Is the civil war beginning?

The right yearns for a national crack-up

Thanks for reading America Explained. I will keep all posts about the situation in Los Angeles free, but if you can upgrade to a paid subscription in order to support my work then I will be eternally grateful.

The situation in Los Angeles is really bad, and the trend is towards the catastrophic.

Overnight, the Trump administration called up 2,000 additional National Guard forces and about 700 Marines from Camp Pendleton and sent them to LA. California Governor Gavin Newsom says that he has learned that the National Guard troops will soon be called on to work directly with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in carrying out deportation operations.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump publicly told the White House official who is running his immigration crackdown to arrest Newsom, whose “primary crime is running for governor”, Trump says.

While this is unfolding, ICE are continuing their round-ups. This all began when ICE started turning up at workplaces and Home Deport parking lots to arrest and deport people. They drove into the parking lots pretending to be there to offer work to people, and then started arresting them. They tried to enter schools to arrest children. They are arresting anyone they can get their hands on and denying them access to lawyers. People who have lived in the United States for years or decades are being disappeared.

It’s important to understand that this is not some set of targeted raids on “criminals”. This is a fundamental attack on the fabric of a great American city.

About one in three people in Los Angeles are immigrants, and about one million of those are undocumented. Most of the undocumented have been in the United States for a decade or more. They work, pay taxes, raise American children, and contribute to society. They were busy doing all of these things when ICE arrived to drag them away. Together, they have built a thriving, diverse, pulsating city, one of the wonders of the world.

And it is this city that Trump and his supporters hate.

As Trump has purposefully escalated this crisis, his administration and supporters have fallen in line. They have gone along with pretending that some graffiti and rioting concentrated on a few blocks in a metro area of nearly ten million people represents a national emergency so grave that it requires sending in the Marines. And they have done that because they are on board with Trump’s fascist project of waging war on his own people.

Don’t take it from me. Take it from their own words. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem says “well, they’re not a city of immigrants, they’re a city of criminals… Boy, we’re gonna hit them back and we’re gonna hit them back harder than we ever have before.” Stephen Miller, Trump’s domestic policy chief, says “this is a fight to save civilization” and calls LA “occupied territory”. Right-wing media outlets from Fox News to National Review are acting as if the real problem here is “a riot against the duly-elected government of the United States” rather than a lawless, authoritarian president.

They’re doing this because they have been primed to do so by years of hate. Anti-immigrant hate, anti-city hate, anti-Democratic hate, anti-Hispanic hate. We are now seeing the consequences of these years of hate, which have desensitized the right to the creep of dictatorship. They don’t see Los Angeles as a city of people - they see it as a city of un-American criminals who must be obliterated. Obliteration is what U.S. Marines are best at, after all.

Trump is playing his supporters with sickening ease. All he has to do is rip some immigrant children away from their parents and as soon as someone protests against the jackbooted thugs doing it, knee-jerk authoritarian instincts take over. Trump’s supporters worship authority, his authority specifically. They will never accept that any exercise of it is unjustified.

There is no limiting principle here. No logical endpoint. Trump and his supporters see the very existence of blue America as illegitimate and unjustified. Its way of life must be stamped out and its politicians arrested.

In my nightmares, I have sometimes seen the beginning of the next American civil war - a war not of battlefronts and tanks but of the government preying on its own people and those people fighting back and then ripping one another part along the lines created by decades of hatred. In those nightmares, this is what the beginning sometimes looks like. It starts in one place, with protests and crackdowns, and then it spreads.

And where are the guardrails? In Trump’s first term, the military strongly resisted anything like this happening. The Defence Secretary and the military’s chief officer made it clear they would not be involved in policing America’s cities. Has the Pentagon folded so quickly? Is firing a few generals and putting a clown in charge all it takes?

Where are the courts? Trump is manifestly not following the law with these military deployments. Will the courts reverse their decades and decades of pusillanimous behavior in the face of outrageous exercises of federal power? Will they do nothing to prevent a president from waging war on his own people?

And what are national politicians going to do? What can they do? The resistance to Trump needs steady, trusted leadership more than ever. But the Democratic Party is at a moment of historic weakness, both in terms of popularity and leadership. It can easily recover in time to win the 2026 and 2028 elections, but does it have that long to get its act together?

We will see in the coming days if de-escalation is possible. But all the signs are that the right is getting the conflict it has always wanted - a war against the half of America that it despises, waged with every tool at its disposal. The red lines have been crossed, and only darkness lays ahead.

Thanks for reading America Explained. I will keep all posts about the situation in Los Angeles free, but if you can upgrade to a paid subscription in order to support my work then I will be eternally grateful.