Trump’s Approach to the L.A. Riots Is Necessary
In the midst of a clear breakdown of law and order in Los Angeles, President Trump is showing he has learned from the mistakes he made during his first administration. The president is responding to the L.A. riots of 2025 as he should have to the nationwide George Floyd riots of 2020. This is clearly not your father’s Republican administration.
Rioters began attacking an ICE detention facility in downtown L.A. after agents rounded up 44 illegal immigrants in workplace raids. Heather Mac Donald has helpfully reported that the collective rap sheets of these individuals include “second-degree murder, assault with the intent to commit rape, assault with a deadly weapon, sexual battery, grand theft larceny, illegal weapon possession, and drug trafficking.”
For this—for taking in just 44 people who are in the country illegally, many with arrest records—hundreds of rioters wreaked havoc. ICE’s Acting Director Todd Lyons said in a statement that the LAPD took over two hours to respond to calls for help despite “being called multiple times.” “Our brave officers were vastly outnumbered, as over 1,000 rioters surrounded and attacked a federal building,” Lyons continued.
In response, Trump has called up a total of 4,000 National Guard troops and 700 Marines to protect federal law enforcement officers and stop rioters who are impeding the adjudication of federal law. Though America has a storied history of keeping the military out of domestic law enforcement matters (Americans of the revolutionary generation even disliked the presence of a standing army in peacetime), responding to what’s happening in L.A. is one of the exceptions to this tradition.
John Yoo, who is not exactly a fervent MAGA hat-wearing supporter of the president, has argued that though the specific way the president called in the National Guard is unprecedented—he did not go through the state governor, for one—it is not illegal. And even as the famous liberal law professor Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law, accused Trump of taking authoritarian actions in deploying the military domestically, he admitted that the president “likely has the legal authority to do this.”
Georgetown Law Professor Jonathan Turley has written that if things continue to escalate, Trump should consider invoking the Insurrection Act, which would allow troops to participate with civilian law enforcement. This act was most recently used by presidents like Dwight D. Eisenhower and JFK during the civil rights era to enforce desegregation efforts. The last time that act was invoked was when President George H.W. Bush used it in 1992 after the riots caused by the Rodney King verdict.
Contrary to the deep-seated personal distaste of Trump that often goes for serious legal analysis by establishment liberals and conservatives, Trump has a right to protect federal law enforcement officers and federal facilities in the states. We are supposed to believe that the same leftists who said Trump raising his fist and saying, “Fight!” during a rally on January 6 constituted an insurrection but that what’s happening in L.A.—for example, rioters throwing Molotov cocktails at police and federal agents—is most certainly not an insurrection. These are not serious people.
And contrary to the argument floating around on the Right that Trump is destroying federalism, that ship sailed long ago. Whatever constitutional wrongs may have been committed by Alexander Hamilton and the Federalists or Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War are irrelevant in 2025. If your principles lead you to stand by and watch as federal agents are attacked by rioters and chaos reigns on city streets, then something is wrong with your principles.
“Whenever those who are entrusted with public councils take prudent measures for the public good,” Matthew Henry wrote in his commentary on Joshua, “it must be acknowledged that God puts it into their hearts; he that teaches the husbandman discretion no doubt teaches the statesman and general.” If the public deems that Trump did, in fact, end up taking imprudent actions during the L.A. riots, they can hurt his party in the 2026 midterms, or even ask their political representatives to file a motion to impeach.
But to the consternation of establishment Democrats and their backers in the media, the public seems to be supporting Trump so far. One early poll shows that 59% of voters approve of Trump’s decision to send in the U.S. military to help quell the riots. Tens of millions of Americans voted for Trump in 2024 because they were tired of the chaos and lawlessness that previous administrations aided and abetted or sat by and watched.
They have had enough of politicos like L.A. Mayor Karen Bass and Governor Gavin Newsom, who seem to be more interested in protecting illegal aliens who loot, start fires, write slogans in graffiti like “F**k ICE,” “Death to Amerikka,” and “Dead Cops,” and drive SUVs through the front windows of luxury clothing stores than protecting Americans citizens and their property from crime. Instead, Bass and Newsom cynically worry about the price tag of sending troops in—and this as the California high-speed rail boondoggle has ballooned now to upwards of $120 billion (when California voters approved the proposition to build the rail system in 2008, the estimate for the entire project was $33 billion). These are the same people who watched as historic sections of L.A. burned down due to wildfires just earlier this year, which was likely made worse due to the state’s insane environmental policies. Bass, Newsom, and the rest of California’s Democratic Party establishment simply have no credibility and should be completely ignored.
Trump’s luck in his political enemies is unparalleled. The Left has moved from praising Luigi Mangione, the man who assassinated the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, and praising Hamas to backing rioters who stand on burned-out cars, waving the flags of other nations.
The president is being helped in his efforts by Stephen Miller, the dynamo who has been perhaps the greatest force for returning to the basic building blocks of law and order of anyone in the Trump administration, save for the president himself. As Miller noted in one of a string of tweets that blasted away at establishment narratives, “The unified message from Democrat leaders is that the only way for the violence against ICE officers to stop is for federal law enforcement to withdraw from Los Angeles. This is the language of insurrection.”
In order to truly capitalize on this situation, Trump must dismantle the Left’s chaos-creating networks. Chris Rufo argues for a systematic approach in taking apart the Left’s mobilization apparatus: “The most effective riot control is to take movement leaders off the field, infiltrate their networks, disrupt the flow of funding, and roll them up in federal investigations. Denying the Left-trained protest leaders now will create a strong precedent for the rest of the president’s term.”
Kyle Shideler, a senior analyst at the Center for Security Policy, notes that the L.A. rioters aren’t just a random group of protestors: the presence of SEUI and its president getting arrested, along with the Democratic Party’s rush to condemn Trump, with Representative Maxine Waters quickly on location, shows that this is a coordinated event that is backed by the Democratic establishment.
“My concern is that if you look back before the election,” Shideler says, “[leftists] were talking about how to confront a future Trump administration over immigration, so they have been preparing for this for some time. This is the conflict that they wanted, and it’s the topic that they wanted.” In his understanding, this is the establishment Left trying to assert control over even more radical foot soldiers toward a goal they think is more palatable to the public.
While at least a portion of the rioters seem to be trust fund babies, as an investigator found while tracking phone data (“79% fly private three or more times per year”), the bulk are not. L.A.-based commentator and author Peachy Keenan notes that a local reported that the crowds are around “75-85% young lantinx hoodlums.” Her contact describes that as sunset arrives each night, “the crowds start to get rowdy. Groups flood onto a freeway. Other groups start to shoot fireworks at cops. Some of them start to break windows and do graffiti. By 10 pm, the looters show up. By morning, everyone is gone.”
The problem is that there is no single individual who is directing the Left’s foot soldiers. Contrary to the Right’s sometimes tunnel vision on specific individuals like George Soros, whom they perceive as directing mayhem worldwide from some mountain lair, there are layers of underlings, middle-tier managers, directors, and funders in the Left’s various and simultaneous operations. The networks are vast, likely receive funding from the government in some capacity, along with high rollers on the Left, and have contacts with sympathetic compadres who hold high-level positions in the media, in the universities, in Fortune 200 corporations, and elsewhere.
Shideler notes that the Right needs a far better understanding of how the Left operates in order to mount an effective counter-response:
The left is a self-perpetuating ecosystem. It’s not sufficient to just pick a hate figure at the top, as much as they might deserve whatever attention they get for bad behavior. You have to disrupt their ecosystem at all levels if you actually want to address this. You can’t put enough rioters in jail to stop them, and you can’t shut down one source of money and stop them. You have to operate at every level, and I think especially at the level of the organizers, of the trainers, of the mid-level professionals who make these things happen. These are the guys who don’t get arrested in a protest. There’s a limited number of those people, but there will never be a shortage of people willing to throw a rock or hold a sign.
Senator Josh Hawley seems interested in taking apart the Left’s networks, brick by brick. He is opening an investigation into the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA), a group he maintains could be supporting the L.A. riots. Fox News reports that CHIRLA has received $34 million in government grants, including a total of $750,000 in grants from the Biden administration.
Additionally, the Trump administration seems to be taking the threat of riots in other cities seriously. ICE will be deploying Special Response Teams to Seattle, Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, and Northern Virginia as rumors of mass, nationwide riots are circulating.
To this point, Trump is acting as he promised during his campaign, ensuring that law and order are restored in sanctuary cities and sanctuary states. Though he’s facing withering criticism yet again from the establishment, he must stay the course. If America is to remain a sovereign nation, the law must be enforced, and prudent men must take the necessary steps to ensure that our nation is preserved for our posterity.
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