Wednesday Reads: Things That Make Me Feel Sad

Good Afternoon!!

I’m feeling very sad today. I’ve actually been feeling sad and depressed for several days now. It just feels as if Trump is winning. He’s getting plenty of attention from his attack on Los Angeles, even though it’s illegal and so over-the-top as to be ridiculous. All this because people don’t like their law-abiding neighbors and co-workers being kidnapped by ICE thugs in masks.

Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” has faded into the background, but it’s still there, threatening to radically change our health care system and hurt millions of lower income and elderly people.

Yesterday, Trump gave a speech to active U.S. Army troops that was supposedly about the 250th anniversary of the army, but instead consisted of political attacks on Joe Biden and California and bragging about Trump’s supposed accomplishments. And the audience of young soldiers laughed and applauded. He left the stage to “YMCA” and even did his ridiculous fist “dance.”

This weekend Trump will celebrate his birthday with a sickening military parade reminiscent of those put on in Russia and North Korea. Those are only four of the things that are making me so sad.

I really don’t know where to begin, but here are some suggested reads.

The immigration protests and Trump’s military response:

Laurel Rosenhall at The New York Times: Newsom Tells Nation That Trump Is Destroying American Democracy.

Gov. Gavin Newsom made the case in a televised address Tuesday evening that President Trump’s decision to send military forces to immigration protests in Los Angeles has put the nation at the precipice of authoritarianism.

The California governor urged Americans to stand up to Mr. Trump, calling it a “perilous moment” for democracy and the country’s long-held legal norms.

California Governor Gavin Newsom

“California may be first, but it clearly won’t end here,” Mr. Newsom said, speaking to cameras from a studio in Los Angeles. “Other states are next. Democracy is next.”

“Democracy is under assault right before our eyes — the moment we’ve feared has arrived,” he added.

Mr. Newsom spoke on the fifth day of protests in Los Angeles against federal immigration raids that have sent fear and anger through many communities in Southern California. He said Mr. Trump had “inflamed a combustible situation” by taking over California’s National Guard, and by calling up 4,000 troops and 700 Marines.

“Trump is pulling a military dragnet all across Los Angeles,” Mr. Newsom said. “Well beyond his stated intent to just go after violent and serious criminals, his agents are arresting dishwashers, gardeners, day laborers and seamstresses.”

Lisa Needham at Public Notice: Trump’s ludicrously sloppy legal rationale for occupying LA.

Donald Trump’s constant willingness to ignore the Constitution and core principles of American democracy means we are forever playing catch-up, stumbling behind while explaining why he absolutely cannot legally do the thing he is doing.

Digging into questions like “can Trump federalize the California National Guard because heavily-armed Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers picked a fight with a few hundred random Californians outside of Home Depot and lost?” is not a thing we should have to do, because the answer is no. The issue is that Trump just does these things anyway and justifies them with incoherent explanations that read as if an especially vicious badger memorized fragments of the Constitution and the US Code.

So, as we barrel toward a military occupation of California — and, really, anywhere else Trump wants — it’s time to figure out what on earth is going on, with two enormous caveats.

First, there are legal scholars who have spent their entire careers studying the deployment of the military on United States soil who are still trying to sort out what is happening. That’s not because they lack expertise, but because the situation is so rare and the administration’s justifications are so sloppy. Second, things are evolving so quickly that explanations quickly become outdated, so one has to try to anticipate the administration’s next wildly illegal move….

Generally, the Posse Comitatus Act prohibits the use of federal troops for civilian law enforcement. State National Guards generally can’t run afoul of the Posse Comitatus Act because they are organized at the state level and report to a governor. That said, there are exceptions where, speaking only hypothetically, it would be completely legal for Trump to send National Guard members and even active duty troops to California. Identifying those possible situations is necessary to understand the relevant laws, but there’s no question that none of those situations currently exist in California or anywhere else.

The initial federalization of the California National Guard already happened on June 7 with Trump’s memo invoking 10 U.S.C. 12406. That allows state National Guards to be used in federal service for very limited reasons, but requires orders to be issued via the governor, a thing that definitely did not happen here.

Generally, the Posse Comitatus Act prohibits the use of federal troops for civilian law enforcement. State National Guards generally can’t run afoul of the Posse Comitatus Act because they are organized at the state level and report to a governor. That said, there are exceptions where, speaking only hypothetically, it would be completely legal for Trump to send National Guard members and even active duty troops to California. Identifying those possible situations is necessary to understand the relevant laws, but there’s no question that none of those situations currently exist in California or anywhere else.

National Guard arrives in Los Angeles

The initial federalization of the California National Guard already happened on June 7 with Trump’s memo invoking 10 U.S.C. 12406. That allows state National Guards to be used in federal service for very limited reasons, but requires orders to be issued via the governor, a thing that definitely did not happen here….

Trump could also invoke the Insurrection Act, which would allow him, in certain circumstances, to deploy a state National Guard even over the objection of the governor. Active-duty troops can only be sent in if the Insurrection Act is invoked, though it appears the Trump administration is just bypassing that step and sending in 700 Marines anyway.

Even if the administration hadn’t skipped getting Newsom’s agreement to federalize state National Guard members, the limits in section 12406 still apply. That section can only be used when (1) there is an invasion or danger of invasion by a foreign nation; (2) there is a rebellion or danger of rebellion against the government; or (3) the president cannot execute federal laws with the regular forces available. (Section 12406 has only been used once, in 1970, when President Nixon invoked it to have the National Guard help deliver mail during a postal worker strike.)

Read the whole thing at the Public Notice link.

Jamie Bouie at The New York Times (gift link): Trump Wants to Be a Strongman, but He’s Actually a Weak Man.

President Trump thinks it is a sign of strength to send in troops to deal with protesters in Los Angeles. To that end, he has federalized a portion of the California National Guard and mobilized nearby Marines to support Immigration and Customs Enforcement as it confronts large protests in opposition to its efforts to arrest and deport undocumented immigrant laborers in the city.

Trump wanted to do something like this in his first term, during the summer that sealed his fate as a failed first-term president. But Mark Esper, his secretary of defense, refused. The protests in Los Angeles are not nearly as large as those that consumed the country in 2020, but Trump wants a redo, and Pete Hegseth, Esper’s more sycophantic successor, is just as eager to unleash the coercive force of the United States government on the president’s political opponents as Trump is.

You can almost feel, emanating from the White House, a libidinal desire to do violence to protesters, as if that will, in one fell swoop, consolidate the Trump administration into a Trump regime, empowered to rule America both by force and the fear of force.

The problem for Trump, however, is that this immediate, and potentially unlawful, recourse to military force isn’t a show of strength; it’s a demonstration of weakness. It highlights the administration’s compromised political position and throws the overall weakness of its policy program into relief. Yes, a certain type of mind might see the president’s willingness to cross into outright despotism as evidence of brash confidence, of a White House that wants to fight it out on the streets with its most vocal opponents because it thinks it will win the war for the hearts and minds of the American people.

But strong, confident regimes are largely not in the habit of meeting protests with military force, nor do they escalate at the drop of the hat. The Trump administration seems to have exactly one tool at its disposal — blunt force — and it’s clear that it has no plan for what happens when Americans do not fear being hit.

The background:

Last month, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal, Miller, the president’s senior aide, confronted leadership at Immigration and Customs Enforcement with a demand: Deport more people. And while Trump promised during his campaign to focus on criminals and “the worst of the worst,” there was no way to meet his (and Miller’s) goals by carefully selecting targets.

Protesters and National Guard in Los Angeles

Instead, Miller, who was raised in nearby Santa Monica, “directed them to target Home Depot, where day laborers typically gather for hire, or 7-Eleven convenience stores,” The Journal reported, which is what ICE opted to do, conducting an immigration sweep last Friday “at the Home Depot in the predominantly Latino neighborhood of Westlake in Los Angeles, helping set off a weekend of protests around Los Angeles County, including at the federal detention center in the city’s downtown.” [….]

the administration’s crackdown on day laborers in the city sparked a predictable response from the community, which immediately rallied to their defense. Initially hundreds but soon thousands of residents went to the streets in what have been mostly peaceful protests, despite the police use of tear gas, flash-bang grenades, rubber bullets and other so-called less lethal armaments. But there has been property damage in the form of burned-out cars and broken windows. And this damage, along with a few instances of looting, is the president’s pretext for a military crackdown.

Read the rest at the NYT. I’ve included a gift link.

Amanda Marcotte has a few words for Stephen Miller at Salon: Stephen Miller can’t make America white. LA is paying for his impotent rage.

Donald Trump loves authoritarian theater, but let’s not forget that Stephen Miller is also to blame for the violence and chaos in Los Angeles. Last week, the right-wing Washington Examiner reported that Trump’s deputy chief of staff called a meeting with the top officials at Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to “eviscerate” them for falling far short of the ridiculous goal he set of 3,000 deportations a day. In their desperation to keep Miller happy, ICE has already been targeting legal immigrants for deportation, mostly because they’re easy to find, due to having registered with the government. ICE agents stake out immigration hearings for people with refugee status and round up people here with work or student visas for minor offenses like speeding tickets, all to get the numbers up. But these actions were not enough for Miller.

“Why aren’t you at Home Depot? Why aren’t you at 7-Eleven?” he reportedly screamed at ICE officials. One ICE leader protested that the agency’s lead, Tom Homan, said they’re supposed to be going after criminals, not people who are just working everyday jobs. Miller reportedly hit the ceiling, furious that arrests aren’t widespread and indiscriminate. Trump has repeatedly implied he was only targeting criminals, but as Charles Davis reported at Salon, that conflicts with his promise of “mass deportations.” Undocumented immigrants commit crimes at far lower rates than native-born Americans. The expansive efforts to find and arrest immigrants in California, which kicked off the protests, appear to be a direct reaction to Miller’s orders to grab as many people as possible, regardless of innocence.

But Miller doesn’t seem to care about crime. Or, perhaps he thinks having darker skin should be a crime. For Miller, the goal of “mass deportations” has never been about law and order, but about the fantasy of a white America. His desire to deport his way to racial homogeneity has always been not only deeply immoral, but pretty much impossible. His impotence shouldn’t breed complacency, however. As the violence in Los Angeles shows, petty rage can lead to all manner of evils.

Stephen Miller

The term “white nationalist” is often used interchangeably with “white supremacist,” but it has a specific meaning. White supremacists think the government should enshrine white people as a privileged class over all others. White nationalists, however, want America to be mostly, if not entirely, white — a goal that cannot be accomplished without mass violence. That Miller appears to lean more into the white nationalist camp is well known. In 2019, the Southern Poverty Law Center reviewed a pile of leaked emails Miller had sent to media allies that illustrated his obsession with white-ifying America. He repeatedly denounced legal immigration of non-white people and endorsed the idea that racial diversity is a threat to white people. He longed for a return to pre-1965 laws that banned most non-white immigrants from moving to America.

“Trump’s mass deportation project is actually a demographic engineering project,” Adam Serwer of the Atlantic explained on a recent Bulwark podcast, pointing to the administration’s expulsion of legal refugees of color while making exceptions to the “no refugee” policy for white South Africans. Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau defended the exception by claiming that “they can be assimilated easily into our country.”

But it’s clear this language is code for “white.” By any good-faith definition of the word, thousands of non-white people targeted for deportation have also assimilated. They have jobs. They get married. They have kids. They are part of their communities.

Sure enough, a sea of MAGA influencers have responded to the Los Angeles protests like parrots trained quite suddenly to say “ban third world immigration.”

Please read the whole thing. Amanda Marcotte is good.

The protests in LA have triggered more immigration protests around the country.

NPR’s Morning Edition: Protests grow across the U.S. as people push against Trump’s mass deportation policies.

NEW YORK — “ICE out of New York!”

Those were the words thousands of people chanted near the city’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) field office, and throughout the streets of Manhattan Tuesday night as part of a series of nationwide rallies against President Trump’s immigration sweeps and the deployment of the U.S. military in California.

NYC protest

“There are many voices in my community that can’t be here today out of fear of what the administration is doing, so I want to be here for them,” 19-year-old Jeanet told NPR as she joined hundreds of other protesters in lower Manhattan Tuesday night….

Across the country, protesters also took to the streets in Chicago, San Francisco, and Seattle, Dallas and half a dozen other cities.

The Trump administration has vowed to arrest 3,000 migrants a day. To accomplish that goal, the Department of Homeland Security has conducted raids all across the country — from a parking lot in a Los Angeles Home Depot, to a Dominican neighborhood in Puerto Rico, to a meatpacking plant in Nebraska.

It’s not just blue states. Flatwater Free Press: Immigration raid rocks Nebraska meatpacking plant; protesters and law enforcement clash.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement carried out its largest Nebraska workplace raid of the current presidential administration on Tuesday.

The raid on the Glenn Valley Foods meatpacking plant near 68th and J streets led to an estimated 75 to 80 people being detained, a spokesperson for U.S. Rep. Don Bacon told the Flatwater Free Press.

The large-scale raid also involved the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the U.S. Marshals Service and Omaha police, according to the plant’s president.

It led to confusion inside the plant and anger outside of it, as some protesters clashed with law enforcement. It shocked company executives, who said they’d used the federal government’s system to verify the legal status of their employees. And it also set off a fresh round of fear and rumors that plants and stores elsewhere in Nebraska had been raided, or were soon to be. Those reports couldn’t be verified by the Flatwater Free Press on Tuesday evening.

ICE executed the federal search warrant on Glenn Valley Foods “based on an ongoing criminal investigation into the large-scale employment of aliens without authorization to work in the United States,” the agency said in a statement.

It’s not yet known where the workers were taken, but Glenn Valley employees leaving the scene told the Flatwater Free Press they saw dozens of their colleagues being led by agents into a white bus.

Tensions escalated between protesters and ICE as a procession of SUVs carrying federal agents left the plant after the raid. Several protesters cursed at law enforcement, jumped on moving vehicles and threw rocks and debris at the cars, shattering one window….

The raid shocked Glenn Valley Foods President Chad Hartmann, who said company leaders had “no notification, no idea whatsoever” that a raid was coming.

There have been immigration protests in Texas, and Gov. Greg Abbott says he’ll call out the National Guard there.

On Trump grotesque speech at Fort Bragg yesterday:

Stephen Saideman, Paterson Chair in International Affairs at Carleton University at MSNBC opinion: Trump’s Fort Bragg speech was a serious step toward ending democracy.

While Donald Trump has challenged many norms both as a presidential candidate and as president, he has made a special effort to violate the standards that have long kept the U.S. military out of partisan politics. To be clear, the U.S. armed forces have always engaged in politics, seeking to avoid getting involved in some conflicts, seeking to escalate in others. But they have not been a Democratic military or a Republican military since the Civil War. Generations of civilian and military leaders did much to keep party and military separate. Trump’s speech at Fort Bragg on June 10 may undo all that work.

In his first term, Trump did much to undermine the norms of American civil-military relations. Rather than appoint a civilian as secretary of defense, a tradition reflecting civilian control of the military, he appointed a recently retired general, James Mattis. He constantly referred to the senior military leaders as “my generals.” He blamed the military when soldiers were killed, rather than accept that the buck stops with the commander in chief. And according to his own secretary of defense at the time, Mark Esper, Trump asked whether soldiers could shoot peaceful protestors in their legs during demonstrations after the death of George Floyd in 2020.

Trump at Fort Bragg Tuesday

Less than five months into his second term, Trump has gone much further to challenge the traditional separation of the military from partisan politics. This time, he chose an unqualified Fox News host to be defense secretary to ensure he would not face the resistance he met from Mattis and Esper. Then he fired multiple senior leaders of the military for being, well, Black or female. Just in the past few days, Trump deployed the Marines to Los Angeles in response to anti-ICE protests, even though

Then on Tuesday, Trump gave a virulently partisan speech at Fort Bragg, during which he egged on the troops to boo the Democrats serving as mayor of Los Angeles and governor of California. This speech, by itself, is incredibly damaging, as it projects the image of the military siding with the president against his political foes.

When scholars like myself talk about politicization of the military, we mean one of two things: either the military is jumping into partisan politics or politicians are pulling the military there. In this case, Trump is dragging the U.S. military into the partisan fray, attempting to turn the American military into a Republican or Trumpian army.

Click the link to read why this is so terrible for our country.

Tom Nichols at The Atlantic (gift link): The Silence of the Generals.

President Donald Trump continued his war against America’s most cherished military traditions today when he delivered a speech at Fort Bragg. It is too much to call it a “speech”; it was, instead, a ramble, full of grievance and anger, just like his many political-rally performances. He took the stage to Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA”—which has become a MAGA anthem—and then pointed to the “fake news,” encouraging military personnel to jeer at the press.

He mocked former President Joe Biden and attacked various other political rivals. He elicited cheers from the crowd by announcing that he would rename U.S. bases (or re-rename them) after Confederate traitors. He repeated his hallucinatory narrative about the invasion of America by foreign criminals and lunatics. He referred to 2024 as the “election of a president who loves you,” to a scatter of cheers and applause. And then he attacked the governor of California and the mayor of Los Angeles, again presiding over jeers at elected officials of the United States.

He led soldiers, in other words, in a display of unseemly behavior that ran contrary to everything the founder of the U.S. Army, George Washington, strove to imbue in the American armed forces.

The president also encouraged a violation of regulations. Trump, himself a convicted felon, doesn’t care about rules and laws, but active-duty military members are not allowed to attend political rallies in uniform. They are not allowed to express partisan views while on duty, or to show disrespect for American elected officials. Trump may not know these rules and regulations, but the officers who lead these men and women know them well. It is part of their oath, their credo, and their identity as officers to remain apart from such displays. Young soldiers will make mistakes. But if senior officers remain silent, what lesson will those young men and women take from what happened today?

The president cares nothing for the military, for its history, or for the men and women who serve the United States. They are, like everything else around him, only raw material: They either feed his narcissism, or they are useless. Those who love him, he claims as “his” military. But those who have laid down their life for their country are, as he so repugnantly put it, just suckers and losers, anonymous saps lying under cold headstones in places such as Arlington National Cemetery that clearly make Trump uncomfortable. Today, he showed that he has no compunction about turning every American soldier into a hooting partisan.

Why has no military leader spoken up about this outrage?

Trump’s supporters and his party will excuse his behavior at Fort Bragg the way they always have, the same way that indulgent parents shrug helplessly at their delinquent children. But senior officers of the United States military have an obligation to speak up and be leaders.  Where is the Army chief of staff, General Randy George? Will he speak truth to the commander in chief and put a stop to the assault on the integrity of his troops? Where is the commander of the airborne troops, Lieutenant General Gregory Anderson, or even Colonel Chad Mixon, the base commander?

And if these men cannot muster the courage to defend American traditions—by speaking out or even resigning—where are the other senior officers who must uphold the values that have made America’s armed forces among the most effective and politically stable militaries in the world? Where is the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Dan Caine? He was personally selected by Trump to be America’s most senior military officer. Will he tell the man who promoted him that what he did today was obscene?

Use the gift link to read the rest.

On Saturday, Trump will celebrate his birthday with a military parade, and on the same day there will be “No Kings” protests around the country.

Helene Cooper at The New York Times: Military Parade Marches Into Political Maelstrom as Troops Deploy to L.A.

This is not the image Army officials had wanted.

While tanks, armored troop carriers and artillery systems pour into Washington for the Army’s 250th birthday celebration, National Guard troops from the Army’s 79th Infantry Brigade Combat Team, supplemented by active-duty Marines, have been deployed to the streets of Los Angeles.

It is a juxtaposition that has military officials and experts concerned.

Army vehicles gathered in Jessup, Md., on Monday being prepared for the military parade in Washington, Chip Somodevilla, Getty Images

Several current and former Army officials said the military parade and other festivities on Saturday — which is also President Trump’s 79th birthday — could make it appear as if the military is celebrating a crackdown on Americans.

“The unfortunate coincidence of the parade and federalizing the California National Guard will feel ominous,” said Kori Schake, a former defense official in the George W. Bush administration who directs foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

Dr. Schake initially did not consider the parade much of a problem but is now concerned about “the rapid escalation by the administration” in Los Angeles.

The two scenes combined “erode trust in the military at a time when the military should be a symbol of national unity,” said Max Rose, a former Democratic congressman and an Army veteran.

“They are deploying the National Guard in direct contradiction to what state and local authorities requested, and at the same time there’s this massive parade with a display more fitting for Russia and North Korea,” he said.

Some veterans groups soured on the parade well before the latest deployments in Los Angeles. The Army recently asked the Vietnam Veterans of America chapter in Northern Virginia if it would provide 25 veterans to sit in the official reviewing stand. The group said no.

“If it were just a matter of celebrating the Army’s 250th birthday, there’d be no question,” said Jay Kalner, the chapter’s president and a retired C.I.A. analyst. “But we felt it was being conflated with Trump’s birthday, and we didn’t want to be a prop for that.”

The Hill: Where the No Kings anti-Trump military parade protests are planned.

Organizers with the “No Kings” movement are planning some 1,500 demonstrations across the country to protest the upcoming military parade on Saturday.

One notable location, however, is missing from that list — Washington, D.C., where the parade will take place.

Protest organizers have framed the move as a rejection of the spectacle, which will mark the 250th birthday of the Army as well as the 79th birthday of President Trump.

“Instead of allowing this birthday parade to be the center of gravity, we will make action everywhere else the story of America that day: people coming together in communities across the country to reject strongman politics and corruption,” organizers wrote.

They instead encouraged those in D.C. to join the flagship march in Philadelphia or one of the local protests in Virginia or Maryland. Organizers are also marketing DC Joy Day starting at 3 p.m. in Anacostia Park, which will have music, grilling, activities for children, and a grocery distribution.

Read more at The Hill.