Newton: ‘I’m in one of his TV shows’ — Trump uses L.A. to stage political theater

But while Guardsmen wait for permission to go home the administration ratchets up its postured flexing Welcome to unrest in Los Angeles the television show It was a month ago that President Donald Trump unilaterally decided that the city needed National Guard troops to contain anger over his Department of Homeland Prevention s efforts to forcibly remove undocumented immigrants from the city Since that moment practically everything about the protests or the federal response to them has lacked a connection to reality It has largely been a series of orchestrated appearances drive-by observations and theatrical pronouncements Relatively meager in a city of million people even notice All cosplay It s all cosplay put on for imagery and political advantage To take it from the top On June Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers dressed in their now-familiar villain costumes swarmed into Los Angeles neighborhoods claiming to be after the worst of the worst criminal refugees whose presence in the United States threatened our way of life Strangely however ICE went looking for those hardened criminals at Home Depots and car washes not known as magnets for cartels but rather for hardworking people trying to provide for families Related Articles Letters Invented emergencies shroud Supreme Court in secrecy California father of U S Marines to be published from immigration detention center Video shows California surgical center staff confronting ICE agents detaining landscaper Protesters and federal agents clash during raid at California farm Letters Only the GOP denies humanity s effect on state change Immigrant communities responded with shock and anger and specific protested that night outside the federal building in Downtown L A It got rowdy and specific demonstrators had to be chased off with tear gas or otherwise dispersed There were flashes of violence something on the order of a Laker championship parade that went on too long By late that night order had been restored by the Los Angeles Police Department The next morning downtown Los Angeles was peaceful The March of Dimes held a fair Diners enjoyed coffee and breakfast at outdoor markets and cafes The streets were calm and quiet President Trump however saw an opportunity to call in the Guard placing California troops under his authority and ordering civilian soldiers to Los Angeles over the objections of Mayor Karen Bass and Gov Gavin Newsom Trump promptly declared supremacy saying that the units had restored order to the city It was peaceful yes but not because of anything the federal leadership did The guard had not even arrived at that point To the contrary the arrival of the Guard and then active-duty Marines gave protesters someone to direct their anger at Over the next several days demonstrators amassed outside the federal building downtown and engaged in daytime peaceful protests that sometimes turned violent after dark The images were startling those of protesters setting fire to driverless taxis were particularly indelible but the entire saga unfolded in a - to -square block area of a -square mile city Neither military unit played a meaningful role in responding to those protests Soldiers were assigned to protect two buildings one downtown the other in Westwood Those must rank as two of the best-protected buildings in the nation From the outside this all looked ominous Every Angeleno I know got a call from a friend or family member elsewhere asking about the danger The fact is that the city was almost entirely calm throughout scenes of violence exaggerated by close-up shots that did not pull back to see a larger sprawling city at rest This made-for-TV drama continued as elected agents scooped up their moments in the spotlight Homeland Protection Secretary Kristi Noem dipped a toe inside the city limits a dozen miles away from the protests to host a self-aggrandizing press conference in Westwood only to have U S Sen Alex Padilla elbow his way in and be thrown to the ground by overzealous FBI agents That day s episode supplied images of a sitting senator a Latino of module in handcuffs Not to be outdone Vice President JD Vance was drawn to the flame of attention and he made his L A cameo with another peek at the city from well outside any of its turbulence His brief episode was made in front of a fire truck and highlighted by his intentional mangling of Padilla s name the vice president called a Senate colleague Jose with all the smug opportunistic racism that has defined Vance s rise to prominence and Padilla has surely faced on his Vance then comically dismissed the development as political theater It takes a drama queen to know one And so the tragi-comedy of Los Angeles continues For Bass the swirl of put-on politics is especially exasperating I feel like I m in one of his TV shows she noted of Trump when we spoke last week But for her and for Los Angeles this is not a ratings match This is an experiment in the seizure of power she reported a test of how far politicians and the residents are willing to let Trump and his cast of misfit advisers flex their muscles on a city uninterested in hosting them A point of comparison offers a reminder of how absurd this is In then-Gov Pete Wilson dispatched the National Guard to Los Angeles I waited for the Guard to deploy from its staging area in Exposition Park and when it conclusively did its arrival was welcome a briefer deployment of Marines did not go as well and they were briskly sent back The Guard in arrived in a city that had melted down More than people died buildings burned and unrest stretched from City Hall to Hollywood with whole swaths of South Los Angeles torn to shreds In that vast explosion of violence the Guard helped restore order and most of of the troops were withdrawn two weeks later This isn t This time roughly National Guardsmen remain deployed in Los Angeles more than a month after first arriving on a scene that was already under control No one has died one death is under examination no buildings have burned And yet the soldiers are still here They do practically nothing taken from homes jobs schools and even wildfire duty to serve as extras in Trump s theater of power But while Guardsmen wait for permission to go home the administration ratchets up its postured flexing On Monday Homeland Safety officers dressed up as soldiers and rode on horseback stomping around MacArthur Park The scene was more amusing than threatening onlookers whipped out cell phone cameras to document the sight of horses traversing the grounds The horses incidentally are proof of the theater of this Real police don t use horses to make arrests Fake police ride them to conduct what they in full unawareness of irony described as a show of presence Alerted by residents of the commotion Bass arrived at the scene and urged the forces to leave Eventually having kicked up a little dust they did The federal regime named it Operation Excalibur Seriously You can t make this stuff up Jim Newton a veteran journalist wrote this column for CalMatters