Trump wants to look strong because he feels weak

Trump wants to look strong because he feels weak


Greg Sargent writes:

With President Donald Trump sending more troops into Los Angeles amid protests there, a remarkable image has gone viral on social media. It shows members of the National Guard crowded into a sterile-looking office, sleeping on a hard floor, in evident discomfort, all dressed in full military gear.

The image doesn’t just reveal awful planning for this dispatching of troops. It also captures the deeper absurdity of this entire operation: These members of the military were supposedly needed to quell an urgent emergency, but as it has turned out, they were simply not needed for this purpose at all.

Guess who knows this disconnect is a problem? Trump does.

“If I didn’t ‘SEND IN THE TROOPS’ to Los Angeles the last three nights, that once beautiful and great City would be burning to the ground right now,” Trump raged on Truth Social, adding that Governor Gavin Newsom is “incompetent.” This came after another incendiary Trump missive, which vaguely suggested that “Gavin Newscum” is inspiring protesters to “spit” on National Guardsmen, and after Trump called for Newsom’s arrest based on nothing. In a subsequent speech to service members, Trump also absurdly described L.A. as nothing but a “trash heap,” presumably meaning he’s its savior, and goaded his audience into booing Newsom.

All of this is supposed to seem fearsome and strong, and the dispatching of the military is unquestionably a serious abuse of power that must be strenuously resisted. But it’s also worth seeing it as a display of a certain form of political weakness. The buffoonery of Trump’s claims about the need for the Guard and his wildly uncontrollable rage at Newsom—combined with new revelations about the genesis of this crisis—point to a real vulnerability that sits at the core of this whole spectacle.

Those revelations come in this report in The Wall Street Journal, which says that in May, top Trump adviser Stephen Miller told Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials that Trump was displeased with lagging deportation numbers. Miller told ICE officials that they are not merely supposed to target gang members and violent criminals, and instead must “just go out there and arrest illegal aliens”:

He directed them to target Home Depot, where day laborers typically gather for hire, or 7-Eleven convenience stores. Miller bet that he and a handful of agents could go out on the streets of Washington, D.C., and arrest 30 people right away.

“Who here thinks they can do it?” Miller said, asking for a show of hands.

It’s this order that inspired the ICE sweep at a Home Depot in Los Angeles that led to where we are right now, reports the Journal. And this is highly instructive.

Here’s why: MAGA, like other iterations of authoritarian and fascist politics, thrives on the invocation of a vast and implacable enemy within that requires the dramatic exercise of emergency authorities and extraordinary measures to defeat it. But executing that invocation in the first place requires what’s technically known as “making shit up.” [Continue reading…]

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