California Vs. Trump: When Old Dogs Don't Learn New Tricks

The Sound of Escalation in Los Angeles

"Damn you guys. ICE is by my area. Better keep my brown ass indoors."

The text came to a group of us — from a lawful U.S. citizen.  By the time it was sent, President Trump had federalized 2,000 National Guard troops and sent them to Los Angeles over Governor Newsom's objections.

By Monday, helicopters circled overhead and Marines were on their way. 

This is how a crisis begins: not with dramatic proclamations, but with friends texting each other to stay inside.

A Deeply Personal Protest

Here’s the truth: Most Angelenos didn't know there were protests in the city until Trump made them front-page news. The city is now on edge — and that’s largely due to a disproportionate response to a fairly normal occurrence here. 

Unless you’ve lived here, it’s hard to understand how massive a place Los Angeles is, nevermind Los Angeles County. It stretches from more or less the ocean to northern mountains, more than 40 miles at its longest point. Each day there are protests, small fires, crimes — all the sorts of things that go on in big cities, especially in the wild west. And if they’re not in your neighborhood or even your block, you might not know about them.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested at least 44 people during what advocates called "military-style raids" on Friday — and protests erupted in the area, but LA is a massive city. We're used to sirens. We're not used to federal troops deployed against the wishes of our elected officials, especially for protests that are more or less geographically contained in confined areas.

In this wide stretch of city, though, immigration is an issue that links communities. The numbers tell the story of why immigration raids hit so hard: at least 10 percent of Los Angeles residents lives in households with at least one undocumented person. Nearly 75 percent of our undocumented residents have been here for more than a decade.

Undocumented immigrants aren't strangers — they're small business owners, entrepreneurs. They are the parents and grandparents of our children’s friends; and in Los Angeles, the most diverse city in the world, it’s not just immigrants from Mexico or central America, it’s truly all over the world, from eastern Europe, to the Middle East to Asia to Africa.

Immigration enforcement has been aggressive. Some people who showed up for their scheduled immigration appointments, trying to follow the law, got arrested anyway. That's when you know the system isn't about justice — it's about theater.

And we know President Trump enjoys the show. He’s joked about arresting California Gov. Gavin Newsom, and described a city that, and I cannot stress this enough, only somewhat had its traffic patterns disrupted by protests, as a vast hellscape. 

Trump does that to paint a vision, not provide any solutions. 

The Musk Precedent

In retrospect, Trump's fall-out with Elon Musk could have been a warning.  

Here was someone who bent over backwards to support Trump, only to discover that loyalty flows one direction in Trump's world and when he tires of you, or makes up his mind, it gets operatic and theatrical rather quickly. 

When Musk pushed back on a single policy decision, their alliance crumbled in a matter of days. And Trump made it a show.

If Trump can't maintain a relationship with the world's richest man — someone who literally bought a social media platform to supposedly support free speech and subsequently helped him with his election ambitions — what hope does California have?

The pattern is always the same: Trump goes farther, faster. "That escalated quickly" isn't just an Anchorman reference or a meme — it's Trump’s governing philosophy. And at 79, he's not learning new tricks.

The Theater of Force

While ordering the National Guard and Marines into Los Angeles (at a cost of more than $134 million), Trump is also spending an estimated $45 million on a military parade for his 79th birthday this weekend. The symbolism couldn't be clearer: Tanks rolling through Washington while federal troops occupy Los Angeles. This isn't governance — it's performance art with real consequences.

Local news here in Los Angeles shows the nuance that national coverage misses. Most protests are peaceful. Local coverage this weekend included real time commentary about how some protestors were helping guide traffic across the 101 freeway. It was “Oh, what are they doing, oh, it looks like they’re opening up a lane of traffic.” (Admittedly, highway closures are standard for many protests here, opening up the traffic not so much). 

Local law enforcement has expressed their frustration that federal intervention is escalating tensions they believed they were managing, if in a very California and L.A.-speciifc way. 

Try explaining that nuance, though, to someone who thinks governing is a reality show.

The Real Stakes

California makes up America's largest economy. We send more tax dollars to Washington than we get back. Gov. Newsom has threatened to withhold federal tax contributions. Two can play the game of theater and, when they do, there are pretty much no winners.

And there’s a much larger issue at stake. 

Today’s focus is immigration. But it’s also about whether states can govern themselves or whether we're all subjects of whatever federal tantrum is trending that week, specifically focused on one state. There are tens of millions of undocumented workers in this country — including almost 2 million in Texas, more than 1 million in Florida. Trump’s not sending Guardsmen to Texas, and there are no reports of ICE rolling up to Home Depots in Orlando. 

He’s chosen California for its symbolic power: A governor whose obsession with optics nearly matches his, a familiar scapegoat for his most devoted followers and a vast stretch of land that makes it easy to misinterpret small actions as widely destructive to the whole state. 

Several times this past weekend my husband said he would like to take a picture from our neighborhood — just six or seven miles from the protests — to show others what a “hellscape” looks like. For the most part it’s beautiful.  We watched fire fighters playing a game of pickleball while it’s partly cloudy, a light breeze and about 78 degrees.

The consequences of this are real, though: My friend is still staying inside. So are tens of thousands of other otherwise productive people who call this city home.  Schools are barricading graduations because ICE trucks park outside. Instead of working together to fix immigration, improve schools, or clean up cities, we have city officials cleaning graffiti and burned Waymos, and the rest of us wondering if our systems will hold up.

No Off-Ramps

Gov. Newsom hopes the courts will provide sanity. (He’s also daring someone to arrest him). Maybe the courts will calm the situation. But courts can move slowly (even with the Governor’s expedited requests), and Trump often moves fast, on instinct and vitriol. Every day this escalates, the stakes get higher.

The question isn't whether this gets worse — Trump's entire brand is ramping up. The question is whether anyone will remember to make it stop.

For now, we wait. We watch helicopters circle a protest that really doesn’t warrant this level of military presence. We wonder what’s on the horizon. When you add more kindling to a tinderbox it can spark. We worry about how calmer minds might prevail. And wonder whether anyone wants to solve problems instead of creating them. 

The embers are growing into flames, and nobody seems to be looking for water.