The White House Is Delighted With Events in Los Angeles

The Atlantic

2 days ago

The last time President Donald Trump tried to send military forces into American streets to put down civil unrest, in June 2020, Pete Hegseth was positioned outside the White House with a Kevlar helmet and riot shield.
Major Hegseth's mobilization as part of a District of Columbia National Guard unit summoned to restore order in the nation's capital, where protests had erupted following the police murder of George Floyd, occurred as Pentagon leaders scrambled to avert what they feared could be a confrontation between active-duty U.S. forces and their fellow Americans.
Today, Hegseth is second only to the president in directing the administration's use of the National Guard and active-duty Marines to respond to unrest over immigration raids in Los Angeles. And this time, the military's civilian leadership isn't acting as a brake on Trump's impulse to escalate the confrontation. The Hegseth-led Pentagon is an accelerant.
The administration's decision to federalize 4,000 California National Guard forces, contrary to Governor Gavin Newsom's wishes, and to dispatch 700 active-duty Marines to the Los Angeles area, marks a break with decades of tradition under which presidents have limited their use of the military on American soil. If there are any internal misgivings about busting through yet another democratic norm, they haven't surfaced publicly. Indeed, officials at the White House told us they are satisfied with the way the L.A. confrontation has unfolded. They believe that it highlights their focus on immigration and law and order, and places Democrats on the wrong side of both. One widely circulated photo—showing a masked protester standing in front of a burning car, waving a Mexican flag—has been embraced by Trump supporters as a distillation of the conflict: a president unafraid to use force to defend an American city from those he deems foreign invaders.
'We couldn't have scripted this better,' said a senior White House aide granted anonymity to discuss internal conversations. 'It's like the 2024 election never ended: Trump is strong while Democrats are weak and defending the indefensible.'
Democrats, of course, take a different view, and say the administration's actions have only risked triggering further violence. Retired officers who study how the armed forces have been used in democracies told us they share those concerns. They point to the damage that Trump's orders could do to the military's relationship with the citizens it serves.
'We should be very careful, cautious, and even reluctant to use the military inside our country,' Bradley Bowman, a former Army officer who heads the defense program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracy, told us.
Conor Friedersdorf: Averting a worst-case scenario in Los Angeles
State and local authorities typically use law-enforcement personnel as a first response to civil disturbances or riots, followed by National Guard forces if needed. Retired Major General Randy Manner, who served as acting vice chief of the National Guard Bureau during the Obama administration, said the federalizing of California Guard forces—putting them under presidential rather than state control, a move allowed with certain limits—pulls those service members away from their civilian jobs and makes it harder to complete planned training or exercises. 'Basically, the risk does not justify the investment of these forces, and it will negatively impact on readiness,' Manner told us.
Retired officers we spoke with also drew a distinction between the involvement of National Guard and active-duty forces. Whereas National Guard troops assist citizens after natural disasters and have the advantage of knowing the communities they serve, active-duty forces are primarily trained to 'see the enemy and neutralize the enemy,' said Mark Cancian, a retired Marine colonel now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. 'When you're dealing with U.S. citizens, no matter what they're doing, that's not the right mindset.'
'This is not Fallujah,' Bowman added. 'This is Los Angeles.'
Juliette Kayyem: Trump's gross misuse of the National Guard
This morning, Hegseth made his first congressional appearance since his bruising confirmation process, appearing before a House committee. His tone with Democrats was at times combative. When Representative Betty McCollum, a Minnesota Democrat, asked the defense secretary what the cost of the California deployment would be, he declined to provide a figure and instead pivoted to criticism of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz for the state's response to the violence that followed Floyd's killing in 2020. (Military officials said later they expected the Los Angeles deployment, as envisioned, to cost roughly $134 million.)
'If you've got millions of illegals, you don't know where they're coming from, they're waving flags from foreign countries and assaulting police officers, that's a problem,' Hegseth told lawmakers.
Trump, for his part, told reporters that anyone who tries to protest at the Saturday parade celebrating the 250th birthday of the U.S. Army will 'be met with very big force.' He also said that he wouldn't hesitate to invoke the Insurrection Act, which would permit him to employ the military for law enforcement or to suppress a rebellion, if he believed that circumstances required. Speaking to troops at Fort Bragg in North Carolina later in the day, the president promised to stop the 'anarchy' in California. ' We will liberate Los Angeles and make it free, clean, and safe again,' he said. 'We will not allow an American city to be invaded and conquered by a foreign enemy.'
Some Republicans have privately expressed worry that Trump may overplay a winning hand. Even in the West Wing, two people we spoke with tried to downplay the incendiary rhetoric from Trump and Hegseth. They stressed that, to this point, National Guard forces have been in a defensive posture, protecting federal buildings. Although they believe that Trump has the political advantage at the moment, they acknowledged there would be real risks if U.S. troops got involved in violence. 'We don't know who would get blamed but no one wins if that happens,' one senior aide told us. 'No one wants to see that.'
Hegseth's support for using active-duty troops in Los Angeles stands in contrast to what his predecessor did in 2020. At that time, Defense Secretary Mark Esper, along with Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley, scrambled to block Trump's desire to employ active-duty forces against the demonstrators protesting racial violence. The president had mused about shooting protesters in the legs, Esper wrote later. To satisfy his boss while also avoiding a dangerous confrontation, the defense chief called active-duty forces from Fort Bragg to Northern Virginia but sought to keep them out of the fray.
Tom Nichols: Trump is using the National Guard as bait
In his 2024 book The War on Warrior s, Hegseth described how his experience as a D.C. Guardsman in 2020 crystallized his views about the divide between military personnel and what he saw as the degenerate protesters who were lobbing bricks and bottles of urine at the citizen soldiers. When the D.C. Guard was again summoned seven months later, to help secure the 2021 inauguration following the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, Hegseth was told to stand down because fellow Guardsmen suspected that one of his tattoos was a sign of extremism. (Hegseth has maintained it is part of his Christian faith.)
Hegseth was angered by his exclusion and resigned from the Guard. That experience remains with him as he attempts to reshape the military, and its role in society, in line with Trump's worldview. As he has written: 'My trust for this Army is irrevocably broken.'