Evelyn Reynolds

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    National guard deploys in downtown LA amid eerie calm after two days of unrest

    On a foggy, unseasonably cold morning in Los Angeles, the national guardsmen suddenly pressed into service by Donald Trump to quell what he called a “rebellion” against his government were nothing if not ready for their close-up.Outside a federal complex in downtown Los Angeles that includes a courthouse, a veterans’ medical centre, and a jail, two dozen guardsmen in camouflage uniforms were arrayed in front of their military vehicles with semi-automatic weapons slung over their shoulders for the benefit of television and news photographers clustered on the sidewalk.They stood with the visors of their helmets up so the reporters could see their faces. Most wore shades, despite the gloomy weather, giving them the eerie appearance of extras from a Hollywood action movie more than shock troops for the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.After two days of unrest in response to heavy-handed raids by Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) in downtown Los Angeles and in the heavily Latino suburb of Paramount, the day started off in an atmosphere of uneasy, almost surreal calm.The skyscrapers and government offices of downtown Los Angeles were ringed by vehicles from multiple law enforcement agencies – Los Angeles police and parking enforcement, county sheriffs, highway patrol and private security guards.Most, though, were deployed for an entirely different event – a festival and two-mile walk organized by the non-profit group the March of Dimes to raise money for maternal and infant health.The streets around Grand Park, across from City Hall, were closed to traffic, but the police seemed less interested in sniffing out anti-Ice protesters than they were in posing for pictures next to a bubble machine with March of Dimes volunteers dressed as Darth Vader and other Star Wars characters.“We had the LAPD’s community engagement Hummer come by earlier and they told us we had nothing to worry about,” event organizer Tanya Adolph said. “They said they’d pull us if there was any risk to our safety. Our numbers are down markedly, I won’t hide that, but we’ve still managed to raise $300,000.”Local activists have called for demonstrations against the immigration crackdown; one demonstration set for Boyle Heights east of downtown and the other outside City Hall. Many activists, though, were worried about continuing Ice raids, particularly in working-class, predominantly Latino parts of the LA area such as Paramount – and worried, too, that any national guard presence heightened the risk of violence.Governor Gavin Newsom’s office reported on Sunday that about 300 of the promised 2,000 national guardsmen had deployed in the LA area. In addition to the small presence downtown, a group of them was reported to have driven through Paramount, scene of clashes between protesters and local police outside a Home Depot on Saturday.Trump congratulated the national guardsmen on a “great job” after what he called “two days of violence, clashes and unrest” but, as several California political leaders pointed out, the national guard had not yet deployed when city police and sheriff’s deputies used tear gas and flash-bang grenades to clear the streets.Both Ice and local activists estimated that about 45 people were arrested on Friday and Saturday, and several were reported to have been injured in confrontations with the police.Nick Stern, a news photographer, said he was shot in the leg by a less-lethal police round and was in hospital awaiting surgery. David Huerta, a prominent union leader with the Service Employees International Union, was also treated in hospital before being transferred to the Metropolitan detention center, the federal lockup in downtown LA.One of many slogans spray-painted on the walls of the federal complex, within eyeshot of the national guard and the news crews, read: “Free Huerta.”Others, daubed liberally on the walls of the complex around an entire city block, expressed rage against Ice and the Los Angeles police in equal measure. “Fuck ICE. Kill all cops!” one graffiti message said. “LAPD can suck it,” read another.Elsewhere in downtown Los Angeles, little seemed out of the ordinary. Homeless people slept undisturbed on a small patch of lawn on the south side of City Hall. Traffic moved unhindered past the county criminal court building and the main entrance to City Hall on Spring Street.Alejandro Ames, a Mexican American protester, who had traveled up from San Diego sat at a folding table on the west side of City Hall with a hand-scrawled sign that read: “Republic against ICE and the police”.Ames said he was a Republican and hoped this would give extra credence to his plea for restraint by the federal authorities. “I don’t want ‘em to go crazy,” he said. “I want ‘em to go home.” More

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    ABC News suspends journalist after calling Trump and adviser ‘world-class’ haters

    ABC News has suspended its senior national correspondent after he described top White House aide Stephen Miller as “richly endowed with the capacity for hatred” on social media.In a now deleted post, Terry Moran, who recently conducted an interview with Donald Trump, said that the president and his deputy chief of staff, Miller, were both “world-class” haters.An ABC News spokesperson said that Moran “has been suspended pending further evaluation”, adding: “ABC News stands for objectivity and impartiality in its news coverage and does not condone subjective personal attacks on others. The post does not reflect the views of ABC News and violated our standards.”According to a screenshot of the post, Moran said that Miller was not the brains behind Trumpism and his ability to translate the movement’s “impulses” into policy was “not brains. It’s bile.”“You can see that his hatreds are his spiritual nourishment,” Moran added. “He eats his hate.”He added of Trump: “Trump is a world-class hater. But his hatred only a means to an end, and that end [is] his own glorification.”Miller shot back, saying: “The most important fact about Terry’s full public meltdown is what it shows about the corporate press in America. For decades, the privileged anchors and reporters narrating and gatekeeping our society have been radicals adopting a journalist’s pose. Terry pulled off his mask.”The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, described Moran’s rhetoric as “unacceptable and unhinged” on Fox News. “I think this speaks to the distrust that the American public have in the legacy media,” she added. JD Vance, the vice-president, described Moran’s post as a “vile smear”.ABC News’ suspension of Moran comes nearly six months after the organisation agreed to pay $15m to a Trump presidential foundation or museum after he filed a defamation case following anchor George Stephanopoulos repeating an assertion on ABC’s This Week that Trump had been found “liable for rape” in a lawsuit filed by the columnist E Jean Carroll. He had not.The latest incident will probably deepen suspicion on the right that US mainstream media outlets are fundamentally biased against the administration.In its statement, ABC News maintained a position of neutrality, saying: “ABC News stands for objectivity and impartiality in its news coverage and does not condone subjective personal attacks on others.” More

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    Eight US states seek to outlaw chemtrails – even though they aren’t real

    Political leaders love an empty statement or proclamation, but when Louisiana’s state house of representatives moved against “chemtrails” last week, they were literally seeking to combat something that does not exist.It was an act of political symbolism that delved deep into the sort of anti-government conspiracy theories that have flourished under Donald Trump and are taking rooting in some US legislative chambers across the US.Known to less conspiratorially minded as aircraft contrails, or the white vaporous lines streaming out of an airplane’s engines at altitude, chemtrails are a longstanding conspiracy theory.Believers in chemtrails hold that the aircraft vapor trails that criss-cross skies across the globe every day are deliberately laden with toxins that are using commercial aircraft to spray them on people below, perhaps to enslave them to big pharma, or exert mind control, or sterilize people or even control the weather for nefarious motives.Despite the outlandishness of the belief and the complete absence of evidence, a 2016 study showed that the idea is held to be “completely true” by 10% of Americans and “somewhat true” by a further 20%-30% of Americans.At least eight states, including Florida and Tennessee, have now introduced chemtrail-coded legislation to prohibit “geo-engineering” or “weather modification”. Louisiana’s bill, which must pass through the senate before reaching Governor Jeff Landry’s desk, orders the department of environmental quality to record reported chemtrail sightings and pass complaints on to the Louisiana air national guard.While there are no penalties for violations, the bill calls for further investigation and documentation. Opponents fear it could be used to force airlines to re-route flights, challenge the location of airports and bring legal action against carriers.The US Environmental Protection Agency states that the plumes of aircraft exhaust vapor are a natural result of flight and pose no risk to weather patterns, while the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) has publicly denied undertaking or planning any weather modification experiments.But the theories abound, including that last year’s Hurricane Helene stalled over and devastated parts of western North Carolina as a result of government weather interference that was designed to force North Carolinians off their land and then exploit it for rare earth mineral mining. Federal emergency managers set up a webpage to dispel false information.But government weather programs have existed in the past.For two decades, from 1962 to 1983, Project Stormfury conducted experiments to release a silver iodide compound into “the belt of maximum winds” to reduce the strongest winds. And cloud-seeding occurs in western states to induce rain or snow fall.“It’s increasingly clear that humanity isn’t merely subjected to whatever weather a cloud portends – we also create and influence it through our everyday actions,” says Nevada’s Desert Research Institute. “Scientists now regularly harness their moisture and pull it to Earth, bringing water to parched communities and landscapes around the world.”Nor has the government always been entirely straightforward in its use of aerial-dispersed chemicals. The US military dropped 19m gallons of herbicide, including the cancer-linked Agent Orange, during the Korean and Vietnam wars, leading to potential long-term health problems related to exposure and spina bifida in children of veterans.Efforts to stop geo-engineering are gaining support in the administration where conspiracy-minded politicians now hold office or wield powerful influence.“We are going to stop this crime,” the health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, posted on X in August. Georgia representative Marjorie Taylor Greene said in a post before Hurricane Milton struck in October: “Yes they can control the weather. It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.” Even Donald Trump has spread the conspiracy theory that Joe Biden is dead and has been replaced by a robotic clone.A recently published book, The Ghosts of Iron Mountain, traces at least some responsibility for current conspiratorial thinking to 1960s radicals, including the 1967 anti-war satire Report from Iron Mountain by Leonard Lewin, written at the suggestion of future Nation editor Victor Navasky, which posed as a leaked government study about the necessity of continuous war for social stability.In The Ghosts of Iron Mountain, author Phil Tinline traces how a leftwing hoax was adopted by the right, absorbing much of the former’s anxieties about a military-industrial complex and elite control and repurposing it around “the deep state” with its attendant spin-offs in QAnon and militia thinking.This mischief-making, Tinline writes, acts as a “warning about the consequences that await if you don’t keep an eye on the line between your deep story and how power works, and what the facts support”.Timothy Tangherlini, a professor at the Berkeley School of Information who studies the circulation of folklore, says the chemtrails conspiracy theory has a potent history because, like all folktales, it begins with a kernel of history truth – programs like Agent Orange – and speaks to potent contemporary fears.“There are certain things that were sprayed by airplanes that did have a massive impact on the environment and on people’s health,” he says, pointing out that Vietnam veterans had fallen sick and the US was revealed as having exposed them to cancer-causing agents and then covering it up.“Fast-forward 50 years, there’s a deep suspicion of the government and things that fly,” he said.Fear of things in the sky was evident in the hysteria late last year in the panic over drones that appeared over New Jersey, close to a nuclear power station and a military arsenal, which prompted a federal investigation that has yet to release its findings.Tangherlini called the cross-fertilization of theories, whether around chemtrails, vaccination hesitancy or any number of other fringe beliefs that have made their way into the American mainstream via the internet and social media, “the wall of crazy”.“Jets flying though the air and contrails of condensed water should not in any way be linked to disease, viruses, mind control, but you look at some of the extractions we get from our mining social media, and if it wasn’t real you’d think your code wasn’t working or in hysterics.”But narratively, Tangherlini pointed out: “It’s a very interesting thing to do – you can create this totalizing threat everywhere you look. What is the strategy for dealing with it? Call the FAA. No, the FAA is in on it. What can we do to protect our health? Well, the doctors and big pharma are in on it. So there is a siege mentality.” More

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    From friends to foes: how Trump turned on the Federalist Society

    The world’s attention last week was gripped by Donald Trump’s abrupt fallout with the tech tycoon Elon Musk. Yet at the same time, and with the help of a rather unflattering epithet, the president has also stoked a rift between his Maga royal court and the conservative legal movement whose judges and lawyers have been crucial in pulling the US judiciary to the right.The word was “sleazebag”, which Trump deployed as part of a lengthy broadside on Truth Social, his social media platform. The targets of his wrath were the Federalist Society, an influential conservative legal organization, and Leonard Leo, a lawyer associated with the group who has, in recent years, branched out to become one of the most powerful rightwing kingmakers in the US.In his post, Trump said that during his first term “it was suggested that I use The Federalist Society as a recommending source on Judges. I did so, openly and freely, but then realized that they were under the thumb of a real ‘sleazebag’ named Leonard Leo, a bad person who, in his own way, probably hates America, and obviously has his own separate ambitions. He openly brags how he controls Judges, and even Justices of the United States Supreme Court – I hope that is not so, and don’t believe it is!”Founded in 1982, the Federalist Society is an important player in the conservative movement. Many conservative lawyers, judges, law students and law clerks are members of the group, attend its events or run in its general orbit. Republican presidents use its recommendations to pick judges for vacant judicial seats.In the days following Trump’s Truth Social harangue, people in the conservative legal world, which is centered in Washington DC but spans law schools and judge’s chambers across the country, are wondering what this rift portends. Is this a classic Trump tantrum that will soon blow over? Or does it speak to a larger schism, with even the famously conservative Federalist Society not rightwing enough – or fanatically loyal enough – to satisfy Trump?“I don’t think this will blow over,” Stuart Gerson, a conservative attorney and a former acting US attorney general, said. “Because it’s not an event. It’s a condition … He thinks judges are his judges, and they’re there to support his policies, rather than the oath that they take [to the constitution].”In recent months, Trump has been stymied repeatedly by court rulings by federal judges. His rage has been particularly acute when the judges are ones whom he or other Republican presidents appointed. The Maga world has turned aggressively against Amy Coney Barrett, for example, after the supreme court justice voted contrary to the Trump line in several key cases.The immediate cause of Trump’s recent outburst was a ruling by the US court of international trade against his sweeping tariffs on foreign goods. In this case, his anger appears to have had less to do with the judges than with the fact that a group of conservative lawyers and academics, including one who co-chairs the board of the Federalist Society, had filed a brief in the case challenging his tariffs.Trump is probably also aware that the New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA), an anti-regulation, pro-free market legal group affiliated with Leo and the billionaire Charles Koch, has sued, separately, to stop the tariffs.John Vecchione, an attorney at the NCLA, noted that the Federalist Society is a broad tent, with conservative jurists of many different inclinations and factions, including free marketeers and libertarians who do not subscribe to Trump’s economic nationalism. Members often disagree with each other or find themselves on different sides of a case. This February, a federal prosecutor affiliated with the group, Danielle Sassoon, resigned after she said the Trump administration tried to pressure her to drop a case.The “real question”, Vecchione said, is what diehard Maga lawyers closest to Trump are telling him.“Are they trying to form a new organization? Or are they trying to do to the Federalist Society what they’ve done to the House Republican caucus, for instance … where nobody wants to go up against Trump on anything?” he said. “I think that some of the people around Trump believe that any right-coded organization has to do his bidding.”A newer legal organization, the Article III Project (A3P), appears to have captured Trump’s ear in his second term. The organization was founded by Mike Davis, a rabidly pro-Trump lawyer, and seems to be positioning itself as a Maga alternative to the Federalist Society. On its website, A3P claims to have “helped confirm” three supreme court justices, 55 federal circuit judges and 13 federal appellate judges.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionDavis recently asserted in the Hill that the Federalist Society “abandoned” Trump during his various recent legal travails. “And not only did they abandon him – they had several [Federalist Society] leaders who participated in the lawfare and threw gas on the fire,” Davis said.Although Leo was a “a close ally” of Trump during his first term, the Wall Street Journal reported, Trump and Leo “haven’t spoken in five years”.Leo has responded to Trump’s outburst delicately. In a short statement, he said he was “very grateful for President Trump transforming the federal courts, and it was a privilege being involved”, adding that the reshaping of the federal bench would be “President Trump’s most important legacy”.Yet this Tuesday, a lengthy piece in the Wall Street Journal – pointedly titled “This Conservative Is Doing Just Fine, Thank You, After Getting Dumped by Trump” – argued that Leo is “unbounded by the pressures of re-election or dependence on outside money”, and is the “rare conservative, who, after being cast out of Trump’s inner circle, remains free to pursue his own vision of what will make America great again”. In 2021, a Chicago billionaire gave Leo a $1.6bn political donation, thought to be the largest such donation in US history. As a result, Leo has an almost unprecedented power in terms of dark-money influence.The article also noted that much of Leo’s focus has shifted to the entertainment industry, where he is funding big-budget television series and films that channel conservative values.Vecchione thinks that Trump’s tendency to surround himself with sycophants and loyalists will work against him.“If you have a lawyer who only tells you what makes you happy, and only does what you say to do, you don’t have a good lawyer,” Vecchione said. “That’s not a good way to get lawyers. Not a good way to get judges, either.” More

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    Stop bending the knee to Trump: it’s time for anticipatory noncompliance | David Kirp

    During the first 100-plus days of his presidency, Donald Trump has done his damnedest to remake the US in his image. Fearing Hurricane Donald, a host of universities, law firms, newspapers, public schools and Fortune 500 companies have rushed to do his bidding, bowing before he even comes calling. Other institutions cower, in hopes that they will go unnoticed.But this behavior, which social scientists call “anticipatory compliance”, smoothes the way to autocracy because it gives the Trump regime unlimited power without his having to lift a finger. Halting autocracy in its tracks demands a counter-strategy – let’s call it anticipatory noncompliance.Examples of anticipatory compliance are legion.Goodbye, academic freedom: Trump means to impose his anti-intellectual ideology on higher education. He is using unproven allegations of antisemitism and claims of discriminatory diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs as an excuse to punish top-ranked private universities – initially hapless Columbia, then other schools including Harvard, Princeton, Cornell and Northwestern – by withholding billions of dollars in federal grants. My own university, the University of California, Berkeley, anticipates that it will be added to this list when Trump turns his attention to nationally renowned public universities.“Be afraid” is the message for every university – threats to withhold funds from schools that use “woke” language have prompted some that aren’t even under the gun to censor themselves, excising words like “race”, “gender”, “class” and “equity” from course titles and curriculums.Anticipatory compliance also affects the actions of public schools. Worried that, because of their alleged “wokeness”, they will lose the federal dollars that deliver extra help to those who need it most, school systems have altered their curriculum to whitewash the historical record and restrict the literature available to students. Adieu, Toni Morrison and Rosa Parks.Goodbye, free press: Disney and Meta shelled out a combined $40m to settle baseless libel lawsuits brought by Trump, and Paramount is negotiating to make Trump’s spurious 60 Minutes lawsuit disappear.On the eve of the 2024 election, Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and the owner of the Washington Post, pulled an editorial endorsing Kamala Harris, to stay in Trump’s good graces. So did the Los Angeles Times, whose owner is a billionaire businessman.Goodbye, legal representation: Nine leading law firms succumbed to blackmail to get rid of the president’s executive orders that punished a few firms for displeasing him. Collectively, they agreed to provide more than $1bn worth of pro bono legal work to causes of Trump’s choosing. Now they’re being asked to defend the coal industry and tariffs, which surely isn’t what they expected.What’s more, some top-drawer firms have stopped providing pro bono work on immigration lawsuits and other hot topic issues. Instead, they are putting their talent at Trump’s disposal, neutering themselves while the White House makes mincemeat of the rule of law.Hello, toadying: To curry favor and avoid ridicule in a Trump tweet, dozens of major companies, ranging from Amazon to Pepsi, are treating the president as if he were king, reducing or abandoning their DEI programs without being specifically threatened.Those who bend the knee rationalize their actions as simply a prudent survival strategy. But that’s delusory, for the historical record shows that anticipatory compliance paves the road to autocracy. Bullies like Trump always demand more from their supplicants – more money, more abandoning principles, more loyalty-oath behavior. Anticipatory compliance feeds the beast, showing authoritarians how much they can get away with.Here’s the good news – anticipatory noncompliance is on the rise. Challenges to Trump’s unconstitutional actions have emerged in higher and K-12 education, the legal profession and the corporate world. The citizenry is now making its voice heard.Spearheaded by Harvard’s defiant pose, a growing number of colleges and universities are pushing back against Trump’s outrageous demands. A recent statement from hundreds of college administrators declared that “we speak with one voice against the unprecedented government overreach and political interference now endangering American higher education”. Faculty senates in the Big 10 Academic Alliance crafted a “mutual defense compact”; behind the scenes, the presidents of about 10 elite private universities are deciding what red lines they won’t cross.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionRather than meekly comply with Trump’s monarchical demand that public schools eliminate DEI initiatives or risk losing federal funds, 19 states have gone to court, contesting the administration’s contorted reading of civil rights law.The CEOs that scaled back their companies’ diversity programs misread the market and have suffered the consequences. Diversity is a popular goal that many investors and consumers take into account in their decisions. When Target rolled back DEI, the company had to confront a consumer boycott and a 17% stock drop. Meanwhile, corporations like Costco and Apple, which have stood firm, are on buyers’ and investors’ good guy list.Several law firms refused to cave in the face of Trump’s blackmail tactics, instead taking the administration to court. Not only is that the right thing to do; it could turn out to be the profitable course. The judges are unequivocally on their side. And when Microsoft dropped a firm that surrendered to Trump, signing on with a firm that’s taking the administration to court, it signaled that virtue may be financially rewarded.After months of quiescence, with the populace overwhelmed by the tsunami of outrages, popular opposition is emerging. On May Day, tens of thousands of demonstrators participated in nearly 1,000 anti-Trump demonstrations.Restoring democracy is no easy task, for it is infinitely easier to destroy than rebuild. It will take a years-long fight that deploys an arsenal of tactics, ranging from mass demonstrations and consumer boycotts to litigation and political organizing. It’s grueling work, but if autocracy is to be defeated there’s no option. “Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced,” observed James Baldwin, in a 1962 New York Times article. A half-century later, that message still rings true.What’s giving me hope nowCourts have stood firm in their defense of the rule of law, pushing back against Trump’s power-grab executive orders. Americans are participating in mass demonstrations nationwide and voting for Democratic candidates in local elections. What’s more, Americans are voting with their wallets – spurred by a consumer boycott, the value of Tesla shares has plunged by close to $700bn from its peak a year ago.

    David Kirp is professor emeritus at the Goldman School of Public Policy, University of California, Berkeley More

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    How can Trump use the national guard on US soil?

    Donald Trump said on Saturday he’s deploying 2,000 California national guard troops to Los Angeles to respond to immigration protests, over the objections of the California governor, Gavin Newsom.Here are some things to know about when and how the president can deploy troops on US soil.The laws are a bit vagueGenerally, federal military forces are not allowed to carry out civilian law enforcement duties against US citizens except in times of emergency.An 18th-century wartime law called the Insurrection Act is the main legal mechanism a president can use to activate the military or national guard during times of rebellion or unrest. But Trump didn’t invoke the Insurrection Act on Saturday.Instead, he relied on a similar federal law that allows the president to federalize national guard troops under certain circumstances.The national guard is a hybrid entity that serves both state and federal interests. Often, it operates under state command and control, using state funding. Sometimes national guard troops will be assigned by their state to serve federal missions, remaining under state command but using federal funding.The law cited by Trump’s proclamation places national guard troops under federal command. The law says this can be done under three circumstances: when the US is invaded or in danger of invasion; when there is a rebellion or danger of rebellion against the authority of the US government; or when the president is unable to “execute the laws of the United States”, with regular forces.But the law also says that orders for those purposes “shall be issued through the governors of the States”. It’s not immediately clear whether the president can activate national guard troops without the order of that state’s governor.The role of the national guard troops will be limitedTrump’s proclamation says the national guard troops will play a supporting role by protecting US immigration officers as they enforce the law, rather than having the troops perform law enforcement work.Steve Vladeck, a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center who specializes in military justice and national security law, says that’s because national guard troops can’t legally engage in ordinary law enforcement activities unless Trump first invokes the Insurrection Act.Vladeck said the move raises the risk that the troops could end up using force while filling that “protection” role. The move could also be a precursor to other, more aggressive troop deployments down the road, he wrote on his website.“There’s nothing these troops will be allowed to do that, for example, the ICE officers against whom these protests have been directed could not do themselves,” Vladeck wrote.Troops have been mobilized beforeThe Insurrection Act and related laws were used during the civil rights era to protect activists and students desegregating schools. Dwight Eisenhower sent the 101st airborne to Little Rock, Arkansas, to protect Black students integrating Central high school after that state’s governor activated the national guard to keep the students out.George HW Bush used the Insurrection Act to respond to riots in Los Angeles in 1992 after the acquittal of white police officers who were videotaped beating Black motorist Rodney King.National guard troops have been deployed for a variety of emergencies, including the Covid pandemic, hurricanes and other natural disasters. But generally, those deployments are carried out with the agreements of the governors of the responding states.Trump is willing to use the military on home soilIn 2020, Trump asked governors of several states to deploy their national guard troops to Washington DC to quell protests that arose after George Floyd was killed by a Minneapolis police officer. Many of the governors agreed, sending troops to the federal district.At the time, Trump also threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act for protests following Floyd’s death in Minneapolis – an intervention rarely seen in modern American history. But then defense secretary Mark Esper pushed back, saying the law should be invoked “only in the most urgent and dire of situations”.Trump never did invoke the Insurrection Act during his first term.But while campaigning for his second term, he suggested that would change. Trump told an audience in Iowa in 2023 that he had been prevented from using the military to suppress violence in cities and states during his first term, and said that if the issue came up again in his next term: “I’m not waiting.”Trump also promised to deploy the national guard to help carry out his immigration enforcement goals, and his top adviser, Stephen Miller, explained how that would be carried out: sympathetic Republican governors would send troops to nearby states that refused to participate, Miller said on The Charlie Kirk Show in 2023.After Trump announced he was federalizing the national guard troops on Saturday, the defense secretary Pete Hegseth said other measures could follow.Hegseth wrote on the social media platform X that active-duty Marines at Camp Pendleton were on high alert and would also be mobilized “if violence continues”. More

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    Trump news at a glance: ‘This is not justice’ – the uprising over Ice raids on LA

    Donald Trump’s homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, on Saturday pushed back against the protesters opposing immigration raids in Los Angeles: “A message to the LA rioters: you will not stop us or slow us down. @Icegov will continue to enforce the law. And if you lay a hand on a law enforcement officer, you will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”Stephen Miller, an immigration hardliner and the White House deputy chief of staff, described the protests as a “violent insurrection”. During protests at a federal detention facility in downtown LA, David Huerta, a senior union official, was arrested in a police response that included teargas and flash-bangs. Hospitalised for his injuries, Huerta released a statement: “Hard-working people, and members of our family and our community, are being treated like criminals. We all collectively have to object to this madness because this is not justice.”Following are the key Trump administration stories of the day:National guard pitted against LA immigration raid protests The Trump administration will deploy the national guard to immigration protests in Los Angeles, the border czar, Tom Homan, said on Saturday, as an immigration crackdown in the area erupted into mass protests with police in riot gear deploying teargas at bystanders. Arrests by immigration authorities in Los Angeles come as Donald Trump and his administration push to fulfil promises to carry out mass deportations across the country.Read the full story‘Very serious consequences’ if Musk switched to DemocratsTrump warned Elon Musk on Saturday that he faces “very serious consequences” if he funds Democratic candidates following the pair’s epic public bust-up. He said in an NBC News interview to be broadcast on Sunday: “If he does, he’ll have to pay the consequences for that. He’ll have to pay very serious consequences if he does that.” Trump said he had no intention to speak to Musk and no wish to repair his relationship with Musk. “I’m too busy doing other things.”Read the full storyVance plays down ‘Elon flying off the handle’JD Vance said Elon Musk was making a “huge mistake” going after Donald Trump. “I hope that eventually Elon comes back into the fold. Maybe that’s not possible now because he’s gone so nuclear … Look, it happens to everybody. I’ve flown off the handle way worse than Elon Musk did in the last 24 hours … I actually think if Elon chilled out a little bit, everything would be fine.”Read the full storyTravel ban ‘racist and hostile’, says Iranian governmentTehran denounced the US travel ban on Iranians and citizens of 11 other mostly Middle Eastern and African countries, saying it was a sign of a “racist mentality”. Donald Trump signed the executive order on Wednesday. Alireza Hashemi-Raja, an Iranian foreign ministry official responsible for Iranians abroad, said the measure – which takes effect on 9 June – “indicates the deep hostility of American decision-makers towards the Iranian and Muslim people”.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

    Lauren Gambino profiles Kristy Noem, Donald Trump’s homeland security secretary: “Noem leads the sprawling department at the heart of the president’s hardline vision to carry out the largest deportation campaign in American history.”

    An international neo-Nazi terrorist organization calling itself the Base is continuing to build in the US and planning a new paramilitary training event – as the FBI under Trump appointee Kash Patel has signalled it is no longer prioritizing investigations of far-right extremism. Ben Makuch reports
    Catching up? Here’s what happened on 6 June 2025. More