Court Gives Trump License to Militarize U.S. Cities Against Protests
Jun 20 2025On Thursday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit overturned a lower court's order that California's National Guard be returned to Governor Gavin Newsom's control, ruling that President Trump was justified in federalizing the state's Guard without Newsom's concurrence.
The three-judge panel, two of them Trump appointees, ruled unanimously that the protests over ICE agents seizing brown-skinned people off the streets of Los Angeles had become overheated enough that "affording appropriate deference to the president’s determination" is warranted, "that he likely acted within his authority (italics ours)".
President Trump exulted in the decision, insulting the governor in the process, tweeting:
"The judges obviously realized that Gavin Newsom is incompetent and ill prepared, but this is much bigger than Gavin because all over the United States, if our Cities, and our people, need protection, we are the ones to give it to them should State and Local Police be unable, for whatever reason, to get the job done. This is a great decision for our Country..." (capitalization his).
This has been his dream, not to govern, but to rule. The doctrine of states' rights is not for him. Trump has long desired to use the United States military against the American people. Restrained by advisers who told him he needed to wait for governors to ask for federal help, he has regretted not taking direct action against the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. "The next time, I am not waiting” to send in the National Guard or the military, he said.
He lunged for the first opportunity to make good on that threat: the protest in Los Angeles.
The court decision pertained only to Los Angeles but Trump immediately extended it to "all over the United States". We can now expect
him to leap at any pretext to commandeer state National Guards and order troops into blue cities such as New York, Chicago, San Francisco.
tough guyDonald Trump is naturally inclined to violence. It was at the private military high school he attended that classmates said he learned to be a bully. In a Playboy magazine interview a year after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, he said that at first,
"the Chinese government almost blew it. Then, they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength. That shows you the power of strength. Our country is right now perceived as weak.”
At his rallies before the 2016 election, video showed him frequently yelling, "I'd like to punch him in the face" at a protester and telling the audience to "Knock the crap out of 'em." In his first inauguration address he spoke of "the crime, and the gangs, and the drugs" and "This American carnage stops right here and stops right now." He wanted to send the military into Portland (Oregon) in the summer of 2020 — rioters were attacking federal buildings — but his aides persuaded him to allow local authorities to predominate.
From his first days as president in 2017 he spoke of "my military" and "my generals" and just now, using the D.C. parade he had ordered up to fund-raise, he asked donors "to help my military parade". In his first term as president, when peaceful protesters in Lafayette Park across from the White House blocked his way to St. John's Church for a photo-op, he asked his Defense Secretary Mark Esper, "Can't you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?" Back then he had minders who told him 'no'. What would Pete Hegseth's answer be?
indiscriminate detention
The protest n Los Angeles arose when ICE agents grabbed 46 seamstresses at a workplace in the garment district. Mayor Karen Bass said, "We started off by hearing the administration wanted to go after violent felons, gang members, drug dealers", but Trump's avidly anti-immigrant homeland security adviser Stephen Miller became impatient with ICE's rate of deportation and demanded that it meet a goal of 3,000 a day. He bet he and a handful of agents could go out on the streets of Washington, D.C., and arrest 30 people right off. "Just go out there and arrest illegal aliens”, Miller told top ICE officials.
So the agency set about scooping up the day laborers who congregate mornings at a Home Depot parking lot hoping to find work, customers at 7-Eleven stores, workers at carwashes and nail salons, dishwashers and gardeners, and most stunningly snatching people at courthouses who had come to fulfill their legal obligation to attend immigration proceedings.
Peaceful at first, the protest against ICE's actions was nothing the nation's third largest police force couldn't handle when the inevitable criminal element, not there to protest at all, started setting fire to cars and smashing storefront windows. 
But it was no different than what followed the Los Angeles Dodgers winning the World Series last October when a bus was set afire, shops were looted, and fireworks thrown at police.
Yet without any request from Governor Gavin Newsom, Trump, out to “liberate Los Angeles from the Migrant Invasion" of "violent insurrectionist mobs", federalized the California National Guard and sent 2,000 troops into the city as well as 700 active-duty Marines. Treating Americans as enemy, the venomous Homeland Security Secretary and dictator-wannabe Kristi Noem went beyond, seemingly bestowing upon herself the power to remove elected officials,
“We are staying here to liberate this city from the socialist and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into this city.”
On Monday, Trump called for Newsom to be arrested.
Newsom fought backCiting "federal agents using rubber bullets, flash-bang grenades, and tear gas", an angry Newsom in a speech called out Donald Trump for commandeering the Guard "without consulting California law enforcement leaders" deploying them "on our streets illegally and for no reason". For Newsom,
”This brazen use of power by a sitting president enflamed a combustible situation...That's when the downward spiral began.”
Trump mobilized yet another 2,000 National Guard.
Except the protest was not large. It occupied only a few blocks in a downtown area into which — said some of the local commentary — multitudes of Angelinos had probably never set foot. The huge, sprawling city went about life unaffected. You would not know that from Fox News prime time which covered only the vandalism and none of the peaceful daytime protesting of people milling about with their signs and singing. Jesse Watters continued his quest to drive a wedge between the American people by looping video that showed only the looting and car fires. The LAPD made arrests. Mayor Karen Bass ordered a curfew. The vandalism subsided.
Thirty-three years ago the rioting in he wake of the acquittal of the police beatings of Rodney King led to 63 dead, 2,000 injured, and 12,000 arrests in Los Angeles when the governor and mayor asked for federal help and President George H. W. Bush federalized the state guard and brought in Marines and Army from bases nearby.
Trump's action is wildly disproportionate to the few hundred protesters this time around. Trump’s thousands of Guard reservists, at first lacking food and water and sleeping on office floors, pulled away from their civilian jobs and family for at least 60 days per his order, already have nothing to do.
But he had to satisfy his need to dominate, to strut that the military is his to order into any American city whenever its people object to his edicts. “We’re going to have troops everywhere”, he has said.
The Speech at Fort BraggOn the Tuesday after the Saturday he ordered in the National Guard, Trump spoke at Fort Bragg in North Carolina to honor the Army on its 250th birthday. He began a proper speech praising the troops, their patriotism, their service to the country, but it soon resembled his rallies, laced with partisan political slander that had no place in front of soldiers and a military that historically avoids the political and stresses neutrality.
He called protesters in Los Angeles “animals” and “a foreign enemy”. He called predecessor Joe Biden,
“a grossly, grossly unfit president who listened to whoever was operating the autopen…I've known this guy for a long time. He was never the sharpest bulb…You think this crowd would've showed up for Biden? I don't think so.”
The troops applauded.
He prattled about his “big beautiful bill” and tax cuts irrelevant to the those in uniform, bragged about winning the “too big to rig” 2024 election, told them he won the popular vote “by millions and millions” (actually 2.3 million, 1.5%), and disgracefully sought to sow among our soldiers distrust in the nation’s elections by telling them that the 2020 “election was rigged and stolen. We all know it.”
He told our military to disbelieve…
”…the fake news back there, the fake news, ladies and gentlemen, look at them, look at them, aye yai yai, what I have to put up with. Fake news. What I have to put up with.”
The troops booed.
He told the soldiers that had he not “deployed thousands of National Guard troops and hundreds of Marines” to Los Angeles against
“the vicious and violent mob, and some of the radical left… if we didn't do this, Los Angeles, it would be burning to the ground right now”
He was indoctrinating the troops with the MAGA point of view. When he told them that, like the restoration of their fort to the name “Bragg”,
”we are also going to be restoring the names to Fort Pickett, Fort Hood, Fort Gordon, Fort Rucker, Fort Polk, Fort A.P. Hill, and Fort Robert E. Lee,”
…they cheered, duped by a president who wishes to restore honors to all of these officers of the Confederacy, traitors one and all who rebelled against the United States. Thom Hartmann, who writes The Hartmann Report, reminded us that,
”Robert E. Lee…killed more Americans than we’ve lost in every war since the American Revolution, combined. He was the largest mass murderer of Americans in our nation’s history.”
What are we to divine from this, this mania to rename bases after the treasonous? Is Trump enlisting the troops to join him in rebelling against America? Might he be thinking of suspending elections next year, fearful of losing the House in the mid-terms, and needs to put loyal troops in the streets around America to deal with the uproar? Will he be speaking at each of these bases as they are renamed so as to win the military’s support which he’ll need if he actually does run for re-election to a third term in 2028?
Seth Moulton is a Democratic member of Congress from Massachusetts and a Marine captain who served four tours in Iraq. About Trump and the military he says,
“He's always wanted to use them to enforce his political agenda here at home. No marine signs up for this. No Marine signs up to attack fellow Americans. Trump doesn't understand that, of course, because he dodged the draft. He let someone else go to Vietnam in his place."
Our guess is that Moulton will attempt a second run for the presidency in 2028, possibly against Trump — if there is an election — because he, too, sees the looming threat:
”We already know that he's perfectly willing to overthrow democratic elections. Now we know he's willing to use the military. You put those two things together and you have a classic dictatorship...Clearly that's what Trump has in mind.”
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