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      ‘This isn’t an isolated incident’: Trump’s show of military force in LA was years in the making

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      Donald Trump is targeting Los Angeles, the biggest city in deep-blue California – a sprawling metropolis shaped by immigrant communities that the president described on Tuesday as a “trash heap” – with a show of force many years in the making. After his first term, Trump expressed regret for not taking a more heavy-handed approach to the 2020 protests over George Floyd’s murder by police. So when demonstrations against his immigration crackdown erupted last week in Los Angeles, he turned to the playbook he wished he had used then – federalizing the national guard and deploying hundreds of US marines to confront what Democratic officials insist was a manageable situation, escalated by a president who the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom, has warned is increasingly behaving like a “dictator”.It’s the made-for-TV clash Trump has been waiting for: visually gripping scenes of unrest in a Democratic-run city furious over his administration’s mass deportation agenda.“Chaos is exactly what Trump wanted, and now California is left to clean up the mess,” Newsom said on Twitter/X.Trump has said he “would have brought in the military immediately” if he could redo 2020. And, former defense secretary Mark Esper told NPR in 2022, Trump asked if protesters could be shot. “Can’t you just shoot them, just shoot them in the legs or something?” Trump asked, according to Esper.The showdown in Los Angeles brings together longtime overlapping goals of the Trump regime: bringing state and local officials to heel; trying to tap as many resources as possible for his deportation program; and going after protesters who speak or act against him, all while stretching the boundaries of legality.Sending troops into an American city to stifle largely peaceful protests is a “test case” that, depending on how it plays out in Los Angeles, could be a strategy the administration replicates in other cities, said Sarah Mehta, the deputy director of government affairs at the ACLU.“This isn’t an isolated incident,” she said. “I think what we’re seeing in Los Angeles is this culmination of several weeks of incredibly aggressive immigration policing, the federal government asking the military to get further involved in immigration enforcement, including the transportation of unaccompanied children and attention and riot control, and then on top of that, again, these really targeted attacks against cities and states that are not going along with Trump’s aggressive deportation regime.”Karen Bass, the mayor of Los Angeles, said her city was being used as a proving ground for how the federal government might exert its authority over other local governments that resist the president’s agenda. “I feel like we are part of an experiment that we did not ask to be a part of,” she said, speaking at a press conference in downtown Los Angeles on Monday.While Trump sows chaos in the streets, the mayor said, the city’s immigrant communities were gripped by a “level of fear and terror” over the administration’s escalating enforcement efforts, with some undocumented workers staying home and mixed-status families afraid to attend school graduation ceremonies.In January, Trump returned to power with what he says is a popular mandate to carry out the largest deportation campaign in US history. Amid growing frustration over the pace of removals, the White House is turning to increasingly forceful tactics, including stepped up raids on workplaces.On Friday, scattered protests broke out in response to a series of immigration sweeps, in some instances by federal agents wearing tactical gear, at businesses across the Los Angeles area. Newsom and Bass said local and state law enforcement were fully capable of handling the demonstrations, but as images of cars on fire and clashes with police spread online, the Trump administration ignored the state’s wishes and brought in the national guard – an extraordinary move that state officials said brought even more protesters into the street over the weekend. Then on Monday, a day of larger, mostly peaceful protests, Trump ordered additional national guard troops and hundreds of US marines to the city.“We will liberate Los Angeles and make it free, clean and safe again,” Trump vowed, in a speech to soldiers at Fort Bragg on Tuesday.Democratic cities, in particular, have long drawn Trump’s ire. On the campaign trail, he frequently pointed to liberal cities, painting them as hellscapes devoid of capable leadership that would be better run with him in White House. Speaking in Iowa in 2023, Trump said he would use federal troops to “get crime out of our cities”.“The next time I’m not waiting [for local approval]. We don’t have to wait any longer. We got to get crime out of our cities,” Trump said. He, and the conservative allies behind Project 2025, have pushed for withholding federal funds from states and cities that don’t aid federal immigration enforcement.Democrats expected him to make good on these threats. In August 2024, the New York Times reported that Trump’s allies spent the four years between his presidencies finding legal justifications for using the military in these situations, often in the immigration context, but sometimes against protesters.In a statement provided to the Guardian, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said: “President Trump has rightfully highlighted how poorly Democrat cities are run – including emboldening criminals, providing sanctuary to criminal illegal aliens, and putting Americans at risk. In LA, illegal aliens and violent criminal protesters spent the last several days attacking law enforcement, waving foreign flags, lighting cars on fire, and unleashing a state of outright anarchy. Anyone downplaying this behavior, or describing it as a ‘manageable situation’, is either an idiot or a propagandist for the Democrat party.”California, the biggest blue state in the country, has long been Trump’s favorite foil. On issue after issue – from climate to immigration to education – Trump cast the state as a hellscape “ruined” by “radical left” lunacy. In defending his national guard deployment, Trump decried Los Angeles a “once great American City” that “has been invaded and occupied by Illegal Aliens and Criminals”.Newsom and attorney general Rob Bonta on Monday sued Trump over what they said was an “unlawful” deployment of the national guard over the governor’s objections. Bonta noted that it was the state’s 24th legal action against the Trump administration in 20 weeks.Democrats say the timing of his crackdown on Los Angeles was no coincidence. Trump had just endured a days-long stretch of bad news: his political partnership with Elon Musk imploded, the US government returned a Maryland man wrongly deported after weeks of insisting they would not bring him back and the president’s “big, beautiful bill” stalled on Capitol Hill.“What’s happening in Los Angeles is straight out of the Trump playbook,” California senator Alex Padilla said, “manufacture a crisis and provoke violence to distract from terrible headlines.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSince January, Trump’s administration has targeted universities and college students on visas who had participated in pro-Palestinian activism. The crackdown comes as states have advanced a host of anti-protest bills in the last few years to expand criminal punishments for protesting.On Monday, Trump called for Newsom’s arrest – a move the governor called an “unmistakable step toward authoritarianism”.“The President of the United States just called for the arrest of a sitting Governor,” Newsom said after Trump’s threat of arrest. “This is a line we cannot cross as a nation.”Trump was unable to identify a crime he thought Newsom had committed. House Speaker Mike Johnson suggested Newsom should be “tarred and feathered”.The Trump administration has already gone after several elected officials who resist his administration’s crackdown. On Tuesday, congresswoman LaMonica McIver of New Jersey, was indicted on federal charges alleging she assaulted and interfered with immigration officers after a clash with law enforcement at a May protest outside of a detention facility in Newark. During the incident, the city’s mayor, Ras Baraka, was arrested, though charges against him were dropped. And a Wisconsin judge was indicted by a federal grand jury for allegedly helping a man evade immigration agents seeking his arrest in her courthouse.Stephen Miller, the hardline architect of Trump’s immigration agenda, used a simple term to describe the protests last week: “insurrection”.Miller, who was raised in the seaside city of Santa Monica on Los Angeles’s west side, called his home state “the largest sanctuary state in America”, underscoring its status as a trial balloon for other communities. He has described the militarized response in Los Angeles as a “fight to save civilization”.“When the rioters swarmed, you handed over your streets, willingly,” he retorted to Newsom on Monday. “You still refuse to arrest and prosecute the arsonists, seditionists and insurrectionists. This Administration is fighting to save the city and the citizens you have left to struggle and suffer.”Trump, who notably pardoned all those who were convicted for their roles in the insurrection at the US Capitol in 2021, has been debating whether to invoke the Insurrection Act, the 18th-century law that would give him the power to activate the military or national guard to quell rebellion or unrest.For now, he is using a different legal justification, though the threat of the act looms. The right to peacefully assemble is guaranteed by the first amendment. Protests in LA have largely been peaceful, not amounting to an insurrection.Engaging the military is a tipping point, Mehta said, because it is “striking and terrifying” to see the president use every tool he can to punish his critics. But, she said, it also reveals the administration’s weakness – they have to use all of these tools to compel compliance.“They’re doing this because they need to make a show of force, and because people are resisting and people are pushing back,” Mehta said. “People are outraged, and they’re very angry about the way that their civil rights are being stripped away, and the aggressiveness with which immigration agents are responding to members of our community.”Mass “No Kings” protests are expected across the country in response to the multimillion dollar military parade Trump has planned in the country’s capitol for Saturday, his 79th birthday and the US army’s 250th anniversary. Organizers expect protests in more than 1,800 locations, though not in Washington DC. About 100 of the events have been added since Trump sent troops to Los Angeles.“Now, this military escalation only confirms what we’ve known: this government wants to rule by force, not serve the people,” the coalition behind the 14 June protests said in a statement.Speaking from the Oval Office on Tuesday, Trump said he wasn’t aware of any planned protests against the event, but claimed that any participants “hate our country”.Then, he issued a dark warning: “For those people that want to protest, they’re going to be met with very big force.” More

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      As military is deployed to LA, rightwing media decry protesters as ‘invaders’

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      There were unsavory scenes in Los Angeles over the weekend, as police used teargas and “less-lethal munitions” on thousands of people gathered to protest against the arrest of undocumented immigrants.The events playing out on rightwing TV channels and in the conservative podcasting realm were almost as miserable, as excitable media figures decried protesters as “invaders”, called for both the mass arrest of elected officials and the invocation of a two-century old laws and used the chaos to push racist conspiracy theories.It came as the Trump administration said the military will remain on the ground in LA for two months, after Donald Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act. About 700 US marines deployed to the US’s second largest city on Tuesday, after LA’s police chief effectively said their presence would complicate law enforcement’s efforts.The clamor for arrests mainly focused on Gavin Newsom, California’s Democratic governor, as rightwing media followed the lead of the US president, who first made the suggestion over the weekend. Trump didn’t seem to know under what law Newsom should be arrested, and the conservative commentariat wasn’t sure either. Still, it didn’t stop them crying for the California governor to be placed in handcuffs.Sean Hannity, the Fox News host, claimed Newsom “should be arrested for obstructing US immigration law”, even as Tom Homan, the border czar, said Newsom hadn’t done anything to warrant detention. Wayne Root, a host on the rightwing channel Real America TV, suggested Newsom should be charged with “treason” and be detained at Guantánamo Bay while he awaits trial. “Be sure he showers with MS-13,” Root added, a take that, even for the rightwing media cesspool, was particularly macabre.But the right wasn’t just calling for the caging of Newsom. Some wanted Karen Bass, the mayor of Los Angeles, to be arrested too, including Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist adviser-turned-podcast host.“Right there, LAPD,” Bannon announced on Monday, apparently under the impression that the entire LA police force was listening to his War Room show.“The mayor is involved in this and having the stand down [sic]. She ought to be arrested today. Immediately.”Bannon went on to call for “hard actions,” whatever they are, adding: “Not even question we’re on the side of the righteous.”The bad takes were everywhere. Chris Plante, a host at rightwing TV channel Newsmax, said on air: “The Democrats are just – I mean, at what point are they declared to be a terrorist organization – with all of the affiliations and all the violence and the shootings and the fire-bombings and the targeting Jews and on and on?”Laura Ingraham, who often seems to be trying just a bit too hard to be offensive, went further. On her Fox News show she accused Joe Biden and Alejandro Mayorkas, the former secretary of homeland security, of having “opened the border” and given “benefits to 10 million illegal aliens”.“The goal was to resettle America with new people in order to transform it completely in ways that you really can’t do at the ballot box, at least when you’re that radical,” Ingraham said.She was referring, not very subtly, to the concept of “great replacement”, a racist conspiracy theory that falsely claims there is an ongoing effort by liberals to replace white populations in current white-majority countries. It’s a concept that started on fringe websites before making its way to Fox News.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionOthers were upset by more prosaic matters, including the sight of people at the protests flying flags other than the stars and stripes. It really set off Charlie Kirk, with the influential rightwing declaring that the US has “a parasitic relationship with Mexico, and we have for quite some time”.He added: “If you loved the promise of America, you wouldn’t wave a Mexican flag when American police tried to remove criminals. This should be a wake-up call. If you did not realize it before, guess what? Pat Buchanan and President Trump were right. We are a conquered country that has been invaded by a force in certain areas.”Kirk is uniquely placed to comment on such matters. His Turning Point USA organization sent 80 busloads of people to Washington on the day that hundreds of Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol, and Kirk has celebrated Trump’s mass pardon of people who attacked police officers that day.When it came to the treatment of people protesting in LA, however, Kirk was of a different mind, as he called for US troops to be used in policing US civilians.“Los Angeles does not feel like a protest, what’s happening there. It’s an entire city that’s declaring open rebellion to American sovereignty and authority,” he said. “We must be unafraid to declare the Insurrection Act of 1807.” More

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      Protesters have a right to wear masks – despite Trump’s double standard | Jan-Werner Müller

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      Do protesters have a right to hide their faces? Donald Trump, who likes to show and see his own face as often as possible, clearly does not think so. One demand to universities has been that they outlaw masking at demonstrations; in response to protests in California, the US president demanded on social media that anyone wearing a mask be arrested immediately.Never mind the apparent double standard, as Ice agents refuse to take off face coverings and hide their name tags, defying any accountability; there is a widespread sense that standing by one’s identity is a crucial part of standing up to unjust power. In fact, that intuition is at the core of civil disobedience. But it is not plausible in our present moment; what’s more, there is a long countervailing tradition of validating citizens’ right to anonymity. As recently as the mid-1990s, it was affirmed by none other than the supreme court.Lawful protest is categorically different from civil disobedience, though much current commentary conflates them. In civil disobedience, citizens openly – or even, as Martin Luther King Jr put it, “lovingly” – break the law; they make themselves identifiable to the authorities and are willing to accept punishment (but hope that they will not be treated like ordinary criminals). This strategy serves multiple purposes: it demonstrates moral seriousness, it flags “highest respect for the law” in general (MLK again) and it counts on a majority coming to see the injustice these loving lawbreakers are flagging – and then change things.To be sure, the requirement to reveal one’s identity has not been accepted by all philosophers of civil disobedience: for some, what matters is that whistleblowers such as Chelsea Manning were doing the right thing. Their identity was not crucial for the public to comprehend scandalous facts they revealed (in the end, at great personal cost).Past lawful protests, meanwhile, occurred in a different media context. The civil rights movement assumed that its messages about injustice would reach a majority of US citizens – as well as people of good will in Washington DC. After all, activists appealed above the heads of racist governors such as Alabama’s George Wallace to the federal government. Today, such assumptions are doubtful. As everyone knows, we no longer live in an age of three large TV networks, which, despite various failings, could be expected faithfully to transmit images of civil rights protesters being brutally treated by southern police. In our deeply distorted, often outright dysfunctional, media landscape, messages are either not transmitted at all (just watch Fox at moments that could be embarrassing for Trump); or they are reframed such that the original message is turned on its head (those peacefully protesting against lawlessness become the law-breakers).Beyond these risks, there is the by now clear and present danger of the Trump administration engaging in personal retribution and making examples of individuals – think of student detentions and deportations. Under such conditions, hiding one’s identity is an understandable act of caution, and such caution should not be criminalized. While democracies such as Canada also have anti-masking laws, these aim at rioters and those assembled unlawfully, not people exercising their right to free expression. We are clearly at a moment where protest is beginning to take courage – a point driven home to me when I politely asked some older women holding up posters outside the main gate at Princeton University whether I could take their picture. Several said that I should not show their faces.As in debates about privacy, someone sooner or later will say that anyone who has nothing to hide should not hide their face. But in an age of ubiquitous surveillance, now supplemented with rapidly advancing facial recognition technology, you do not know what will be done with evidence of your presence at a protest. We have a secret ballot because we do not want people to be intimidated, but also because we don’t want powerful people – not necessarily always the state; it could be the boss who does not like your vote for democratic socialism – to know about our stances.The supreme court saw this logic three decades ago. It defended the right to stay anonymous of an elderly lady handing out leaflets opposing a school tax levy in Ohio. The court reminded Americans that the authors of the Federalist papers had used pseudonyms; the justices declared anonymity a means “to protect unpopular individuals from retaliation”, going so far as to ennoble it as a “shield from the tyranny of the majority” (of course, today’s protesters are not standing against a real majority – what Trump and Miller are doing is precisely not popular).To be sure, when protest is meant directly to engage others, there is something not right about an asymmetry of the masked speaking to the unmasked: freedom of assembly, among other things, ensures that we can get into each other’s faces. Already in the 19th century, revolutionaries hoped that those manning barricades and soldiers would end up talking and fraternizing. Teargas – first used against barricades, even before deployment in war – renders that vision impossible. Today, what risks they take, and, specifically, how much they want to reveal to authorities and fellow citizens, should be up to individuals engaged in lawful protest.

      Jan-Werner Müller is a Guardian US columnist and a professor of politics at Princeton University More

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      Trump is waging war against his own citizens in Los Angeles | Judith Levine

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      On Monday, the Pentagon sent 700 active-duty marines to Los Angeles and doubled the number of national guard troops deployed there to 4,000, to quell protests Donald Trump said on Sunday were already “under control”, “still simmering … but not very much”.The same day, the US president used the word “insurrectionists” to describe demonstrators against the unprecedentedly large and fierce immigration deportation raids by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) that started on Friday in that city. The remark echoed his long-held desire to invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act, which would authorize him to send the military anywhere in the country to put down dissent.California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, sued the Trump administration, arguing that it is unconstitutional to use the armed forces inside the US, except in the most extreme situations.Put another way, the government is not allowed to wage war against its own citizens. But this is what it is doing.In its first months in office, the Trump administration enacted what could be called soft authoritarianism: rhetorical glorification of white masculinity and derision of frailty and difference; intimidation of liberal democratic institutions – universities, law firms, the press, and the arts; weaponization of the judicial system against Trump’s perceived foes.Laced through this non-violent aggression are real violence and reward for violence toward selective populations: the denial of life-saving medical care for transgender people and pregnant women in distress, in deference to the “personhood” of their fetuses; the pardon of the insurrectionists who attacked the Capitol and killed officers on 6 January 2021. And most prominent, the kidnap, deportation without due process, and rendition of immigrants to foreign gulags.But in the last week or so, a second phase has begun unfolding: the literal weaponization of the government to contain dissent. It is no hyperbole to call this, and the less visible mechanisms that reinforce it, fascism.This weekend in Los Angeles, protests broke out over Ice raids across the city, especially at workplaces including a clothing warehouse and Home Depot, where migrants muster for day labor. The raids were aimed at meeting an unattainable quota of 3,000 arrests a day. In this diverse city, which immigrants are rebuilding after the devastating fires, the outrage Ice provoked was inevitable.Some of the resistance was not peaceful – objects were thrown at cars, for instance – but the LA police got matters in hand. Still, over the objections of Newsom and LA’s mayor, Karen Bass, Trump deployed 300 national guard troops to the scene. They carried long guns and shields and fired “less-lethal munitions”, including flash-bangs, teargas and rubber bullets into the crowds; they also wielded their batons.At the same time as repressing citizens’ free speech, Ice is preventing elected officials from fulfilling their responsibility to oversee federal detention facilities in their jurisdictions. On Sunday, two US representatives from New York were denied entry to the federal building in downtown Manhattan where about 100 immigrants had been kept for days in small, short-term holding cells, some sleeping on bathroom floors. A month earlier, the mayor of Newark, New Jersey, was arrested outside a federal detention center for attempting to do the same thing.Speaking on Friday with NBC News, Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, would not rule out arresting Newsom or Bass if they interfered with the deportation raids. “I’ll say it about anybody,” he proclaimed. “You cross that line, it’s a felony to knowingly harbor and conceal an illegal alien. It is a felony to impede law enforcement doing their job.”Homan later walked back his threat to arrest Newsom, who had dared him to do so. Trump expressed no reservations. “I think it’s great,” he told the press.Like every authoritarian regime, this one justifies doing its “job” as a defense of public safety necessitated by lawlessness. “Despite what you may be hearing, the record checks show that we arrested illegal aliens with criminal histories including CHILD CRUELTY, DOMESTIC VIOLENCE, DRUG TRAFFICKING, ASSAULT, ROBBERY, HUMAN SMUGGLING,” Homan posted on X. Did they? Ice always says it is arresting only criminals, but it conflates undocumented status with criminality. Yes, it is a felony to conceal or harbor an “alien” – but giving sanctuary, as churches have long done, was rarely penalized until now. Being in the US without documentation, meanwhile, is not a crime. It is a civil, administrative offence.Nor is it a crime to peacefully resist the government’s torment of one’s family and neighbors. “Our officers and agents continued to enforce immigration law in LA, despite the violent protesters,” Homan continued. Some news outlets have called the protests “riots”, a characterization that local observers, including the governor, the mayor and radio host Charlamagne the God, reject. They counter that the demonstrations were loud, angry and almost entirely nonviolent before the national guard arrived to escalate the tension.This sequence of events is not accidental. On Facebook, Katherine Franke, a tenured Columbia law school professor who was forced to resign after defending student protesters against the war on Gaza, recounted a recent conversation with “a prominent Democratic attorney general”. Asked where things were going, he predicted, on “good information”, Franke paraphrased, that in May or June the federal government would intensify the crackdowns to provoke resistance, “then use that provocation as a justification for declaring martial law”. The declaration, she continued, could free the administration not just to deploy troops but also to suspend elections or the writ of habeas corpus.Trump seems to be affirming these predictions. “We’re gonna have troops everywhere,” he told reporters. “If we see danger to our country and to our citizens [the response] will be very, very strong.” He nattered on about protesters spitting on police. “They spit, we hit,” said the poet-president, looking pleased with himself.While manufacturing peril, authoritarian regimes seek to manufacture consent, as Noam Chomsky put it – or, better, enthusiasm – for the exercise of their power. To do so, they stage mass rituals of adulation and spectacular displays of the military might at the beloved leader’s command. On the US army’s official Facebook page, the ad campaign for the 14 June military parade celebrating the army’s and Trump’s simultaneous birthdays is unceasing. Repeatedly refreshed is a video of him at his desk. “I am thrilled to invite everyone to an unforgettable celebration, one like you’ve never seen before,” he reads woodenly. “This is your army. This is your country. This is America250,” says the quietly awed narrator of another video. The first eight seconds of the one-minute spot feature Trump.But enthusiasm is not easily won, and trying to compel obedience through force creates backlash. Better to attain anticipatory consent through fear. This is where surveillance comes in. To complement the FBI, the National Security Agency and myriad state-level snitching mechanisms for everything from abortion to teaching Black history, the administration has, perhaps unintentionally, created a sophisticated spying apparatus at the so-called “department of government efficiency”, or Doge.The Heritage Foundation wrote the plan to reduce the administrative state to the size of a supply closet; thus, Doge was born. But Trump never cared about waste, fraud and abuse (he believes in them all). For him, the aim was to build a force of unswervingly loyal apparatchiks. In fact, as the Washington Post reports, the department is now scrambling to rehire federal employees. It turns out that things the government does, such as process tax filings and fly weather balloons, need people who know how to do them.But Doge is not obsolete. Now that the supreme court has turned over the nation’s personal data to Big Balls and the boys, and AI is connecting every dataset with every other dataset, it may have a more useful function: coordinating the surveillance state. Homeland security is already spidering through IRS data to locate undocumented immigrants through their tax filings ($96.7bn in federal, state and local taxes in 2024).While the shock troops do the dirty work and the marching bands inspire the masses, Doge may expand from enforcing fealty in the federal workforce to exacting it from everyone. Violence, propaganda and surveillance: the triumvirate makes fascism.

      Judith Levine is Brooklyn-based journalist, essayist, and author of five books. Her Substack is Today in Fascism More

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      Trump’s war on Harvard was decades in the making. This letter proves it | Bernard Harcourt

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      On the shelf in my library, I have an autographed copy of a book written by a former Republican congressman from New York, John LeBoutillier, titled Harvard Hates America: The Odyssey of a Born-Again American. It was published in 1978, two years before LeBoutillier was elected to Congress – and decades before the Trump administration’s assault on the institution. But its message is familiar in 2025.The book is a scathing criticism of Harvard University, in large part over its supposed left-leaning professors who allegedly indoctrinate their undergraduates. Its thrust is straightforward: Harvard is America’s problem.Today, the blueprint for Donald Trump’s attack on Harvard, Columbia and other liberal arts colleges and universities can be found in another text: Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership, a guide to rightwing government reform published in April 2023 by the Heritage Foundation – over a year before any encampments went up on Columbia’s campus. But the Republican ambition to subjugate Harvard and Columbia traces further back, at least to the 1970s, when it became apparent that college-educated voters favored the Democratic party.My copy of Harvard Hates America is autographed and dedicated to two constituents. And I recently stumbled on something tucked into the fold: a letter that LeBoutillier enclosed to the recipients of his gift. On House of Representatives stationery, LeBoutillier wrote:
      Long after I had graduated from Harvard and was a freshman member of Congress, I realized just how terrible some of the people educating our young are; they are not only liberals, but they use their “power” over their students to preach an anti-American leftist point of view. And this is not confined to Harvard. Indeed, this is a disease spreading throughout the academic world.
      I believe that this politicalization of education threatens this country. And, coupled with a bias so obviously evident in the media, makes it difficult for we conservatives to get our message across.
      Well, I’m going to continue to fight for our point of view and our principles.
      Enjoy the book.
      LeBoutillier was not alone in these sentiments. In a taped conversation with Henry Kissinger and Alexander Haig Jr in the Oval Office on 14 December 1972, President Richard Nixon attacked university professors, claiming they were the enemy. His rhetoric was characteristically colorful: “The professors are the enemy. Professors are the enemy. Write that on the blackboard 100 times and never forget it.”Conservatives like the journalist Irving Kristol, the philosopher Allan Bloom, and Ronald Reagan’s education secretary, William Bennett, would perpetuate the criticisms of supposedly left-leaning universities in the 1980s. And there is a straight line from those attacks in the 1970s and 80s to the Trump administration.View image in fullscreenIn a speech titled “The universities are the enemy” and delivered at the National Conservatism Conference in Orlando, Florida, on 2 November 2021, JD Vance declared: “I think if any of us want to do the things that we want to do for our country and for the people who live in it, we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.” Vance would then add, quoting Nixon: “There is a wisdom in what Richard Nixon said approximately 40 to 50 years ago. He said, and I quote, ‘The professors are the enemy.’”The Heritage Foundation picked up the baton in a 43-page chapter on education in the Project 2025 text. Remarkably, the Trump administration’s continuing assault on Harvard, Columbia and other universities is unfolding line-by-line, chapter and verse, from that script.So, right after a federal judge in Boston blocked the Department of Homeland Security from revoking Harvard University’s ability to enroll foreign students, Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, announced that the administration intended to revoke the visas of Chinese students, especially those with ties to the Chinese Communist party. On page 355 of its Mandate for Leadership, Project 2025 calls for “Confronting the Chinese Communist Party’s Influence on Higher Education.”At a press conference in the Oval Office on 30 May 2025, Trump attacked Harvard and said he would redirect the school’s grants to vocational education. “I’d like to see the money go to trade schools,” Trump said. The remark, again, came straight out of the Project 2025 playbook, which states on pages 15-16 and 319 that the federal government should prioritize “trade schools” and “career schools” over the “woke-dominated system” of universities.The Trump administration demanded that Columbia’s Middle Eastern, South Asian and African studies program be placed “under academic receivership”. Again, straight out of the playbook. Project 2025 calls on page 356 for “wind[ing] down so-called ‘area studies’ programs at universities”.Trump signed executive orders on inauguration day banning diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) and “gender ideology” at institutions such as universities that receive federal funding. Again, textbook material. Project 2025 argued on page 322, regarding educational institutions, that “enforcement of civil rights should be based on a proper understanding of those laws, rejecting gender ideology and critical race theory”.In fact, the first line of the chapter on education in Project 2025 says it all: “The federal Department of Education should be eliminated.”Christopher Rufo, the conservative activist behind the attack on critical race theory and gender studies, has openly described the Republican attack on universities as a “counter-revolution” planned well before the campus protests. The Republican offensive traces back at least to the rise of the Black Lives Matter and abolition movements in the wake of the police killings of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, George Floyd and others. “It’s a revolution against revolution,” Rufo admitted, adding: “I think that actually we are a counter-radical force in American life that, paradoxically, has to use what many see as radical techniques.”And what the Trump administration has accomplished with its ongoing assault on Harvard and Columbia is the “prototype” of that wider counter-revolution. Rufo is explicit about this. “If you take Columbia University as really the first trial of this strategy, we’ve seen an enormous payoff,” he said. “I’d like to see that prototype industrialized and applied to all of the universities as a sector.”Given this history tracing back to the 1970s, it is puzzling why people continue to believe that the Republicans are trying to reform the universities to address antisemitism. It should be clear that their actions are instead part of a decades-long effort to humble universities for political reasons, namely to counter the trend that college-educated people tend to vote Democratic. Nixon was frank about this. That’s what made professors the enemy.On top of that, of course, there is profit and political economy. At the press conference last week, Trump admitted why he wants to shift education funding to trade schools.Encouraged by billionaire Elon Musk at his side, Trump said: “I’d like to see trade schools set up, because you could take $5bn plus hundreds of billions more, which is what is spent [on research universities], and you could have the greatest trade school system anywhere in the world. And that’s what we need to build his rockets and robots and things that he’s doing” – pointing to Musk.Trump could not have been more explicit. “We probably found our pot of gold,” Trump adds, “and that is what has been wasted at places like Harvard.”The Trump administration has seen some successes in its counter-revolution against higher education. So far, the lower federal courts have run interference. But there have been major casualties already, especially in the funding of sciences and medical research, academic integrity and autonomy, and area studies. Faculty governance at some universities has also been diminished, at some universities decimated.Anyone who is genuinely interested in understanding what the Trump administration is up to and to anticipate its next moves should return to books like Harvard Hates America and then read Project 2025’s chapter on education. It clearly explains the past four months and predicts the future – one in which the federal government will sacrifice liberal arts colleges and universities to the benefit of trade schools, faith-based institutions and military academies.The path ahead also includes, in all likelihood, eliminating the American Bar Association as an accrediting system (page 359), as well as the other actors in the “federal accreditation cartel” (pages 320 and 355); terminating the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program (page 354), phasing out income-driven repayment plans (page 337), and privatizing student loans (page 340); allocating at least 40% of federal funding of education “to international business programs that teach about free markets and economics” (page 356); and a host of other radical proposals.It is time now to be honest about the decades-long history of the Republican assault on higher education. Too many of the university leaders who are negotiating with the Trump administration about campus protest are naive at best and fail to grasp the stakes of the ongoing counterrevolution – or complicit at worst. In the process, they are undermining their universities and violating their fiduciary duties to their constituents – students, alumni, faculty and staff. By capitulating based on a pretext, a feint in military terms, those leaders have sacrificed the integrity of the research enterprise and the autonomy of the academy.Liberal arts colleges and universities are a gem in the US, envied by people around the world. Their strength lies in fostering critical thought, creativity and inventiveness throughout the humanities, social sciences, and natural and applied sciences. A liberal arts education, at its best, cultivates critical thinking that challenges society’s strengths and weaknesses, and asks how to make the world more just with more freedom for everyone. Those are the true aims of higher education.

      Bernard E Harcourt is a professor of law and political science at Columbia University in New York City and a directeur d’études at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He is the author most recently of “A Modern Counterrevolution” in The Ideas Letter More

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      Trump news at a glance: Gavin Newsom declares ‘democracy is under assault’ in blistering attack on president

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      The California governor, Gavin Newsom, has declared that “democracy is under assault” in a blistering evening address in which he accused Donald Trump of “pulling a military dragnet” across Los Angeles.On another day of mass protests over immigration raids and the federal deployment of military forces to the state, Newsom said Trump’s immigration crackdown had gone well beyond arresting criminals and that “dishwashers, gardeners, day labourers and seamstresses” are among those being detained.In an extraordinary ratcheting of tensions with the White House, Newsom recounted how in recent days Ice agents had grabbed people outside a Home Depot, detained a nine-months pregnant US citizen and sent unmarked cars to schools.He said Trump’s decision to deploy the California national guard without his support as governor should be a warning to other states.“California may be first – but it clearly won’t end here,” Newsom said.Here’s our round-up of key Trump administration stories of the day:Los Angeles mayor sets curfew as Newsom intensifies criticism of Trump The city of Los Angeles is instituting a curfew for a one-square mile area of downtown, where demonstrations against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) have continued.The mayor, Karen Bass, announced the 10-hour curfew after the police department said it had carried out more than 300 arrests of protesters in the last two days. The city’s crackdown came after Gavin Newsom filed an emergency lawsuit to block the Trump administration from using military forces to accompany Ice officers on raids throughout Los Angeles.Read the full storyProtests spread across US as anger grows over Trump’s immigration crackdownProtests against the Trump administration’s newly intensified immigration raids, centered on Los Angeles, spread across the country on Tuesday with demonstrations in New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Omaha and Seattle.Read the full storyTrump’s mobilization of troops in LA to cost Americans at least $134m, Hegseth saysDonald Trump’s decision to mobilise the US marines and national guard troops to Los Angeles is expected to cost taxpayers at least $134m and continue for a minimum of 60 days, the US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, told lawmakers during a House hearing on Tuesday.A total of 2,700 military personnel – 700 marines and 2,000 national guard troops – were dispatched to the city on Monday in a move that state leaders have publicly opposed.Read the full storyMike Johnson suggests Newsom should be ‘tarred and feathered’The Republican US House speaker, Mike Johnson, advocated for a brutal form of vigilante justice to be performed on the California governor, Gavin Newsom, saying he should be “tarred and feathered” for his opposition to immigration enforcement actions.This came after the Louisiana congressman declined to say if Newsom and other California officials should be arrested – as Trump and his “border czar”, Tom Homan, have recently floated – for allegedly impeding federal deportations.Read the full storyMexico president denies encouraging LA protests Mexico’s president has rejected an unfounded allegation by a senior US official that she encouraged demonstrations against immigration raids in Los Angeles, saying it was “absolutely false”.Claudia Sheinbaum responded on social media after Kristi Noem, Donald Trump’s homeland security secretary, accused her of “encouraging violent protests”.Read the full storyTrump’s speech at Fort Bragg contained lies and conspiracy theories about LADonald Trump reiterated a slew of falsehoods and misleading statements about the tensions in the US’s second-largest city in an address to troops at the Fort Bragg military base in North Carolina.In the speech, the president spread conspiracy theories, maligned California’s Democratic leaders and misleadingly portrayed protesters as part of a “foreign invasion”.Read the full storyTrump administration to cut all USAID overseas rolesThe Trump administration will eliminate all USAID (United States Agency for International Development) overseas positions worldwide by 30 September in a dramatic restructuring of remaining US foreign aid operations.In a Tuesday state department cable obtained by the Guardian, the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, ordered the abolishment of the agency’s entire international workforce, transferring control of foreign assistance programs directly to the state department.Read the full storyUS not pursuing goal of independent Palestinian stateMike Huckabee, Trump’s ambassador to Israel, has said the US is no longer pursuing the goal of an independent Palestinian state, marking what analysts describe as the most explicit abandonment yet of a cornerstone of American Middle East diplomacy.Read the full storyUS to put four prisoners to death this weekFour executions are scheduled across the US, marking a sharp increase in killings as Donald Trump has pushed to revive the death penalty despite growing concerns about states’ methods.Executions are set to take place in Alabama, Florida and South Carolina. A fourth, scheduled in Oklahoma, has been temporarily blocked by a judge, but the state’s attorney general is challenging the ruling.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      The Smithsonian Institution has rebuffed Trump’s attempt to fire the director of its National Portrait Gallery in a direct challenge to the president.

      Mark Green, the Republican chair of the homeland security committee, announced that he will retire from Congress once the House votes again on Trump’s tax bill.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened on 9 June 2025. More

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      What are the ‘less lethal’ weapons being used in Los Angeles?

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      After United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents arrested multiple people on alleged immigration violations, protests broke out in Los Angeles.

      In response, police and military personnel have been deployed around the greater LA area.

      Authorities have been using “less lethal” weapons against crowds of civilians, but these weapons can still cause serious harm.

      Footage of an Australian news reporter being shot by a rubber bullet fired by police – who appeared to deliberately target her – has been beamed around the world. And headlines this morning told of an ABC camera operator hit in the chest with a “less lethal” round.

      This has provoked debate about police and military use of force.

      Read more:
      In Trump’s America, the shooting of a journalist is not a one-off. Press freedom itself is under attack

      What are ‘less lethal’ weapons?

      As the term suggests, less lethal (also called non lethal or less-than-lethal) weapons are items that are less likely to result in death when compared with alternatives such as firearms.

      Less lethal weapons include weapons such as:

      pepper spray
      tear gas
      tasers
      batons
      water cannons
      acoustic weapons
      bean-bag rounds
      rubber bullets.

      They are designed and used to incapacitate people and disperse or control crowds.

      They are meant to have temporary and reversible effects that minimise the likelihood of fatalities or permanent injury as well as undesired damage to property, facilities, material and the environment.

      Fatalities can still occur but this does not necessarily mean the weapon itself caused those.

      In Australia in 2023, for example, 95-year-old aged care resident Clare Nowland was tasered, fell backwards, hit her head and died from her head injury.

      In 2012, responding to a mistaken report about an armed robbery, police physically restrained, tasered and pepper sprayed 21-year-old Roberto Curti multiple times. He died but his exact cause of death (and whether the use of less lethal weapons played a causal role) was not clear.

      Do these weapons work to quell unrest?

      The impetus for police and military use of less lethal force came about, in part, from backlash following the use of lethal force in situations where it was seen as a gross overreaction.

      One example was the 1960 Sharpeville massacre in South Africa, when police officers in a black township opened fire on an anti-apartheid protest, killing 69 civilians.

      In theory, less lethal force is meant to provide a graduated level of response to events such as riots or protests, where the use of lethal force would be disproportionate and counter-productive.

      It is sometimes described as the “next step” to use after de-escalation techniques (like negotiation or verbal commands) have failed.

      Less lethal weapons can be used when some degree of force is considered necessary to restore order, neutralise a threat, or avoid full-blown conflict.

      How well this works in practice is a different story.

      There can be unintended consequences and use of less lethal force can be seen as an act of aggression by a government against its people, heightening existing tensions.

      The availability of less lethal weapons may also change perceptions of risk and encourage the use of force in situations where it would otherwise be avoided. This in turn can provoke further escalation, conflict and distrust of authorities. More

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      Protests across US as anger grows over Trump’s immigration crackdown

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      Protests against the Trump administration’s newly intensified immigration raids, centered on Los Angeles, spread across the country on Tuesday, with demonstrations in New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Omaha and Seattle.Thousands attended a protest against the federal government’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) in New York City’s Foley Square.Some protesters held signs reading “Ice out of New York” and others chanted “Why are you in riot gear? I don’t see no riot here.”Shirley, a 29-year-old protester, condemned the Trump administration for targeting workers, which she called antithetical to the country’s essence.“I come from immigrant parents,” she said, with a large Mexican flag draped across her back. “It’s infuriating to see that this particular government is going into labor fields, taking people from construction sites, into industry, plants, into farms, and taking away what is the backbone of this country.“So I’m here today to remind everybody that the United States started as an immigrant country, and it’s a nation of immigrants, and I just want to make sure that I’m here for those who can’t be here today.”Councilmember Shahana Hanif of Brooklyn spoke before the large crowd in Foley Square. She criticized the Trump administration and New York’s mayor, Eric Adams, for the crackdown on immigrants.“Mayor Adams has made it clear that he doesn’t care about working class people,” she said. “He does not care about any one of us. He is collaborating with Trump to use tactics. He’s complicit.”She also expressed her desire to keep New York a sanctuary city, and called for more protections for international students.“Stop the attacks and assaults on our students!” she yelled, and was met with cheers from the crowd.Thousands also gathered outside an immigration court in Chicago, and then marched through downtown streets, drumming and chanting, “No more deportations!”View image in fullscreenAt one point, a car drove through the marchers, narrowly missing the anti-Ice protesters, according to WGN TV News, which broadcast video of the incident.In metro Atlanta, hundreds of people marched along Buford Highway in solidarity with Los Angeles, local 11 Alive News reported.Protesters marched in Omaha on Tuesday, chanting “Chinga la migra” (a Spanish phrase that roughly translates to the slogan “Fuck Ice” on placards waved by the marchers) after about 80 people were reportedly arrested in an immigration raid on a meat-packing plant.In Seattle, a small crowd of about 50 protesters gathered outside the Henry M Jackson federal building in downtown Seattle to show solidarity with protesters in Los Angeles, the Seattle Times reported.After a rally, the protesters barricaded driveways with e-bikes and e-scooters to block homeland security vehicles thought to be transporting detained immigrants.Large rallies also took place in Dallas and Austin on Monday, and up to 1,800 protests are planned nationwide on Saturday, to coincide with the military parade Donald Trump is throwing on his birthday in the nation’s capital. More