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Past Emails
June 11, 2025

Why the military? A manufactured crisis.

We’re on a knife’s edge moment — caught between promise and peril, precarity and possibility.

In case you missed it: Donald Trump has deployed 700 marines alongside up to 4,100 National Guard troops to Los Angeles. This comes in direct defiance of local voices and elected leaders who made it clear they do not want this ICE-led crackdown. Protests erupted as people tried to shield their communities and loved ones. ICE escalated quickly—using tear gas and stun grenades.

No one requested the National Guard.

The violence began with ICE ripping families apart. Trump wants to escalate it with the military and national guard.

California Governor Gavin Newsom put it plainly:

“Trump is sending… troops into LA County—not to meet an unmet need, but to manufacture a crisis.… He’s hoping for chaos so he can justify more crackdowns, more fear, more control. Stay calm. Never use violence. Stay peaceful.”

This is a predictable tactic! Protect Democracy’s Authoritarian Playbook for 2025 predicted: “we can expect a future President Trump to deploy the U.S. military within the United States … to put down protests.”  Over a year ago I wrote this scenario in What if Trump Wins: “Trump attacks the “lawlessness of Democratic cities” and promises to end it. He cites made-up crime statistics and the “wildly violent” protests since he’s been elected. He invokes the Insurrection Act, ordering the military to go into Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Portland, and Chicago and “secure” them.”

So what is Trump trying to do?

As with many things in this administration, the implementation of this extreme escalation is haphazard. National Guardsmen have been sleeping on the floor without federal funding for food and water. Rules of engagement have been hastily written. And it was bad politics for ICE to attack and then arrest well-loved SEIU-USWW President David Huerta as he was standing up for migrant workers. This activated labor — with AFL-CIO and many other unions throwing down on national actions earlier this week. (David is now released on bond.)

Trump is trying to do several things. Above all, he’s presenting himself to his supporters as the ultimate solution to lawlessness—through unmatched violence. It’s important to remember that we live in a country already steeped in economic, social, and physical violence. He’s positioning himself as the final answer.

So ordering the military is a simple strategy: exert his will through violence. His playbook is to provoke a manufactured crisis so he can convince his base to keep escalating. More power to him. Less to everyone else.

Our core strategy: don’t give the autocrat what he wants: passive silence (which would be the worst) or made-for-TV scenes of violence (which feed Trump’s manufactured crisis). Trump wants the street violence, one of many reasons we teach nonviolence as critical for an anti-authoritarian movement. However Trump wants to escalate no matter — so blaming any violence in the streets for his escalation is actually making his argument for him. The truth is: it’s his violence. It’s his choice to escalate.

For those of us not in the streets of L.A., our role is to help the public get unstuck about its confusion of where the cruelty comes from. ICE is using violent means to achieve violent ends—and Trump is trying to escalate even further. They are the perpetrators of this immediate crisis.

If someone kidnapped my kid, I would lose my mind. However I reacted, I would want you to focus on the greater cruelty — that kidnapping. The separating of families. The human trafficking of a government benefiting from workers’ labor but shipping them away when they’re not politically convenient.

Think about how little news is covering the story of the initial ICE raids. A rare piece from USA Today reminds us of that cruelty:

Among those struggling was longtime Compton resident Isabel Ramirez, who said she is “dying of sadness” after multiple family members were detained on June 7. Waiting in line in a folding chair at the Alondra Church of Christ, Ramirez said her family was visiting from San Jose, but had left her house to buy gardening tools when they were detained by ICE.

“They took them away,” Ramirez says. “They’re all married and have children who were born in the U.S., but they don’t have papers.”

Ramirez said she found out about the raids on TV and is anxiously awaiting word about her family’s fate.

“We don’t know where they are. We don’t know where they took them. We’re just waiting, still,” Ramirez said, tearing up. “Their poor kids, what’s going to happen with them? What’s going to happen? We’re sad, we’re praying to the Virgin Mary that this gets resolved. Wherever we go, we have our cellphones with us, just in case.”

Technically speaking: Trump did not invoke the Insurrection Act. Instead, he used an emergency procedure to call up the National Guard and marines. This kind of deployment—without a governor’s consent—hasn’t happened since 1965. The legal implications are serious, hotly contested, and already California has sued. (Much else of what we’ve written previously on “What to do if the Insurrection Act is invoked” still applies.)

Trump is doing another thing that he’s particularly good at: changing the narrative when things turned sour for him. All last week news covered Trump’s MAGA base splitting over his atrocious spending bill, his break-up with Musk, and the fall-out from his terrible policies. Consider State Senator Ileana Garcia, who said:

“This is not what we voted for. I have always supported Trump, through thick and thin. However, this [the broader ICE crackdowns] is unacceptable and inhumane.”

We’re no longer talking about the unexpected return of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia. Trump had sworn he’d never bring Kilmar back. It was supposed to be a show of brute strength. Instead, it’s a humiliating public retreat.

(That Kilmar returns to likely vastly inflated charges does allow Trump some degree of “saving face.” But his fundamental strongman claim that “I can get away with anything” was unmasked.)

Why did Trump reverse course? We don’t have all the inside details. Maybe it was pressure from Republican senators, frustrated elite lawyers, or even El Salvador’s president. But his retreat proves Trump hasn’t fully consolidated power.

There’s also the known outside strategy that we’ve wielded: Town halls erupting. Growing protests. Surging petitions. Labor leaders from AFL-CIO’s Liz Shuler to Sean McGarvey of the Building Trades have spoken out forcefully. These, too, contributed to Trump’s backing down.

So the timing is important Trump. Trump is trying to distract us from the fact that he’s vulnerable, that his base isn’t united, and that our movement has the power to disrupt his agenda. He’s trying to provoke further violence in L.A. to rally his base and regain control.

They fear our togetherness. What they try to tear apart only deepens our bond. We will stand in solidarity with each other.

Warmly,

– Choose Democracy

ps: We almost forgot!  Eileen Flanagan and Daniel Hunter just wrote a timely peacekeeper/marshal manual (already part of the “No Kings” toolkit for upcoming protests this weekend). Eileen just posted a Waging Nonviolence article about this resource.

Resources for National Guard & Military

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