2 days ago
The 1600: The Political Showdown We Deserve
The Insider's Track
Good morning,
Four days from now, the Army will celebrate its 250th birthday. The original plan had been for a daytime festival on the National Mall, complete with displays, flyovers, meet-and-greets with Medal of Honor recipients, etc. Then President Trump, whose 79th birthday happens to also fall on Saturday, decided he wanted a bigger event complete with a grand evening parade. He's been wanting to preside over a military parade since his first term, when he went to France and was awed by the Bastille Day celebrations. (Maybe it's just me but I don't think the USA needs to emulate the French when it comes to the military).
They told him then it was a bad idea and the DC streets would just get chewed up from the tank treads. More trouble than it's worth. But now he's back and there's no one left to say no, so Trump is getting his parade. Thousands of soldiers will march down Constitution Avenue alongside M1 Abrams tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles and howitzers while the president looks on. Very Pyongyang-on-the-Potomac. Hopefully we keep the big, phallic ICBMs in their silos or else it's really gonna look like something out of Putin or Lil Kim's fantasies.
Put aside the dumb optics of Abrams tanks rolling through DC, this is happening at a precarious moment. All of this simmering rage that we're starting to see boil over, first on the streets of LA, will have a convenient new target. I hope I'm wrong and this event goes off fine, but you couldn't pay me to be in Washington this weekend.
The good news this morning seems to be that the clashes/riots in LA appear to have been more scattered overnight. Hundreds of Marines from Camp Pendleton are on their way to the city, which seems both inflammatory and unnecessary, but as we said yesterday, this is a fight the White House wants. Newsom is playing to his base, turning this into a referendum on Trump's draconian immigration raids while images of burning self-driving Waymos and Mexican flags become the lasting images on TV and social media. Trump is, cleverly, playing up Newsom as his foil because there would be no better situation for JD Vance in '28 than running against someone who presents as the embodiment of blue-state dysfunction. Everybody wins but us, the voters, as usual.
A couple other random thoughts on LA:
It's hard to take Trump's tough guy law-and-order stance seriously after he just pardoned every violent J6 protester, including those who attacked cops with flagpoles and bear spray.
Have we noticed how ICE is doing their most over-the-top, military-esque raids in deep blue cities? Do you think that's a coincidence? I sure haven't seen any big workplace raids in, say, South Dakota (where Kristi Noem is from), or Iowa, where Trump-voting farmers have been employing illegal immigrants just as long as anyone.
There's something amusing about watching the "Don't Tread on Me" right, people who are supposed to be skeptical of the federal government, all of a sudden come to the support of masked, anonymous federal agents jumping out of trucks to snatch people at their jobs and homes. And then refusing to acknowledge when they make mistakes and accidentally arrest or deport the wrong guy. Remember when they told us they were focused only on those here illegally with criminal records or who present a threat to the community?
Democrats who equivocate on this are digging their own grave. You simply cannot appear to be on the side of people throwing cement at cops. It doesn't matter that most of the protests were calm, or that things were relatively peaceful until the feds came in, or that LA is a sanctuary city and should therefore be immune from federal immigration enforcement. What matters with riots is the optics of disorder, and it never works in the protesters' favor when it comes to public opinion. I saw some talking head on CNN yesterday say that "99.9%" of L.A. was peaceful.
That may be true, but it's like saying JFK's trip to Dallas was 99.9% successful until he made that left onto Dealey Plaza.
The Rundown
As violence erupts out of immigration enforcement protests in Los Angeles, images of protestors waving Mexican flags became a focal point of the coverage and for the Trump administration's reaction.
Senior administration officials said this proved there had been an "invasion" by illegal immigrants, particularly over the past four years under former President Joe Biden, and that it was necessary to send in the National Guard and deport those in the country without legal status. Read the story.
Also happening:
New Jersey primaries: President Donald Trump's second-term agenda faces an early test with voters Tuesday in New Jersey, a blue state holding the first statewide elections since Trump won back the White House last year. "Trump looms large over this entire race on both sides of the aisle," said Ashley Koning, the director of the Eagleton Center for Public Interest Polling at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Read more.
President Donald Trump's second-term agenda faces an early test with voters Tuesday in New Jersey, a blue state holding the first statewide elections since Trump won back the White House last year. "Trump looms large over this entire race on both sides of the aisle," said Ashley Koning, the director of the Eagleton Center for Public Interest Polling at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Read more. Trade talks: President Donald Trump described China as "not easy" to deal with, but touted progress between the two countries as negotiations in London go into their second day. "We are doing well with China. China is not easy," Trump said. Read more.
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