Jon Wiener: From The Nation magazine, this is Start Making Sense. I’m Jon Wiener. Later in the hour, our report from LA: who exactly is being arrested by ICE agents? What is the National Guard doing — and what are those 700 Marines going to do? Harold Meyerson will comment.  But first: this coming Saturday is the No Kings Day of Defiance across America–Ezra Levin of Indivisible will explain – in a minute.

‘With tanks rolling down the street in Washington DC on Saturday, and Marines being deployed to Los Angeles, it’s never been more important to come together in nonviolent action to exercise our First Amendment right to peaceful protest.’ That’s what the organization Indivisible says about Saturday’s National Day of Defiance. We’re talking of course about the nationwide No Kings protests. For comment, we turn to Ezra Levin. He’s co-founder and co-executive director of Indivisible, the grassroots movement of thousands of local groups working to elect progressive leaders, rebuild democracy, and defeat the Trump agenda. Ezra has appeared on CNN, NPR, MSNBC. We saw him with Rachel Maddow this week.  He’s been in The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Nation, where he recently co-wrote an article “How to Organize Our Way Out of the Trump-Musk Putsch – a plan to harness grassroots energy and hold Democratic leaders accountable.” Last time he was on our podcast was before the pandemic. Ezra Levin, Welcome back.

Ezra Levin: Jon, great to be here.

JW: The original plan for Saturday’s No Kings protests was to provide an alternative and a challenge to Trump’s military parade celebrating his birthday. But Trump sending the National Guard to Los Angeles where we record our show and then the Marines has given the Saturday protests a new urgency. I wonder, how many more No Kings rallies have been announced since Trump sent the National Guard and then the Marines to LA?

EL: The answer is hundreds. Hundreds of new rallies all across the country. At this point, we’re nearing about 1,900 — 1900 locally led, peaceful, empowering, joyful, pro-democracy No Kings Day protests this Saturday.

JW: And how does the total number for this Saturday – you say around 1900 – compare with the number of Hands Off rallies that we held last April 5th?

EL: It’s bigger, Jon, is what I would say. It’s bigger. On April 5th, I was overjoyed with how April 5th went down. We announced it about three weeks ahead of time, hopes that people would show up. Whenever you announce one of these days, it’s like throwing a party. You hope it’s a good party, you hope people come. But ultimately, it’s up to people whether or not to put on these protests and actually come out. We had 1300 events across every single state. On April 5th, conservative estimate held about three and a half million people showed up, as I mentioned, where at 1900 events now, I think there are going to be even more out on Saturday. We’re looking at millions and millions of normal everyday Americans showing up peacefully but powerfully in defensive democracy.

JW: If this Saturday’s protest is bigger and broader than the Hands Off day was, that’s really the best thing any of us can do to keep Trump from escalating further. On Sunday, the coalition organizing the No King’s Day of Defiance released a statement about LA, let me just quote it briefly, “Trump wants you to believe that the people of Los Angeles are destroying their own communities. That’s false. Here’s the truth. People are peacefully and lawfully protesting the administration’s abuses of power and the abduction of their neighbors by ICE. It’s a blatant abuse of power designed to intimidate families, stoke fear, crush dissent. We reject political violence. We reject fear as governance. We reject the myth that only some deserve freedom. On Saturday, join your community. Bring a sign. Make it clear. We don’t do kings in this country.” Indivisible. I noticed that while about you say 1900 cities and towns will have No Kings protest on Saturday, including virtually all the big ones. There’s one exception – Washington DC will not, no march on Washington this time. Why not?

EL: This was intentional and it was part of the planning from the get-go. The last thing that we want is to give Donald Trump some excuse to crack down on peaceful protest. The second to last thing that we want is to give him any kind of narrative argument that we’re out there protesting the military on the 250th anniversary of the forming of the continental Army. Instead of that, we said at the very beginning, we want to be everywhere else. Donald Trump can have his pathetic little birthday parade. He can waste a hundred million dollars of your money, my money of taxpayer money. He can do that. What he can’t do is tell the vast majority of pro-democracy Americans that they can’t show up in defense of their ideals. So we intentionally said, not downtown DC. If you’re in DC and want to be part of a protest Free DC, great organization is doing a separate protest far from where the march is happening.
But the flagship event is in Philadelphia. We’ll have big events in Chicago. We’ll have big events in New York City in LA, but frankly, maybe I’m biased from rural Texas. I think it’s just or more important to be in your small town or community. You shouldn’t have to drive or fly anywhere to go to No Kings Day protest. If you’re looking and you don’t find one in your community, start it up, put it on the map. We’ll put it up there until Wednesday night. We’re still registering events and new ones are coming on board every single hour.

JW: Well, let’s take a step back. Remind us about the beginnings of Indivisible. What was your original idea?

EL: I mean, our original idea was a Google document, Jon, that’s all it was. I am a former congressional staffer. My wife Leah is too. We had worked in Congress during the rise of the Tea Party, a movement that we strongly disagreed with, ideologically, we just disagreed with some of their violence, their bigotry, their racism, but damn did they know how to organize locally and put pressure on elected officials. So fast forward to 2016, Donald Trump gets elected, I’m doing anti-poverty work and my wife’s doing anti-human trafficking work. And we see two things happen: one, we see Donald Trump and his allies comparing using the Japanese and terming camps during in World War II as a model for what they might do with Muslims and immigrants and refugees – so real, a heinous, hateful agenda. And then we also see interviews with incoming senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, in which he talks about how ‘well. we lost the election. I guess we’re just going to have to work with the other side. Maybe we can work on infrastructure together.’ And so, there was this very real moment in late 2016 where the near term future for America would be one in which America’s new internment camps had well-paid roads with bipartisan dollars. And we thought in that moment, look, we saw what local organizing can do. We saw it’s possible to organize and push elected officials. You might not win everything, but you can certainly change the political wins. And so Leah and I wrote this guide, the Indivisible guide that recommended people learn from the Tea Party, learn from their organizing, dissect what they got right, and then replicate it, but replicate it in service of democracy. Organize, put pressure on your elected officials, help your Democrats find their spines, help your Republicans find the light or at least fear that there are electoral consequences if they don’t organize, don’t give an inch.
And we put it out into the ecosystem, and I tweeted it out back when there was Twitter one day after work after dinner, and shockingly it went viral. But then incredibly people started forming Indivisible groups all across the country. Just normal everyday people, not professional politicos. And we had an Indivisible Albany, an Indivisible Tallahassee, and an Indivisible Austin. They started emailing us saying, “Hey, we got a meeting together and 300 people showed up. What do we do next?” And so, Leah and I have now spent the following eight years working to help these Indivisible groups organize. But at the end of the day, we wrote a Google Doc and look, I’m proud of the Google Doc. I think it had some good advice, but fundamentally, we’re not the leaders of this. And the beating heart isn’t some national operation. It’s normal everyday people who founded their local indivisible group recruited the members and day in, day out, week in, week out have been leading those groups since then – until this most recent election, and we’ve doubled in size since then because there’s now a new surge of people coming in confronting both the heinous Trump agenda and often feckless Democratic leadership and saying to themselves, “I guess I have to do something” – and they’re forming indivisible groups now too.

JW: Well, one of the things you’re doing this week is host updates in Marshall trainings.

EL: That’s

JW: Right. Tell us what those are like. What do you do there?

EL: So Indivisible has always been rooted in the principles of non-violence, and that is in part because I don’t think we should engage in violence, but it’s also hardheaded strategy. The thing that Trump would like more than anything else is the same thing that all authoritarians would like, which is an excuse to crack down on organized people power. And the best excuse that they always look for and often will manufacture is the excuse that these groups are out of control. ‘They’re engaged in criminal activity or in violence or property destruction, and therefore I’ve got to send in the military. I’ve got to nationalize the guard. I’ve got to do away with due process.’ We can’t give them any excuse. They can do – we can’t control what they do. We can control what we do. And the best strategic move in this moment is to be very focused on the principles of nonviolent opposition.
And that’s not always immediately obvious to people how to do that in real time because it’s hard to make decisions in real time. And if you just send people out into organizing and events occur and you haven’t prepared them with any sort of training or principles, you’re setting yourself up. For instances, you don’t want to occur. We want to maintain the moral high ground, which means we put a lot of emphasis on training and preparation so that folks who are out in these communities are as prepared as they can be for what’s to come. Now, I want to talk about this because I think it’s important. I also don’t want to present some image that in home or Alaska or in Eureka or in Winnebago or in Austin, Chicago, there are people in the streets who are coming into conflict with other people for Hands Off, that’s not what it looked like. People were bringing their dogs and their kids, it was funny, it was boisterous, people were laughing and chanting and dancing. That’s what characterizes the vast majority of these events. They’re joyful. They’re not confrontational in that way. And also, we need to prepare for the worst, while we hope for the best

JW: Indivisible in organizing the No Kings protests this weekend has a lot of co-sponsors. How many are there?

EL: So I want to be clear, we are not the leaders of No Kings any more than I am the leader of the Indivisible movement. There are so many people who are engaged in so many organizations, more than 150 organizational sponsors of No Kings Day. This includes unions like American Federation of Teachers, other grassroots groups like 50501, civil rights groups like Reverend Barber, there are environmental groups and immigration groups and good government groups. You can go to nokings.org and look at the list of partners. It’s impressive, Jon. It is a long list and one of the things I will note, it’s somewhat ideologically diverse and intentionally so. This is not a movement that is built around one specific vision for what comes in 2029 when we have a new Democratic trifecta. It’s the coalition of No, it’s the coalition of we do not want authoritarian overreach, and that’s intentional. If you are organizing in this moment in a room with people who entirely agree with you on everything, your room is too small. That’s a line I stole from Maurice Mitchell from The Working Families Party. 

JW: It’s a good one. Let’s talk about the strategy behind the No Kings protest. You wrote about strategy in February for The Nation. This is just like a few weeks after Trump took the oath of office second time. “The one thing we know from historical fights against authoritarians,” you reminded us there is that “success depends on a persistent, courageous, broad-based, and unified opposition.” But what should that look like and what should its goal be? Back in February, you suggested that congressional Democrats should lead the charge. I wonder if that’s what you think today.

EL: Look, I’ll take anybody who’s willing to be courageous acting courageously today. I would say I’ve seen that from some congressional Democrats, the Maxwell Frosts and Jasmine Crocketts and Chris Murphys and Jamie Raskins of the world. I think far too many Democrats have taken James Carville’s advice as he wrote in The New York Times, that Democrats should just roll over and play dead. I think even more have engaged in the symbolism of opposition, have given a fiery speech, have issued a strongly worded letter, have showed up and lifted their hand up in a fist at a march, but then gone back to Congress and voted for Trump’s nominees or voted as 16 Democrats did recently for an industry friendly crypto bill that helps Trump take additional bribes. I think in this moment, if I’m being honest, Jon, I think politics is too important to be left to the politicians. If we have leaders willing to take courageous acts, we should rally behind them whether they’re in Congress or they’re in the streets. But right now, the people in Congress are looking to their left and right to understand how far they should go in opposing this government. And if the people don’t stand up to act as the bulwark for democracy, I don’t think it’s going to be enough to wait for the Congressional representatives to take that action.

JW: Well, now it’s time for your Minnesota moment. That’s news from my hometown of St. Paul that you won’t get from Sean Hannity. No Kings protests will be held across northern Minnesota in Duluth at the head of Lake Superior near the ore docks, in Chisholm, in Virginia, up on the Iron Range where Bob Dylan grew up, in Ely Gateway to the boundary waters in Bemidji, at the Paul Bunion statue in Thief River Falls, Detroit Lakes in Barnum during spring fever days and in International Falls, the northernmost place in the United States, the No Kings protest is sponsored by the Koochiching County DFL, that’s the Democratic Party in Minnesota, in Smokey Bear Park, four blocks from the Canadian border. And you could come up with a similar list of smalltown No Kings protests from every state in the union. It’s really my favorite thing about Indivisible, the idea that we are everywhere. 

EL: I don’t know if you’ve been watching “Andor” Jon, “Andor” is a Star Wars show, it’s in its second season. It just concluded it is the best fiction on the coalition-building around opposing authoritarianism that I’ve ever seen. I’m not even a Star Wars fan. I think it’s brilliant. But I bring it up because one of the taglines of the show, one of the ways that the rebels organizing identify themselves to each other is to say, “I have friends everywhere.” And that’s what I think of when I think of the Indivisible groups. We’ve got friends everywhere, and there’s some sense I think out there that politics is taken care of by somebody else. Or politics happens in the big city centers where the people are, or the only places that matter are the purple states that have competitive elections coming up next. But it’s just not the case.
If we organize wherever we are, if we focus on where we have leverage based on our political geography, that’s how we can have an impact. That’s how we can actually make a difference. And maybe it’s naive, but I believe our cause is just. I believe most Americans do support democracy. Do not want to see authoritarian overreach. And people in red and rural communities included do not support what this administration is doing, whether it is abducting Americans and disappearing them to a foreign gulag, or it is coming after their Medicaid and a reconciliation bill that’s intended to cut taxes for billionaires and millionaires while attacking the middle class and lower income folks. But we’re not going to win this unless we organize. Nobody is coming to save us. It depends on us.

JW: You say our enemy is not one or two men. What is our enemy?

EL: The real enemy, as far as I’m concerned, isn’t a MAGA. It’s not a Trump, it’s not a Republican. It’s not feckless Democratic leadership. The real enemy is cynicism and nihilism and fatalism. It’s a sense that we are mere victims of world events. The system’s too corrupt and broken. We shouldn’t even get engaged. That’s what we’re really fighting against. I think that’s what Indivisible groups do so well.

JW: ‘Our real enemy is cynicism and fatalism,’ Ezra Levin, co-founder of Indivisible, sponsor of the No Kings National Day of Defiance on Saturday. Find the protest near you @nokings.org. Ezra, thank you for all your work – and thanks for talking with us today.

EL: Well, let’s talk again before the next pandemic.

JW: [Laughter] Okay.
[BREAK]
Jon Wiener: What exactly are ICE agents doing this week in Los Angeles? Why is the National Guard downtown LA? And what are the 700 Marines Trump sent to LA supposed to do? For comment and analysis, we turn to Harold Myerson. He’s editor at large of The American Prospect. He’s also written for The Washington Post, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Financial Times, and The LA Times. And he worked as executive editor of the late lamented LA Weekly for more than a decade, mostly in the nineties. We reached him today in our nation’s capital. Harold, welcome back.

Harold Meyerson: Always good to be here, Jon.

JW: Let’s start with Trump’s answer to the question. He said, if he hadn’t sent the National Guard, LA “would have been completely obliterated,” even though all the National Guard has been doing is standing around guarding the Federal detention center downtown. But let’s start on Thursday, the day before all of this started. Trump was in deep trouble politically on many fronts. Elon Musk, the richest man in the world who funded his reelection campaign, said he should be impeached. His budget was in trouble in the Senate. His tariffs were wildly unpopular. His approval ratings were bad and getting worse. That was Thursday. So what is to be done if you’re Trump?  Send ICE agents to LA — to places like Paramount.  Now, if you ask people on the west side of LA, ‘where is Paramount?’ They’d say ‘Paramount is on Melrose, down by Van Ness.’ Tell us about the other Paramount.

HM: One of my missions at the LA Weekly was to educate our westside readers on what was going on on the other side of town. Now, on the other side of town, abutting the Long Beach Freeway as a whole host of small cities like Southgate and Downey and Paramount and Bell and Bell Gardens and Flower, et cetera, all of which are almost entirely Latino and very heavily immigrant in terms of who lives there, working class communities. That’s where Paramount is to be found. Not the studio, but the hometown for about 55,000 people.

JW: And what was ICE doing in Paramount on Sunday?

HM: ICE has been going to a lot of Home Depots because workers, disproportionately immigrants, line up there in shape-ups and hoping to be picked up for little construction gigs that are ubiquitous around Southern California.

JW: Day labor.

HM: Yeah, they’re day laborers.  And under directives from Steven Miller, we learned from Thursday’s Wall Street Journal ICE is supposed to start arresting everybody. Forget this gang member, convicted criminal thing, because there just aren’t that many of them, and Trump has a numerical quota that has to be met. So ICE agents have been going out to Home Depots to garment factories, those sorts of places.

JW: And what kind of reception did they get when they showed up in Paramount on Sunday?

HM: When they showed up in Paramount on Sunday, word spread around the community. As I said, it’s a small town.  A high percentage of the people who live in Paramount are Latino immigrants. Some are documented, some are not. Some are naturalized citizens, some are not. And it caused alarm in the community. So the first thing that happened, according to an LA Times report, was that passersby started honking sympathetically with the people who had been apprehended. And then locals turned out to try to keep their family members or friends or community figures from being seized and deported. Even though at some point the administration claimed on Sunday that it had captured five gang members. Well, it captured several hundred people on Sunday. That just leads me to think that if we say it was 200, that 195 weren’t gang members.  And their families and friends obviously turned out peaceably to try to keep their loved ones from being seized.

JW: And there were also ICE raids over the weekend downtown in the Fashion District. Now is the LA Fashion District, is that like Fifth Avenue?

HM: No.  I don’t know when the name changed from the Garment District to the Fashion District, but for some reason, some Chamber of Commerce genius changed the name. But it’s where seamstresses and male sewers, I’m not quite sure what the word is for that, it’s not seamstress, work stitching garments, that’s who works in the fashion district.

JW: The New York Times on Tuesday ran a big photo on page one of a highway patrol car in flames. Who did that?

HM: Well, there have been protests around the country and in LA the protests have been centered at the Federal Detention Center. It’s an area of a few blocks in downtown LA and that’s where all the footage of disruption, which is mainly disruption of vehicles on the street, have been taking place. But I think it’s important to point out that outside of this six or seven block area, the LA that Trump says has been consumed by riots. I mean, LA County is a little over 4,000 square miles, so six and seven blocks of occasional disorder – and by Monday night, the disorder consisted of painting graffiti, which usually doesn’t necessitate calling in the Marines – is fairly confined to a minuscule slice of the city that Trump says is in a state of a virtual insurrection.

JW: So in places like Downey, it was community members who came out to try to stop ICE from seizing their friends, neighbors, relatives.  Downtown, there’ve been demonstrations around the federal detention center. This is a different crowd, let us say; I just got an email this morning announcing Mothers of the Disappeared are having a vigil outside the detention center. That’s a different kind of protest.

HM: Yes. And yesterday, on Monday, there was a considerable turnout of clergy, of union leaders and members, of activists and some elected officials in a peaceable demonstration against both the seizures and deportations and against the presence of the National Guard, which I hasten to point out is simply defending the Metropolitan Detention Center, and not even doing that, they’re basically just standing there. So that is the military deployment. But the military deployment is intended, I think, more as a provocation, to get people out demonstrating, than it is to safeguard anything. And if it’s a provocation, you mark success by claiming, ‘oh, there’s riots and we need more National Guardsmen’ or ‘more military’ or ‘more Marines.’ So that’s sort of the state of emergency that Trump is insisting exists, though it does not. It’s kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s both supply side and demand side. If you supply enough National Guards standing around, there will be demonstrations; and therefore you need to supply more National Guards.

JW: You said at your new piece @prospect.org that the focus on downtown misses the big picture. What is the big picture?

HM: Well, the big picture is what’s been going on in Paramount and Downey and places like that. The big picture is what’s going on among day laborers and among immigrants working in the kitchens of restaurants. This week happens to be graduation week for the LA Unified School District, the second largest school district in the nation, which has 577,000 students. 73% of them are Latino. The majority are working class. And the school district was afraid and is afraid that ICE agents will see in those graduation ceremonies for grade schools and middle schools and high schools, that students who may well be undocumented will be there, that parents and siblings who may well be undocumented will be there. And there is a reason why the school district is fearful that ICE agents will disrupt these graduation ceremonies.

JW: And why is that?

HM: Well, in April, ICE agents went to two grade schools, not middle schools, not high schools, but kindergarten through five or six, and they asked to see specific students there ranging from sixth grade to fourth grade to third grade to second grade even to first grade, that’s like a 6-year-old. And fortunately, the principals did not allow them entry into the campuses. Now, I suspect the ICE agents wanted to talk to them about their mommies and daddies and where they were and things like that, and maybe take away an occasional kid here or there. So with that as precedent, the school district has ordered the school police not to allow ICE agents on campus during or in the general vicinity of the graduation ceremony. So you can see that’s really what’s going on in LA right now. Not whatever happens in five square blocks of downtown LA.

JW: Taking a step back here: LA has a dense structure of immigrants’ rights groups: CHIRLA, the Committee for Humane Immigrant Rights Los Angeles; CARECEN, the Central American Immigrant Rights Organization; IMMDEF, the Immigrant Defense Law Center, and the ACLU of Southern California. These groups have been defending immigrants for decades, and have been preparing for this for over a year. And then there’s the National Day Laborers Organizing Network, which was founded in the Valley. They’re very active right now. The National Day Laborers issued a statement on Sunday that I want to quote here: “We need you, the people, to stand with immigrants to say to ICE and this administration, we will not tolerate this injustice. If you are privileged, if you are a citizen, if you are not at risk of deportation, please go to the streets, to Home Depot, go outside the courts, go to the places of work where our people are. You need to protect day laborers today.” That’s the National Day Laborers Organizing Network. And then there’s also a group called the Garment Worker Center downtown. They do these Know Your Rights trainings for their members. You covered most of these groups going back to the ‘90s.

HM: I sure did. They’ve been around. I mean CARECEN and CHIRLA have been around at least since the ‘80s. These are venerable LA institutions in defense of really a huge share of the LA population. I mean LA, both city and county, is majority Latino or Asian, all of whom are like everyone else here, except people from the original Native First Nations — descendants of immigrants or immigrants themselves or immigrants’ kids – this is in many ways the core of Los Angeles that Trump and the good old Stephen Miller are attacking. And this is where they think they can get the most bang for the buck, they can produce the kind of reaction they think that will enable them to declare some kind of emergency. If they’re doing this with agricultural workers in Georgia, there’s not going to be a hell of a lot of pushback. But in coming to LA, they know very well what they’re doing. They are agents provocateurs.

JW: It’s not just the ACLU and CHIRLA and CARECEN who have been standing up to Trump on this.  What you might call the ruling class organization of LA has also spoken out against Trump’s actions. The Los Angeles Civic Alliance, this is something doesn’t get in the news very much. I didn’t know very much about them, it’s a coalition of business, big corporations, the studios. For years, this has served as the voice of the establishment in Los Angeles, and they made a rare public statement over the weekend condemning the deployment of the National Guard as an unconstitutional action, charging the president had acted illegally.
And it’s not just the Los Angeles Civic Alliance.  Even Rick Caruso, the billionaire developer and former Republican who lost to Karen Bass and is expected to challenge her again, I was interested to see, issued a statement on Sunday: ‘there is no emergency, no widespread threat, no out of control violence in Los Angeles, and absolutely no danger that justifies the deployment of the National Guard or military to the streets of this or any other Southern California city. Local law enforcement is capable of handling the situation.’

HM: Rick Caruso would not have said that if he hadn’t known that, if he failed to say something like that, there was no chance he could win the next mayoral election, which is basically what he’s aiming for. There is huge opposition to what Trump and Miller are doing in California, but that’s exactly why they’re doing it.

JW: What’s your assessment of Gavin Newsom? He’s been defiant. He’s been exchanging insults with Trump. Some people think this is not the best approach.

HM: Well, Gavin Newsom is essentially doing this as part of his campaign for the presidency. He’s trying to set himself at the head of the list of Democrats who have challenged Trump. And at the head of the list of Democrats who will be seeking the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028. A lot of what he’s doing, certainly bringing the lawsuit to try to stop the deployment of the National Guard, is mandatory and absolutely necessary and commendable. But there is an element of posturing there. He has certainly highlighted what really isn’t much of a threat to have the Feds incarcerate him. I think on Gavin’s part, he’s posturing somewhat blatantly.

JW: I want to talk about the Marines for a minute here. You said the National Guard is, all they’re doing is guarding the Federal Detention Center downtown. They’re not apprehending anybody. They’re not fighting the demonstrators. They’re just standing outside there. And the 700 Marines who arrived in Los Angeles on Tuesday are supposed to be here to back up the Guard. Now, what are they going to be doing?

HM: Well, they mean that literally they’ll be standing behind the Guard where there isn’t much too much space between the Guard and the building they’re already defending. I would have to assume the Marines are in good shape and not very fat. So they could probably fit into that rather small space. And I would hope that they do fit. As long as they’re going to be here, that seems like a reasonable deployment for them.

JW: The underlying political factor here that you have referred to is that the Trump administration is using Southern California as a testing ground to see how far they can push with this. What’s happening now in Los Angeles will likely be copied in other states. So the response here from the mayor and the Governor and the senators and the representatives, and from the ACLU and the immigrants’ rights groups, and from the people in the streets, that response will set the precedent and lead the way for how to fight back for other cities.

And I just want to say a word about how it’s going for Trump right now. There was a new poll from CBS released on Tuesday morning on approval of sending the National Guard. I looked at Independents: 30% of independents are in favor of sending the National Guard. On ‘Approve of sending Marines,’ 27% of independents.  Overall view of Trump: very favorable: total population, 22%. This is nationally. Among independents, 14% view Trump very favorably.  Very unfavorable: nationally, 44%; among independents, 45%. So it seems like this is not helping Trump with the political problems that he’s been facing for the last several weeks. 

HM: Republicans and others have pointed out that there was a clear majority opposed to what was seen as Biden’s policy of open borders, but that hasn’t translated into the polls to mass deportation of non-criminals, and this is before what we’ve seen just in the last week. And it certainly hasn’t translated into mass occupations of American cities by federalized National Guards and Marines to help in the deportation of non-criminals who are working in the United States to support their families.

JW: After sending first ICE, then the National Guard, then the Marines to Los Angeles, things are not going well for Trump with the public. Harold Myerson – you can read him @prospect.org. Harold, thanks for talking with us today.

HM: Always good to be here, Jon.