Trump's Decision to Send Troops to California Is His Do-Over of 2020
In 2020, as racial justice protests swept through the country over the murder of George Floyd, President Trump was itching to deploy the military to crush the unrest. He was talked out of it by his top national security advisers, who feared that such a decision would be viewed as moving toward martial law.
Five years later, as protests against his immigration policies began to swell in Los Angeles, Mr. Trump said he had learned his lesson.
'I'll never do that again,' Mr. Trump said on Thursday, about waiting to send in the National Guard in 2020. 'If I see problems brewing,' he added, 'I'm not going to wait two weeks.'
With the Los Angeles protests, Mr. Trump has seized the chance to make up for his first-term regret.
His decision to send in federal troops right away, taking the extraordinary step of deploying active-duty military to deal with domestic unrest, fits into the larger pattern of Mr. Trump operating without any significant pushback from the people around him in his second term.
'He saw the military as his reactionary arm,' said Olivia Troye, a former homeland security official and aide to former Vice President Mike Pence. Ms. Troye said she witnessed multiple national security officials explain to Mr. Trump in 2020 that the military takes an oath to the Constitution — not Mr. Trump — and that it should not be turned against American citizens, even protesters.
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12 minutes ago
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No More Student Visas? No Problem.
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China would like to have its own Harvards, rather than sending its elite students to the United States, for political and cultural reasons as well as economic ones. Chinese authorities have long worried that the hundreds of thousands of students it exports to America will absorb undesirable ideas about democracy and civil liberties—and that they will access information about China that is suppressed at home, such as the story of the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. In fact, many young Chinese who study in the United States seem to enjoy American freedoms and seek to stay rather than return to serve the motherland. Beijing has tried to deal with this in part by monitoring the activities of its students in the U.S. and attempting to hold them firmly to the party line, including by harassing the families back home of those who stray. Within China, authorities can more easily confine students inside the government's propaganda bubble, which in recent years has become more airtight. 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12 minutes ago
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Tim Walz lets loose in rant-filled talk with liberal think tank
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