Trump deepens authoritarian drift with deployment of 700 Marines and additional 2,000 National Guard troops in Los Angeles

Unlike other newspapers, The New York Times does not publish multiple editorials each day. Not even one. The editorials — barring serious exceptions that require immediate intervention — are published weekly, and they appear in the Sunday Opinion pages. The editorial board of the New York newspaper signed off on two pieces this weekend: the one that was planned, about the Trump family’s “culture of corruption” in doing business under the shadow of the presidency, and one that was an urgent response to the Republican’s decision to deploy around 2,000 National Guard troops. Tensions deepened late Monday with the announcement of the deployment of 700 Marines — a force rarely mobilized for domestic matters — and the decision to double the number of National Guard troops in response to protests over his immigration policies in Los Angeles. “Trump calling troops into Los Angeles,” the article says, “is the real emergency.”

The National Guard is a military force made up of reservists who have other jobs in civilian life and are activated when the occasion calls for it. There is a detachment for each of the states and for the overseas territories, as well as for the District of Columbia (Washington). Normally, they are called into action during emergencies such as natural disasters, wildfires, and other situations that require reinforcement of local authorities.

This is the first time in six decades that a president has ordered such a deployment without a prior request for assistance from the state’s governor — in this case, Gavin Newsom. The last time it happened, the president was Lyndon B. Johnson, who made the decision to allow Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights activists to march in Alabama.

Trump’s order, and the speed with which he gave it on Saturday, have drawn criticism from civil rights organizations and reignited alarm over his authoritarian drift and his eagerness to expand the reach of his executive power. There’s also suspicion that this was the confrontation Trump — who calls the protesters, whether peaceful or not, “insurrectionists” or “professional agitators” — had been waiting for to strengthen his stance on immigration, one of his top priorities. And to do so in a solidly Democratic state, led by a governor he’s clashed with in the past — someone whose name often comes up as a potential Democratic candidate for the 2028 presidential election.

On Sunday, Newsom challenged the anti-immigration czar, Tom Homan, to send the police to arrest him. Homan dismissed the idea on Monday during a morning news program on television. Shortly afterward, Trump told reporters at the White House who were waiting for the arrival of his presidential helicopter: “Gavin likes the publicity, but I think it would be a great thing.” The idea of a U.S. president ordering the arrest of a state governor (and not just any state, but the most populous in the country) is also unprecedented.

Newsom, the editorial writers at The New York Times, and numerous critics of Trump have compared his decision to deploy the National Guard — followed on Monday by the announcement that 700 Marines would also be made available — to “pouring fuel on the fire” of the unrest sparked by protests that began on Friday in opposition to raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) targeting undocumented immigrants. The protests continued on Saturday and escalated significantly on Sunday, when around 200 troops were deployed to the streets of the nation’s second-largest city. Newsom filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration over the mobilization of the National Guard.

The pretext for rebellion

“The use of military units should be a last resort. This deployment appears designed to escalate the situation. The LAPD and other local agencies have the situation under control and, most importantly, know these communities,” Rudy DeLeon, deputy secretary of defense under president Bill Clinton and a national security expert at the Washington-based Center for American Progress (CAP) think tank, explained in an email. “The current deployment of the National Guard deliberately jeopardizes the American public’s hard-earned trust in its military.”

University of Massachusetts law professor Paul Collins, for his part, expressed concern in an email on Monday about the suspicion that the administration is deliberately escalating the situation in an effort to “make California comply with Trump’s immigration priorities.”

“This escalation is not an isolated incident,” CAP experts write in an article. “It should be viewed against the backdrop of the administration’s actions to use the power of the federal government to target and punish people and institutions the Trump administration does not like.” The New York Times believes that Trump’s order to deploy the National Guard is “both ahistoric and based on false pretenses and is already creating the very chaos it was purportedly designed to prevent.”

Trump invoked a rarely used section of the U.S. Code on Armed Forces that allows the National Guard to be deployed to the federal executive branch if “there is a rebellion or danger of a rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States.” He did so in a presidential directive, arguing that “to the extent that protests or acts of violence directly inhibit the execution of the laws, they constitute a form of rebellion.”

During the election campaign, Trump had warned at a rally in Iowa that he would not hesitate to take a firm stance in Democrat-run cities. “You just have to be asked by the governor or the mayor to come in — the next time, I’m not waiting," he said.

In October, he went further, threatening to use the “military” — not just the National Guard — against U.S. citizens. One of his greatest frustrations during the last year of his first term was the handling of the unrest that followed the murder of a Black man named George Floyd by a white Minneapolis police officer, which led to riots in dozens of cities.

On Monday, Trump wrote on his social media platform, Truth Social, in one of his typical exaggerations and distortions of the truth, that if he hadn’t brought in the troops, “Los Angeles would have been completely obliterated.” “We will always do what is needed to keep our Citizens SAFE, so we can, together, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!” he added.

The last time the National Guard was deployed to Los Angeles to respond to riots in the city was in 1992, when the governor asked president George Bush Sr. for help quelling the violence that erupted after the acquittal of four white police officers who brutally beat African-American driver Rodney King — a beating that was caught on camera.

Back then, dozens of people died, over 1,500 were injured, and private property damage totaled around $1 billion. Three days of protests passed before Bush made his decision. This time, Trump gave the order before nightfall on the second day. So far, the escalation of violence — which resulted in at least 56 arrests on Sunday (many of those arrested were Mexican nationals), a handful of officers with minor injuries, and several self-driving taxis vandalized — is far from comparable to what happened 33 years ago.

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