Trump's broad definition of ‘insurrection' looms over Los Angeles
In September 2020, President Donald Trump suggested he was hamstrung to crack down on at-times-violent racial justice demonstrations in cities like Portland, Oregon.
'Look, we have laws. We have to go by the laws,' Trump said at an ABC News town hall, adding: 'We can't call in the National Guard unless we're requested by a governor.'
Trump noted there was one way he could do that – by invoking the Insurrection Act – but added that 'there's no reason to ever do that, even in a Portland case.'
Something has clearly changed since then.
Trump this weekend became the first president in about 60 years to call in the National Guard without a request from a governor – to help quell protests in Los Angeles against Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids.
He did so without invoking the Insurrection Act – the 1807 law that allows the president to deploy American soldiers to police US streets in extreme circumstances. That means the guard has limited authorities that don't include law enforcement, as CNN legal analyst Steve Vladeck noted. Even that more limited decision, though, has been criticized as overzealous and heavy-handed by some experts, given fears it could inflame the situation.
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But Trump has clearly left open the possibility of ratcheting things up and possibly even doing what he said five years ago there was 'no reason to ever do': invoking the Insurrection Act to deal with demonstrators. Northern Command said Sunday that 500 US Marines were on 'prepared to deploy' status.
Trump was asked Sunday whether the situation was an insurrection, and he said no. But just after 10 p.m. ET, he posted on Truth Social: 'Paid insurrectionists!'
The president again used the term on Monday, telling reporters upon his return to the White House that the 'people that are causing the problem are professional agitators' before going on to call them 'insurrectionists.'
Top White House adviser Stephen Miller has been calling the situation in Los Angeles an insurrection for days.
And indeed, for Trump, Miller and their allies, the bar for 'insurrection' appears quite different than it was five years ago. After many labeled the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol an insurrection, Trump and MAGA have spent years applying that label extremely broadly to other things.
The idea seems to have been to 'whatabout' the term and water it down by suggesting other events are the 'real' insurrections – like the protests after George Floyd's murder.
But Trump's broad definition of that term looms large as the administration considers something he's long entertained: dispatching the military on US soil. It has almost seemed like Trump and Co. see themselves surrounded by insurrections.
Among the situations Trump has previously attached the 'insurrection' label to:
Antifa ('they're causing insurrection')
His baseless claims of a 'stolen' 2020 election ('the real insurrection happened on November 3rd')
Unspecified enemies within the United States ('insurrectionists roam free')
A border influx ('when you talk about insurrection, what they're doing, that's the real deal')
Then-President Joe Biden ('I'm not an Insurrectionist … Crooked Joe Biden is!!!')
Miller – a key figure in the White House on such matters – has appended that label to many of these things and more.
He's most often used it in relation to the border under Biden. But he's also repeatedly accused judges who ruled against Trump of a 'legal insurrection.' He's called pro-Palestinian demonstrators a 'pro-Hamas insurrection.' And he accused those who protested the Supreme Court in 2022 – including in some cases apparently illegally at justices' homes – of waging an 'open insurrection.'
It's worth emphasizing that many of these things don't qualify as insurrections.
While Trump and his allies balked at people labeling January 6 an insurrection, there's little doubt that it met the definition. That word is generally defined as a violent revolt or rebellion against the government. The attack on the US Capitol was a violent attempt to effectively change the makeup of that government by overturning the election result – and by attacking an actual seat of power.
In other words, an insurrection isn't about the level of violence; it's about the target and purpose of it.
Merely protesting or even engaging in violence while doing so doesn't automatically make something an insurrection. Nor do adverse court rulings and an influx of undocumented immigrants constitute a rebellion.
Of course, Trump has shown he's more than happy to stretch the bounds of words and the law in his quest to expand his power and go after perceived enemies.
The question from here is why Trump hasn't gone there on invoking the Insurrection Act. He and Miller have now invoked that specific word multiple times in reference to the situation in Los Angeles, and preparing the Marines to possibly come in suggests this is very much on the table.
Perhaps the White House has some qualms about the politics of what could come from the more in-your-face federal presence Trump has spent years entertaining. Or perhaps, as Vladeck wagers, the initial deployment of the National Guard could be a precursor.
'In other words, it's possible that this step is meant to both be and look modest,' Vladeck wrote in his newsletter Saturday, 'so that, if and when it 'fails,' the government can invoke its failure as a basis for a more aggressive domestic deployment of troops.'
Only time will tell. But we're clearly operating in a very different political world than we were five years ago. Trump seems to have developed a very broad sense of what constitutes an insurrection and plenty of reasons to potentially do what he said 'there's no reason to ever do.'
Indeed, he's already gone further than he did before.
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Atlantic
24 minutes ago
- Atlantic
Stephen Miller Triggers Los Angeles
During a lull in the chanting outside the federal building targeted by protesters in downtown Los Angeles this week, I walked up behind a hooded young man wearing a mask and carrying a can of spray paint. He began to deface the marble facade in big black letters. WHEN TYRANNY BECOMES LAW, REBELLION BECOMES DUTY—THOMAS JEFFERSON, he wrote, adding his tag, SMO, in smaller font. SMO told me that he is 21, Mexican American, an Angeleno, and a 'history buff' who thinks about the Founding Fathers more than the average tagger does. He said he wanted to write something that stood out from the hundreds of places where FUCK ICE now appears. 'I needed a better message that would inspire more people to remember that our history as Americans is deeply rooted in being resistant to the ones who oppress us,' he told me. 'Our Founding Fathers trusted that we the people would take it into our hands to fight back against a government who no longer serves the people.' (The quote, although spurious, captures some of the ideas that Jefferson put into the Declaration of Independence, according to the Thomas Jefferson Foundation.) Whether what's occurring in Los Angeles is a noble rebellion, a destructive riot, or a bit of both, the protests here have been the most intense demonstrations against President Donald Trump and his policies since he retook office. They were set off by a new, more aggressive phase of Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids across the city last week. But it's important to keep some perspective on the size of the confrontations. Los Angeles County covers more than 4,000 square miles, with a population of 10 million, and across much of that sunny expanse, life has carried on as usual this week. Missy Ryan and Jonathan Lemire: The White House is delighted with events in Los Angeles The protesters' focal point has been the federal building in downtown Los Angeles where several Department of Homeland Security agencies, including ICE, have offices. Just across the 101 freeway is the El Pueblo de Los Angeles historic plaza, which marks the site where settlers of Native American, African, and European heritage first arrived in 1781. Nearly every city block in this part of town is taken up by a courthouse or some other stone edifice of law or government, including the Art Deco tower of Los Angeles City Hall. In a city built on shaky ground, these civic structures are meant to project stability and permanence. But L.A.'s layered, fraught history seemed very much on the minds of many demonstrators I spoke with, who told me that they felt like their right to belong—regardless of legal status—was under attack. Although the crowd of protesters has not been especially large, drawing at most a few thousand people, it has been a microcosm of Los Angeles and the deep-blue Democratic coalition that has dominated the city for decades. It's a mix of young Hispanic people—many the children of first-generation immigrants—and older liberals, college students, and left-wing activists; also present is a contingent of younger, more militant protesters, who have been eager to confront police and inflict damage on the city's buildings and institutions, and film themselves doing it. At one point on Monday, I watched a group of jumpy teen boys in hoods and masks who appeared no older than 15 or 16 approach one of the last unblemished surfaces on the federal building. One shook a spray can and began writing in large, looping letters. The nozzle wasn't working well, and his friends began to rush him. Trump is a BICH, he wrote, and ran away. Observing the crowd and speaking with protesters over the past several days, I couldn't help but think of Stephen Miller, the top Trump aide who has ordered immigration officials to arrest and deport more and more people, encouraging them to do so in the most attention-grabbing of ways. The version of Los Angeles represented by the protesters is the one Miller deplores. The city has a voracious demand for workers that, for decades, has mostly looked past legal status and allowed newcomers from around the world to live and work without much risk of arrest and deportation. Trump and Miller have upended that in a way many people here describe as a punch in the face. Los Angeles, specifically the liberal, upper-middle-class enclave of Santa Monica, is Miller's hometown, and it became the foil for his archconservative political identity. He is often described as the 'architect' of Trump's immigration policy, but his role as a political strategist—and chief provocateur—is much bigger than that. It is no fluke that Los Angeles is where Miller could most aggressively assert the ideas he champions in Trump's MAGA movement: mass deportations and a maximal assertion of executive power. No matter if it means calling out U.S. troops to suppress a backlash triggered by those policies. 'Huge swaths of the city where I was born now resemble failed third world nations. A ruptured, balkanized society of strangers,' Miller wrote Monday on X. He was attacking Governor Gavin Newsom for suing to reverse the Trump administration's takeover of the California National Guard—the first time the government has federalized state forces since 1965. Trump has also called up 700 U.S. Marines. Miller was defending the use of force to subdue protesters, but he was really talking about something bigger in his hometown. This was a culture war, with real troops. What was the spark? On May 21, Miller and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem brought the heads of ICE's regional offices to Washington for a dressing-down. Trump had promised the largest mass-removal campaign in U.S. history and wanted 1 million deportations a year. ICE officers had been making far more arrests in American communities than under Joe Biden, but they were well short of Trump's desired pace. Miller demanded 3,000 arrests a day—a nearly fourfold increase—and demoted several top ICE officials who weren't hitting their targets. Miller's push is just a warm-up. The Republican funding bill Trump wants to sign into law by Independence Day would formalize his goal of 1 million deportations annually, and furnish more than $150 billion for immigration enforcement, including tens of billions for more ICE officers, contractors, detention facilities, and removal flights. If Los Angeles and other cities are recoiling now, how will they respond when ICE has the money to do everything Miller wants? Trump and his 'border czar,' the former ICE acting director Tom Homan, had been insisting for months that the deportation campaign would prioritize violent criminals and avoid indiscriminate roundups. Miller has told ICE officials to disregard that and to hit Home Depot parking lots. So they have. The number of arrests reported by ICE has soared past 2,000 a day in recent weeks. Backed by the Border Patrol, the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and other federal law-enforcement agencies pressed into helping ICE, officers are arresting people who show up for immigration-court appointments or periodic 'check-ins' to show that they have remained in compliance with court orders. Last week in Los Angeles, ICE teams began showing up at those Home Depot parking lots and work sites, including a downtown apparel factory. This was a redline for many Angelenos. Protesters told me that it was the moment Miller and Trump went from taunts and trolling to something more personal and threatening. About a third of the city's residents are foreign-born. Juliette Kayyem: Trump's gross misuse of the National Guard 'This is humiliating,' Hector Agredano, a 30-year-old community-college instructor who was demonstrating on Sunday outside a Pasadena hotel, told me. ICE officers were rumored to be staying at the location and two others nearby, drawing dozens of protesters who chanted and carried signs demanding ICE out of LA! 'They are tearing apart our families,' Agredano told me. 'We will not stand for this. They cannot sleep safely at night while our communities are being terrorized.' Some activists have been trying to track ICE vehicles and show up where officers make arrests to film and protest. More established activist groups are organizing vigils and marches while urging demonstrators to remain peaceful. They have struggled to contain the younger, angrier elements of the crowd downtown who lack their patience. On Sunday, I watched protesters block the southbound lanes of the 101 until police cleared them with tear gas. Some in the crowd hurled water bottles and debris down at officers and set off bottle rockets and cherry bombs. The police responded with flash-bangs, which detonate with a burst of light. There were so many explosions happening, it wasn't easy to tell if they belonged to the protesters or to law enforcement. I tried approaching a police line, and a boom sounded near my head, ringing my ears. One group of vandals summoned several Waymo self-driving cars to the street next to the plaza where the city was founded and set them ablaze. People in the crowd hooted and cheered at the leaping flames, and the cars' melting batteries and sensors sent plumes of oily black smoke toward police helicopters circling above. Firetrucks arrived and put out the last of the flames, leaving little piles of gnarled metal. City officials grew more alarmed the following evening, when smaller groups of masked teenagers rampaged through downtown and looted a CVS, an Apple Store, and several other businesses, prompting Mayor Karen Bass to set an 8 p.m. curfew in the area yesterday. The smoke and flames began shifting attention away from the administration's immigration imagery has been giddily watched by White House officials, and it's fueled speculation that it could create an opening for Miller to attempt to invoke the Insurrection Act. For years he has longingly discussed the wartime power, which would give troops a direct law-enforcement role on U.S. streets, potentially including immigration arrests. Yesterday, Trump said that he would not allow Los Angeles to be 'invaded and conquered by a foreign enemy,' and that he would 'liberate' the country's second-largest city. His send-in-the-Marines order underscored his apparent eagerness to deal with the demonstrators as combatants, rather than as civilians and American citizens. Since Trump's announcement, protesters have been on the lookout for the Marines, wondering if their arrival would signal a darker, more violent phase of the government's response. But military officials said today that the Marine units will need to receive more training in civilian deployments before they go to Los Angeles. Despite the attention on the federalized California National Guard troops, they have had a minimal role so far, standing guard at the entrance to the federal building where SMO and other taggers have left messages for Trump and ICE. Mayor Bass said that about 100 soldiers were stationed there as of today. Trump has activated 4,000, and there are signs that their role is already expanding: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posted a photo yesterday of soldiers with rifles and full combat gear standing guard for ICE officers making street arrests. 'This We'll Defend,' he wrote. David Frum: For Trump, this is a dress rehearsal In downtown Los Angeles, though, the LAPD and the California Highway Patrol—which are under the control of the state and local Democratic leaders—have been left to handle violent protesters and looters. By insisting that Trump's troop deployment is unnecessary and provocative, Newsom and Bass are under more pressure to make sure that their forces, not Trump's, can keep a lid on the anger. Their officers have fired tear gas, flash-bang grenades, and a kind of less-than-lethal projectile known as a sponge grenade that leaves bruises and welts. One Australian television reporter was hit while doing a live report; many others have been shot at point-blank range. Over more than three days of street confrontations, there have been no deaths or reports of serious injuries. Some protesters gathered up the spent sponge munitions as souvenirs. With a hard foam nose and a thick plastic base, they resemble Nerf darts from hell. I met one protester, carrying a camera, who wore a bandage around his forearm where he'd been struck minutes earlier. Castro—he wouldn't give me his first name—told me that he was a 39-year-old security guard whose parents are from El Salvador. He likened the pain to a sprained ankle. 'I was born and raised in Los Angeles. I support, I love, I stand for America. I love the USA,' he told me. 'I'm here today to support our people of Los Angeles. That's it.' Some Democrats outside the state have chafed at the sight of protesters waving Mexican flags and those of other nations, which Trump officials have seized upon as evidence of anti-Americanism. Protesters told me the flags of their or their parents' home countries are not intended as a sign of loyalty to another nation. Quite a few protesters waved the Stars and Stripes too, or a hybrid of the American flag and their home country's. Hailey, a 23-year-old welder carrying a Guatemalan flag, told me she wanted to display her heritage at a protest that brought together people from all over. That was part of belonging to California, she said: 'I was born on American soil, but I just think it's appropriate to celebrate where my family is from. And America is supposed to be a celebration of that.' Dylan Littlefield, a bishop who joined a rally on Sunday led by union organizers, told me that he grew up in L.A. with Italian Americans displaying their flag. 'No one has ever made a single comment or had any objection to the Italian flag flying, so the people that are making the flag issue now really are trying to create a battle where there's no battle to be had,' he said. The protests against Trump in Los Angeles have picked up, to some extent, where those in Portland left off. In 2020, anti-ICE protesters targeted the federal courthouse in downtown Portland, and DHS sent federal agents and officers to defend the building and confront the crowds. The destructive standoff carried on for months, and the city's Democratic mayor and Oregon's Democratic governor eventually had to use escalating force against rioters. Newsom and Bass seem keen to avoid the price they would pay politically if that were to occur here, but for now they are caught between the need to suppress the violent elements of the protests and their desire to blame the White House for fanning the flames. Anne Applebaum: This is what Trump does when his revolution sputters Trump officials say they have delighted in the imagery of L.A. mayhem and foreign-flag waving, but they face a threat, too, if protests spread beyond blue California and become a nationwide movement. That would take pressure off Newsom and Bass. Doe Hain, a retired teacher I met in Pasadena this week holding a Save Democracy sign for passing motorists, told me that the ICE push into California symbolizes the worst fears of an authoritarian takeover by a president unfazed by the idea of turning troops against Americans. 'I don't really think I can protest the existence of ICE as a federal agency, but we can protest the way that they're doing things,' Hain said. 'They're bypassing people's rights and the laws, and that's not right.' Few people I spoke with said they thought the protests in Los Angeles would diminish, even if more troops arrive in the city. There have been fewer reports of ICE raids since the protests erupted, and one Home Depot I visited on Monday—south of Los Angeles, in Huntington Park—had had only a handful of arrests that day, bystanders told me. ICE teams had moved to other locations in Southern California and the Central Valley. They will surely be back. At a minimum, Miller and other Trump officials have come away from this round of confrontations with the imagery they wanted. Today, DHS released a none-too-subtle social-media ad with a dark, ominous filter, featuring the flaming Waymos, Mexican flags, looters, and rock throwers. 'RESTORE LAW AND ORDER NOW!' it said, with the number for an ICE tip line. It fades out on an image of a burning American flag.
Yahoo
30 minutes ago
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Trump Unironically Attends 'Les Misérables' As Protests Spread
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30 minutes ago
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Family of former Fort Novosel namesake believes new order is a slap in the face: ‘I am just appalled'
Ft. Novosel, Ala. (WDHN) — President Donald Trump announced on Tuesday that his administration would work to change the names of seven Army bases, including Fort Novosel, that previously bore the names of Confederate Army officers. K. Denise Rucker Krepp, a cousin of Confederate Colonel Edmund Rucker, for whom Fort Novosel was previously named, believes the order from President Trump to restore the names of army bases is a step backward, despite the base being named in honor of a different Rucker. 'Rucker is not that important. My family committed treason,' Krepp said. 'We should not be looking to the past. Why are you doing this, and as a Rucker, I am just appalled.' Trump says he will reverse Fort Novosel name change After almost two years, with the base renamed to Fort Novosel, President Trump called for all Army bases that had their names changed in 2023 under the previous administration to revert to their original names. 'We won a lot of battles out of those forts, it's no time to change,' President Donald Trump said. 'It was a gut punch, it hurts, and it was quite sad. My family committed treason, lost a war, and an American base in the United States should have never been named in honor of one of my family members,' Krepp said. The base was renamed in honor of Chief Warrant Officer 4 Michael Novosel Sr., a local Army aviator who served in three wars and saved 29 soldiers during a medevac mission. It will now be in honor of a Missouri native, Captain Edward Rucker, a distinguished service cross recipient pilot for extraordinary heroism in World War 1. Fort Novosel to be reverted to Fort Rucker with new namesake. Who is it? 'It's being named for him because of his last name, not about what he did — Novosel was a hero, and that's who it should be named after,' Krepp said. 'Heartbreaking to see the disrespect to Vietnam veterans. Novosel was a Vietnam veteran, and when you take his name off it's disrespectful to his family and everybody who fought,' She added. Krepp encourages people to do research on Novosel, and she says, despite the name change, she will still refer to it as Fort Novosel. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
