UPDATE: President Trump contacted Missouri Gov. Mike Kehoe Monday night — 25 days after the tornado hit — to tell him he had approved Federal Emergency Management Agency aid for 51ºÚÁÏ' recovery.
In the more than three weeks since a tornado took lives, flattened thousands of buildings and otherwise devastated wide swaths of the 51ºÚÁÏ region, the Trump administration has blithely dragged its feet, refusing so far to issue a clearly warranted emergency declaration that would open up badly needed federal aid.
But there was no such presidential foot-dragging in Los Angeles over the weekend in response to what started as relatively mild protests there over the administration’s immigration enforcement tactics. Within 24 hours, President Donald Trump had ordered the California National Guard into L.A. over the objections of Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom.
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Don’t believe the administration’s predictable efforts to present this development as a reasonable response to what it has falsely termed (of all things) an “insurrection.â€
This marks the first time in more than half a century that a president has commandeered a state’s National Guard over the objections of its governor. In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson deployed the Guard in Alabama to protect civil rights protesters that the state’s governor wouldn’t. That the current power play by this lawless president might be categorized as anything like that heroic action is, in a word, grotesque.
The L.A. protests have, predictably enough, grown exponentially more violent since Trump inserted federal authority where it had no validity or necessity. Indeed, Newsom’s warning that Trump’s action was “purposefully inflammatory†was both prescient and a fair analysis of this president’s instinct toward needless confrontation and abuse of his authority.
Peaceful protest is always legitimate; violent protest never is. Those who are burning cars and destroying property in California in response to Trump’s latest authoritarian stunt are — in addition to being fundamentally, morally wrong — playing right into his power-hungry hands.
Trump, being Trump, is testing constitutional guardrails as usual, to the point of hinting he might yet send in regular military troops and arrest political opponents like Newsom (“Newscum,†in Trump’s typically unpresidential rhetoric). The best way to thwart him would be to keep the protests scrupulously peaceful.
Meanwhile, 51ºÚÁÏ still waits quietly for the aid it needs and deserves. What a vivid contrast to highlight the malignant rot at the core of this malicious administration.
