There is no need for that. There is no riot, no massive uprising, no insurrection. They are doing it because they want to militarize Los Angeles and bend us to their will.
Josh Marshall has the right analysis and it’s extremely worrying:
Some key facts. The President does have the authority to nationalize the state National Guards. This is clearly within his power. The Governor has no power or authority to resist that move. Same applies the Adjutant General (the top officer of each state guard) and the soldiers. But they are still not allowed to obey illegal orders. This is why I said a few times through the Spring that governors needed to have serious talks with their state adjutant generals and find out just who they were, their values, understanding of their responsibilities, etc.
There have always been a few clear break points, rubicon thresholds in the Trump autocracy storyline where the entire legitimacy of the state and the freedom of American citizens can go sideways very, very fast. And this has always been one of the most obvious ones. There’s no need here for the Guard. The irritant here are the wildly inflammatory raids by militarized ICE squads. Even assuming those go on the Guard isn’t necessary. The President has triggered this crisis and is now using it to exercise military authority within a state against the wishes of the state’s civilian elected leaders – Mayor, Governor, congressional representatives, etc.
We’re very clearly entering a moment of grave danger. My main thought about this is to remember – as we’ve said in other contexts – that the fight to preserve the American republic remains fundamentally one over public opinion. The President has a lot of power here for violence and mischief. He’s not in charge of what people think about it, whether they think his actions are legitimate, wise, anything they support. You can dismiss whether public opinion matters in a case like this. I disagree. It’s fundamentally what it’s all about, what will eventually decide all of this. So I hope all the players here, in the decisions they make, keep that in mind.
I think we’ve all been waiting for this to happen. It’s what they’ve wanted from the beginning.
Here’s the authority under which Trump called out the guard.
Update —
This whole situation is a definitional abuse of power. It is a wholly manufactured crisis. The President has the authority to federalize the National Guard. But the powers he takes from that decision are far from unlimited.
At the moment we know much less than we should about just what authority the President used to do this and what led up to that decision. The situation is developing rapidly. So it’s possible there is more information than I have seen. Did Gavin Newsom first refuse the President’s request to deploy the Guard? Or did the President just skip that entirely? Newsom’s public statement, as I noted earlier, was fairly vague about what was happening.
That’s important both because we just want to know the details of how we got here but also because the legal situation is pretty different under different scenarios. Just moments ago Ed O’Keefe of CBS reported that, according to the White House Press Secretary “the president invoked his Title 10 authority to federalize” the California state Guard. There are a bunch of smart lawyers on Bluesky and Twitter who understand the relevant statutes far better than I do. Joyce Vance says that doing it this way may bring the actions into conflict with the Posse Comitatus Act.
Again, I don’t know enough about these different statutes to discuss this part of it.
I’ll return to my earlier point. The larger context is public opinion in California and around the country. These are illegitimate actions and abuses of presidential power. How the public at large views this is critical to the future of the country and Donald Trump’s whole effort to create a Putinized, autocratic presidency. In my opinion every elected leader and really every citizen should be choosing their next moves with an aim to having this play out in such a way that the public views these actions in that way – as illegitimate, unAmerican. The future of the Republic, civic democracy is the real game here. Having the public reject the legitimacy of this decision is critical to that goal. So everything every decision needs to be made with that goal in mind.