate that project by repelling rather than persuading judges whose votes they need to prevail on multi-judge panels. Populist commentators imagine that Federalist Society judges 'make nice with the left, get invited to the right conferences, and write elegant dissents.' In reality, traditional conservatives persuade their colleagues and increasingly write majority opinions. Our new MAGA-warriors in robes will be the ones writing dissents, but with more anger than eloquence. Some commentators have suggested that Trump's rejection of the conservative legal movement will have little impact on nominations because he will have nowhere else to look for judicial candidates than Federalist Society circles. This is wishful thinking for two reasons. First, if the president's chief concern in judicial selection is a loyal MAGA fighter, there are plenty of them to be found. There are over a million lawyers in America, many are Republicans. The president can turn to the ranks of the Republican National Lawyers Association and look for lawyers who have worked on campaigns or run for office with MAGA bona fides. The conservative legal movement performed an important function in recommending individuals with established jurisprudential commitments. Finding such people takes work and judgment, but if you want hacks, you can swing a gavel and hit them. The second reason this is cold comfort is that today's Federalist Society membership is not what it was twenty years ago. Belonging in the Federalist Society once clearly signified a deep interest in and commitment to a certain jurisprudential approach; if anything, membership might hurt one's career in some circles. As the society has grown and become associated with power, it has become attractive to ambitious lawyers more generally. Long-established leaders of the conservative legal movement know very well who among the ranks has a serious commitment to sound jurisprudence. But if the president has hostility to the core of the conservative legal movement, and to its most prominent leaders, he can certainly find pliant tools who can claim Federalist Society membership. Join now THE NOMINATION OF EMIL BOVE to the Third Circuit presents the first test case of a Trump presidency divorced from the conservative legal movement. A self-respecting Senate would reject this nomination on basic character and competence grounds. Bove's involvement in the deeply corrupt Eric Adams affair alone disqualifies him. But this nomination is not just about Bove. It is about how the second Trump term will approach judicial nominations, including to the Supreme Court. If the Senate confirms Bove, it will send a clear signal that the president has the freedom to depart from the model of judges long favored by the conservative legal movement. We can count on him to take that freedom and run with it for other vacancies, including for the Supreme Court. The president himself announced Bove in partisan terms, promising his followers on Truth Social that Bove 'will end the Weaponization of Justice, restore the Rule of Law, and do anything else that is necessary to, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN. Emil Bove will never let you down!' Outside commentators who have long rejected principled legal conservatism applauded and suggested Bove would be the new model for Trump judicial nominees, those who are committed 'warriors' who understand 'the fight for our country is existential.' The Bove nomination is an existential fight—for the conservative legal movement. If the conservative legal movement and its allies in the Senate rally to defeat this nomination as they did the Miers nomination twenty years ago, they will prove their commitment to principle and ensure their relevance going forward. They may get invited to fewer parties at the White House, but if legal conservatives stand firm now, they will remain a force to be reckoned with, for this administration and those to come. If, instead, the conservative legal movement accepts this nomination, it will surrender any leverage and influence it has. At the very least, it will lose its purpose in the political arena. Perhaps it will fade into obscurity, or return to its roots as primarily a debating society for constitutional nerds and academics. There's another, darker possibility. In surrendering to and accepting the Bove nomination, the conservative legal movement could send the message that the rising band of illiberal right-wingers and polemical pugilists have a place in its tent, alongside the Burkeans and Hayekians. In such an eventuality, the movement devoted to law and truth would legitimize those who reject it. In blessing the heretics of the 'post-constitutional' right, the movement will have lost its purpose. And its soul. Share this essay with your favorite Burkean or Hayekian conservative. Share Gregg Nunziata is the executive director of the Society for the Rule of Law. He is a veteran of the conservative legal movement and a former chief nominations counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee.
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Fox News Host Jesse Watters Uses Edited Clip to Cover Up Trump Flub
Fox News' Jesse Watters Primetime conveniently omitted a portion of Donald Trump's comment about a phone call with Gavin Newsom in order to make the California governor look bad. The attempted dunk tried to skirt the fact that Trump told reporters in the Oval Office Tuesday afternoon that he last spoke with Newsom 'a day ago,' which Newsom denied. 'There was no call. Not even a voicemail,' he wrote on X in response. Fox News anchor John Roberts obtained a record of a call from Trump to Newsom on Friday night Pacific time (Saturday morning in the east), and admitted the calls were not made 'a day ago,' as Trump claimed. 'This was June the 7th. Now, granted, this was on Saturday,' the Fox anchor said. However some on the right, like Watters, spun the story as somehow proof that Newsom was lying. When Watters introduced the topic Tuesday night, Fox's broadcast of Trump's comments just so happened to begin a split-second after he said those three words, omitting, 'a day ago' from its broadcast. 'Called him up to tell him: got to do a better job. He's done a bad job, causing a lot of death and a lot of potential death,' Trump said, as Fox portrayed it. Watters made no mention of the omission Tuesday night. Instead, he went ahead bashing Newsom anyways. 'Newsom responded, and he said there wasn't a phone call. He said Trump never called him. Not even a voicemail, he said. But John Roberts got Trump's call logs, and it shows Trump called him late Friday night and they talked for 16 minutes,' Watters said confidently. 'Why would Newsom lie and claim Trump never called him? Why would he do that?' he then asked. Newsom has already said that Trump didn't even talk about the National Guard during their call last week. 'We talked for almost 20 minutes and this issue never came up,' he told MSNBC. 'He never once brought up the National Guard. He's a stone-cold liar.'
Axios
29 minutes ago
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Trump's Strongman Week: Inside his show of military force
Troops deployed to Los Angeles. Paratroopers dropping from the sky before a partisan speech to troops at Fort Bragg. A military parade in D.C. that will coincide with the president's birthday. Call it President Trump 's Strongman Week. Trump is making a point of showing executive force at a level he only dreamed about during his first term. Why it matters: Trump's swift militarized response Saturday to the Los Angeles protests marks a defining moment in his presidency, as he uses his military authority to juice his immigration crackdown and hammer Democrats — all with a mix of pomp and threats. Zoom in: In a sign he's moving closer to escalating military action by declaring protests such as L.A.'s as insurrections, Trump said Tuesday that he'll send troops to any city he deems at risk of riots or possibly even protests he doesn't like — including Saturday's military parade in D.C. "I can inform the rest of the country that when they do it — if they do it — they're going to be met with equal or greater force," Trump told reporters in the Oval Office regarding the possibility of protests this weekend in D.C. Trump's executive order last weekend authorizing the National Guard deployment doesn't specify it's only for Los Angeles. It could apply anywhere. Later Tuesday, during a speech to troops at Fort Bragg, N.C., Trump blasted former President Biden and California's Democratic leadership while calling the L.A. protests against his immigration raids "anarchy." Earlier, he'd called some of the protesters "insurrectionists." Such claims — which have been aggressively disputed by California officials — suggest Trump is seeking to justify using the Insurrection Act of 1807, which allows the deployment of U.S. troops to quell domestic unrest and is among the most extreme emergency powers available to a president. Already, he's ordered 4,000 National Guard troops to L.A. over the objection of California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D). On Tuesday, hundreds of Marines were arriving as well — a move Newsom and other state and local officials called unnecessary and an abuse of power. "Donald Trump is behaving like a tyrant, not a president," Newsom posted on X Tuesday. "By turning the military against American citizens, he is threatening the very core of our democracy." The backstory: Trump's actions in many ways reflect his regret at not sending in the National Guard sooner in 2020, during his first administration's response to the unrest that followed George Floyd's death at the hands of Minneapolis police. Trump's advisers at the time talked him out of it. Trump also wanted to have a military parade in 2020, but dropped the idea after advisers cautioned it would look too authoritarian and could cause costly damage by tanks rolling along D.C. streets. Marc Short, then-Vice President Mike Pence's chief of staff, recalled that Trump had been eager to hold a military parade since French President Emmanuel Macron hosted Trump at a Bastille Day parade in Paris in 2017. A senior Trump 2020 campaign official said using the military during the Floyd protests would have been risky, given the sensitive racial issues at the center of the demonstrations. The big picture: Now, in his second term, Trump isn't expressing such concerns. He has different advisers who are more in line with his desires. But one constant remains: Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump's aggressive immigration policies. He has aggressively called for using the National Guard to crack down on any protesters who try to block federal agents from arresting unauthorized immigrants. "Stephen has been clear in all the meetings: More military, faster," said a Trump adviser familiar with the discussions. Bolstering Miller: Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, whom the adviser described as "practically bloodthirsty" in her support for more and tougher immigration enforcement. A DHS spokesperson pushed back on that characterization and said Noem is "antithetical to bloodthirsty — she is trying to prevent bloodshed." This weekend, Trump will get his military parade — a $45 million effort celebrating the Army's 250th birthday that happens to fall on Trump's 79th birthday and Flag Day. Army officials plan to display rocket launchers and missiles along with more than 100 aircraft and tanks, according to people familiar with the planning. Trump on Tuesday had a warning for any protesters — and didn't distinguish between troublemakers and peaceful citizens expressing their speech rights. "I haven't even heard about a protest," he said, "but you know, this is people that hate our country .... They will be met with very heavy force." The intrigue: White House insiders say Trump's response to the L.A. protests appears to have energized him after a week in which his "First Buddy," Elon Musk, brutally criticized him during their falling out over Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill" in Congress. "The president was actually hurt" by the Musk episode, according to a confidant who spoke with Trump about it. "Yes, he has feelings, and he was hurt the way anyone would be when a friend turns on them." "But that's gone now. L.A. wiped away the Elon drama," the source said. "What's driving the president is how the riots of 2020 are seared into his brain, and how he wished he could've sent in the troops to end it."
