The 4-Year Grudge Behind Trump’s Invasion of California
The president’s response to the protests in Los Angeles is a naked attempt to settle a score going back to January 6, 2021.
Law enforcement officers stand under an overpass in Los Angeles, California, during a protest on June 8, 2025.
(David Pashaee / Middle East Images via AFP)“You bring chaos, and we’ll bring handcuffs,” Rumble personality turned Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino announced on X, as the first day of protests outside the Paramount, California, Home Depot wound down. This threat, which sat awkwardly alongside Bongino’s earlier pro-chaos social media outbursts, summed up the determination of the MAGA right to will the public show of outrage over an unprovoked ICE raid on a group of day workers into an additional show of overwhelming force.
Bongino’s prophecy soon bore fruit, as President Donald Trump mobilized 2,000 National Guard troops to suppress the protest in Paramount and an allied action outside a detention facility in downtown Los Angeles. Trump’s order defied the position of California Governor Gavin Newsom, who wisely deemed a federal mobilization an act of overkill for demonstrations that didn’t draw a turnout above three figures in either site. Newsom is now suing the Trump administration for dispatching the Guard. Meanwhile, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has dispatched 700 Marines into Los Angeles, and Trump has begun mobilizing 2000 more National Guard troops.
On one level, the unhinged response to the LA-area protests is another ultra-cynical MAGA bid to harness the power of the state to stage-manage a police action that serves as propaganda of the deed. The unrest in LA indeed began as the Trump White House announced a new and more expansive ban on foreign travel to the United States—and as Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man who’d been illegally renditioned to El Salvador’s CECOT prison, was returned to the United States to face a federal indictment on criminal trafficking so hastily thrown together that the head of the criminal division in the Nashville US Attorney’s office resigned in protest.
Yet the rage for retribution now coursing through the administration and the MAGA mediasphere reveals something more than impunity. The state-sanctioned theater of cruelty in Los Angeles is meant to advance an ideological aim central to Donald Trump’s self-image—to launder the trauma of the January 6 siege at the Capitol out of civic memory once and for all. Now that Trump is fully restored to maximum executive power, he’s determined to use it to achieve one of the most basic goals of any authoritarian regime: to rewrite history in his own preferred image.
Trump’s blanket pardon of the more than 1,500 rioters convicted and sentenced for taking part in the failed coup attempt was of course the first and boldest initiative in this effort. But you can see the same agenda shaping Trump’s response to the LA protests. In characterizing the protesters, he has referred to them as “insurrectionists”—a deliberate lurch into language that the MAGA right strenuously claims doesn’t apply to the January 6 uprising. (Indeed, one of the only times that Trump called the Capitol siege an insurrection, he did so in order to blame it all on Nancy Pelosi.) This rhetoric is already spurring a reported move within the administration to invoke the Insurrection Act to empower Trump to continue sending federal troops into LA. (Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has drafted a memo to Hegseth requesting military officials to detain civilians, which is a key step in that direction.) It’s a stunning brand of historical amnesia to seize on a term that aptly sums up an attack on a legislative body and apply it to a group of demonstrators trying to defend members of their community.
Trump’s White House is also using the LA protests as a pretext to visit on his political foes the reckoning he himself narrowly escaped, under the stalled January 6 prosecution captained by federal prosecutor Jack Smith and the related election-fraud case brought by Fulton County DA Fani Wills—to vow to arrest and jail elected officials. Trump’s thuggish immigration czar has declared both Newsom and LA Mayor Karen Bass fair game for arrest if they continue trying to thwart the unjustified use of federal force in their jurisdictions—and Trump has seconded that view. It again takes no great foray into depth psychology to follow the (over)compensating logic here: Since I was never held to account for my own role in fomenting an actual insurrection, any other political leader can be rounded up for keeping me from putting down a completely fabricated one.
Homans appears to have provisionally backed off his threats after Newsom dared him to come and get him. But other civic leaders are still ensnared in the White House’s bald power grab: David Huerta, president of California Service Employees International Union, had been arrested while serving as a community observer on a June 6 ICE raid, and faces federal charges of conspiracy to impede an officer and a potential six-year prison sentence. (He’s now been released from jail on a $50,000 bond.) Again, it’s hard to imagine a starker contrast with the vast corps of January 6 rioters pardoned by Trump for their role in a failed coup that resulted in injuries for around 140 police officers, and the deaths of several more, including four by suicide. Huerta’s prosecution, like the LA protests, allows White House officials to completely reverse the January 6 narrative, setting up a draconian federal prosecution for what by all indications was a moment of incidental contact between the labor leader and an officer. Meanwhile, the instigators of mass violence against cops at the Capitol are walking free. And as an additional flourish of hard-right didacticism, Homans himself—heretofore a power-suited senior White House administrator—has taken to wearing a khaki ensemble of faux combat fatigues in his LA-related TV interviews, calling to mind the LARPing ensembles favored by the Oath Keepers, who played a key organizing role in the run-up to January 6, culminating in serving as Roger Stone’s security detail during the failed coup.
The symbolism of Homan’s new get-up is also intended to play up the pet talking point among MAGA xenophobes—that the stream of immigrants entering the country constitutes an “invasion,” which should be repelled by any means necessary, and the more lethal the better. Indeed, the seeds for ICE’s original assault on the Paramount Home Depot were evident in a recent report in The Washington Examiner about immigration enforcement controversies at the White House. When a group of ICE administrators traveled to Washington to discuss deportations, deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller laid into them for failing to mount a deportation blitzkrieg. “Miller came in there and eviscerated everyone,” one of the officials told the Examiner. “‘You guys aren’t doing a good job. You’re horrible leaders.’ He just ripped into everybody.… Stephen Miller wants everybody arrested. ‘Why aren’t you at Home Depot? Why aren’t you at 7-Eleven?’”
To call this brand of leadership unhinged is to insult the unhinged. In reality, as Never Trump libertarian Julian Sanchez notes, illegal entry into the country is a misdemeanor, while unlawful presence in the United States isn’t even a crime but a civil offense. “This is the equivalent of saying we need to torch the Constitution & send in the SWAT team to catch jaywalkers & people with overdue library books,” Sanchez writes.
Yet, as with the January insurrection—where Trump whipped up his MAGA crowd into a state of riotous indignation with the grim prophecy that a failure to “fight” would mean “you won’t have a country any more”—the absolutist rhetoric about a rampaging “invasion” of undocumented immigrants segues briskly into scenarios of lethal confrontation. Plainly high on the implementation of his Home Depots–first deportation plan, Miller has gravely intoned that with its sanctuary policies, “the government of the State of California aided, abetted and conspired to facilitate the invasion of the United States.”
Outside of government, ideologues have fanned the flames. Pizzagate grifter Mike Cernovich earned an affirmation from Miller on X for his assertion that “nothing else matters if this isn’t handled.” Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk is likewise feeling the bloodlust:
Los Angeles doesn’t feel like a protest. It feels like an entire city is declaring open rebellion to American authority and sovereignty.… If we don’t succeed our nation will be permanently populated by foreigners, whether illegal or illegal, who hate us and owe their true allegiance to another country. If someone loves another country more than America, they are here simply to leech off our economy, our culture, and our welfare. That is civilizational suicide.
Sub in “Democrats” for “foreigners” here, and you have pure January 6 boilerplate—which means no American who’s remained sentient over the past four and a half years has any business being surprised at what’s likely to happen next.
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Even before February 28, the reasons for Donald Trump’s imploding approval rating were abundantly clear: untrammeled corruption and personal enrichment to the tune of billions of dollars during an affordability crisis, a foreign policy guided only by his own derelict sense of morality, and the deployment of a murderous campaign of occupation, detention, and deportation on American streets.
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