What’s important to remember about the fracture that emerged in Los Angeles over the weekend is that it came shortly after reports that President Donald Trump was seeking to block California from receiving certain federal funding. His team, The Post reported, was “asking federal employees to develop rationales for the funding cuts” — perhaps looking at conflicts with his executive orders about cutting costs or ending diversity initiatives.
Donald Trump vs. California (and everywhere else)
What happened in California this weekend was another facet of the president’s effort to quash critics.
June 9, 2025
California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) responded by noting that the state contributes far more in federal taxes than it receives in services. But the point wasn’t really the money. The point was that the Trump administration wanted to bring California to heel, precisely as it had sought to bring elite universities to heel, similarly by contriving reasons the government might strip funding. The methodology was the same because the intent was the same: inflict pain on an entity that Trump viewed as hostile to his presidency.
Immigration officials and officers have been a critical component of those efforts to inflict pain. For example, Harvard University, a target of administration efforts to block funding, had its ability to enroll students from overseas thrown into legal limbo. Meanwhile, California (and Los Angeles in particular) is home to more than 1 million immigrants who are living in the U.S. without legal documentation, providing lots of potential enforcement opportunities for immigration police less concerned about deporting potentially dangerous immigrants than simply deporting any immigrant who might be subject to deportation.
Last month the conservative Washington Examiner reported that Trump adviser Stephen Miller had excoriated senior immigration officials for the slow pace of deportations.
“Stephen Miller wants everybody arrested,” an official told the newspaper. Miller, the official said, asked, “Why aren’t you at Home Depot? Why aren’t you at 7-Eleven?”
So Immigration and Customs Enforcement went to a Home Depot in Los Angeles. There, they met resistance from protesters seeking to shield targeted immigrants — often their neighbors — from ICE’s efforts. The result was conflagration, which there are plenty of reasons to assume is exactly what the administration sought.
“We’re going to flood the zone,” Trump’s “border czar, Tom Homan, promised last month, “and sanctuary cities” — including Los Angeles — “will get exactly what they don’t want.”
The protests that federal officers encountered on Saturday were sufficiently tame that the Los Angeles Police Department took the remarkable step of releasing a public statement indicating that the protests were “peaceful” and concluded “without incident.”
That was not how members of the Trump administration described what was underway. Miller referred to isolated scenes of conflict as an “insurrection” over and over and over and over again. While this could be understood as an effort to reclaim the term from its application to the pro-Trump violence that occurred at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, it was probably more immediately an effort to till the soil for an invocation of the Insurrection Act of 1807 — a presidential deployment of the military within the United States.
Trump ultimately stopped short of that step, instead taking the (still unusual and escalatory) step of nationalizing the California National Guard so that it could be deployed in California’s largest city over the objections of Newsom. The decision was being made, the governor said in a statement, “not because there is a shortage of law enforcement, but because they want a spectacle.”
They got one, but not the one that Trump subsequently presented on social media.
“A once great American City, Los Angeles, has been invaded and occupied by Illegal Aliens and Criminals,” he wrote, promising that the federal government would “take all such action necessary to liberate Los Angeles from the Migrant Invasion, and put an end to these Migrant riots. Order will be restored, the Illegals will be expelled, and Los Angeles will be set free.”
Again, the easiest way to understand this is not that Los Angeles has suddenly turned into a metropolis riddled with criminal immigrants who are holding it hostage. The easiest way to understand this is that the president and his administration have been looking to California as they have been looking to crush any center of power that he views as adversarial. It’s wildly at odds with the traditional precept in conservative politics that states have a sovereignty independent of the federal government, but we are well beyond the point of expecting Trump to adhere to traditional conservative rhetoric.
What’s more, the administration by all appearances seeks to make an example of California and of any leaders who oppose its efforts. The acting director of ICE appeared in a video in which he said that “politicians need to stop putting my people in danger” by “stirring up outrage about what ICE does”: “I’m not asking them to stop. I’m demanding that they stop” — a demand that is in obvious conflict with the First Amendment. Homan on Sunday warned that California officials might face arrest if they oppose ICE actions. Trump, meanwhile, pledged that the feds would “have troops everywhere.”
But California is not a trivial target. It does, as Newsom noted, generate far more in revenue for the federal government than it receives.
What’s more, rhetoric about the purported dangers of immigrants is not compelling to Californians. Recent polling from the Public Policy Institute of California shows that 7 in 10 Californians see immigrants as “a benefit to California because of their hard work and job skills.” That’s up dramatically since February 2024 — probably in part because of a backlash against Trump administration policies.
The reason the National Guard was deployed to Los Angeles (for what appeared to be a pretty uneventful mission) is not that soldiers were needed to restore order. It was because Trump wanted to tell a story about the heavy hand he would bring down on anyone who attempted to stand in his way, even if the hand’s heaviness was equivalent to deploying a platoon against a ghost. Telling that story required sending hostile immigration officers into an unsympathetic community (precisely as the “border czar” warned) to pick up laborers looking for work outside a hardware store. The crisis the administration insisted it needed to solve was a crisis of the administration’s creation. Again, this is what Trump and his allies did to Harvard and promise to do to anyone else who stands in their way.
The Trump administration might still get the fight it seeks; deploying soldiers and continuing immigration actions in the face of an angry population create a volatile situation. But the lesson Trump’s critics and opponents should take from this weekend is in the wide gap between what actually happened in Los Angeles and what the administration insists happened. So eager to show how they crushed dissent, officials revealed very clearly that they hadn’t. So desperate to show strength, they showed weakness. Any state or organization that faces threats from the administration in the future would do well to remember that Trump has less of an iron fist than a virtual reality one.