The Tom Cotton Do-Over
Trump and the right are living out their fantasies of rewriting the awful summer of 2020.
Five years ago last Tuesday, The New York Times, after considerable internal turmoil, published an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton (R–Ark.) advocating that the federal government unilaterally send military troops to quell the riots ripping through the country in the wake of the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd.
The piece led directly to the firing of multiple Times editors, the resignation and eventual relaunch of Times controversialist Bari Weiss, and an appended 317-word editor's note lamenting that "the essay fell short of our standards and should not have been published," among other derangements. It also, crucially, did not deliver its intended result: Cities continued to burn, some for months on end, and President Donald Trump never did impose military troops on any unwilling governor.
On the five-year anniversary of Cotton's unrequited exhortation to power, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) authorities at the Edward R. Roybal Federal Building in downtown Los Angeles began snatching illegal immigrants and asylum seekers who had arrived for previously scheduled check-ins, and detaining them in a makeshift detention facility in the basement, some with their whole families (including U.S. citizen children). Such process bait-and-switches, including of at least one married father of four who thought he was going to his final naturalization interview, have been conducted across the country during Trump's second term as part of a White House pledge to increase immigration arrests tenfold from the 2024 average of 300 per day to 3,000. Last Tuesday's nationwide haul, assisted by text messages urging asylum seekers to check in early for appointments, reached a record 2,200.
On Wednesday, as protesters began gathering outside the Roybal Building, Trump announced a travel ban on citizens of 12 countries (Cotton was pleased) and threatened "large scale fines" on California Democratic Gov. Gavin "Newscum" for allowing biological males to compete in girls' high school athletics—a precursor to a Harvard-style culture war showdown over federal funding.
The stage was thus set for Friday's visually dramatic escalation of street-level conflict in Southern California. ICE that morning kicked off what it would later advertise as a 30-day campaign of raids on local workplaces suspected of employing or harboring illegal immigrants, with heavily armed agents, in both unmarked SUVs and military-style transports, throwing flash-bang grenades and tear-gas cannisters, cuffing suspected perps and objecting protesters alike. (The latter including the powerful president of Service Employees International Union, or SEIU, David Huerta.)
In a Democrat-dominated city of 1.5 million foreign-born residents, in the nation's most immigrant-rich state, where infamously ineffective politicians have long touted sanctuary from immigration enforcement while defining themselves largely in opposition to Trump, the prospect of a theatrical clash probably looked to the White House like a win-win-win: Draw out the most self-defeating elements of the protest left, highlight the intransigent ineptitude of once-ambitious Dems, and continue to scare immigrant communities into self-deportation. All while releasing pent-up demand for a 2020 rewrite.
"Tom Cotton," tweeted National Review's Jeff Blehar Saturday, "now has the chance to publish the funniest LA Times op-ed ever."
The administration could barely contain its enthusiasm Saturday night. Even as protests Friday had been mostly limited, even in the most fed-credulous estimates, to around 2,000 combined people in two targeted locations—the Roybal detention center downtown, and the streets around a Home Depot 15 miles south in the city of Paramount near where an ICE caravan had massed—officials tripped over themselves to flex preemptive muscle over the riotous landscape.
"If Governor Gavin Newscum, of California, and Mayor Karen Bass, of Los Angeles, can't do their jobs, which everyone knows they can't, then the Federal Government will step in and solve the problem, RIOTS & LOOTERS, the way it should be solved!!!" the president of the United States posted on Truth Social at 8:25 p.m. Eastern time. (Best as I can ascertain from a great distance, at the time of Trump's assertion there had been one reported protest-related looting incident, and zero looting-related arrests.) Within an hour, the White House announced the first uninvited deployment of the National Guard in 60 years.
"Insurrectionists carrying foreign flags are attacking immigration enforcement officers, while one half of America's political leadership has decided that border enforcement is evil," Vice President J.D. Vance chimed in at 9:23 p.m. Eastern time. Ten minutes later Vance suggested that the presence of "foreign nationals with no legal right to be in the country waving foreign flags and assaulting law enforcement" meets the legal definition of invasion, thereby clearing the way for a more robust military response.
Up jumped Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. "The violent mob assaults on ICE and Federal Law Enforcement are designed to prevent the removal of Criminal Illegal Aliens from our soil; a dangerous invasion facilitated by criminal cartels (aka Foreign Terrorist Organizations) and a huge NATIONAL SECURITY RISK," the former Fox News host tweet-shouted at 10:06 p.m. Eastern time Saturday night. "The @DeptofDefense is mobilizing the National Guard IMMEDIATELY to support federal law enforcement in Los Angeles. And, if violence continues, active duty Marines at Camp Pendleton will also be mobilized — they are on high alert."
Seven hundred Marines were indeed mobilized from nearby Twentynine Palms on Monday night; the Associated Press reported unreassuringly that "the Pentagon was scrambling Monday to establish rules to guide U.S. Marines who could be faced with the rare and difficult prospect of using force against citizens on American soil." Meanwhile, the White House ordered up an additional 2,000 National Guard troops as well.
By then, the administration's initial depictions of out-of-control lawlessness had graduated from anticipatory to plausible, if geographically contained largely within a five-minute walk of where this past week's conflicts began, the Roybal building. Demonstrators on Sunday shut down the 101 freeway, hurled rocks and electric scooters at cop cars, set fire to a handful of driverless Waymos, threw bottles and fireworks at law enforcement, defaced government buildings, and looted several businesses. "These past few nights we've seen a level that disgusts every good person in this city," L.A. Police Chief Jim McDonnell said Sunday, describing his forces as "overwhelmed."
Such unforced protesting errors (including—yes!—waving predominantly Mexican flags at rallies backing immigration to the U.S.), were as predictable as morning fog on a June beach, not that that in any way deprives rioters of their own miserable agency. Californians looted after the deadly Altadena fires, for goodness' sake. Local Dems couldn't manage to say "knock off the rioting" without foregrounding Trump. And very little imagination is required to recall unchecked violence back in the summer of 2020, or indeed 1992.
But those many conservatives, including of the otherwise anti-Trump variety, who are gleefully posting images of rooftop Koreans and cheering on federal militarism directed at residents of a great (if grossly mismanaged) American city, may benefit from reflecting on the ways June 2025 does not resemble June 2020, let alone the Bosch-style hellscape of early '90s L.A.
The first is sheer scale. In Los Angeles County alone, there were at least 50 separate public demonstrations in the days after Floyd, with more than a dozen cases of looting and vandalism. Nationwide, there were 19 deaths, 14,000 arrests, and property losses estimated at $2 billion. More than 30 states activated their National Guard.
Aside from the unrepeatable black swan aspect of COVID-lockdown decompression, the societal institutions most aligned with those protests—the media, academia, lefty nonprofits—are all significantly weaker than five years ago, in no small part through the are-you-kidding-me overreach and circular firing squads of that particularly insane season.
The second difference is directional. Minneapolis police did nothing to residents of any city outside Minneapolis. That season's enemies were institutional, historical, impossibly overgeneralized. This year, specifically localized protests (so far, anyway) are arising—not just in L.A., but in Dallas, San Francisco, Santa Ana, and elsewhere—in response to discrete federal enforcement actions frequently carried out in disorientingly authoritarian manner.
As The Wall Street Journal put it in a news article Monday, "Federal agents make warrantless arrests. Masked agents take people into custody without identifying themselves. Plainclothes agents in at least a dozen cities have arrested migrants who showed up to their court hearings. And across the U.S., people suspected of being in the country illegally are disappearing into the federal detention system without notice to families or lawyers, according to attorneys, witnesses and officials." Such actions tend to put affected communities on the defensive alert.
Good!, retort immigration restrictionists, and we'll see about that. American public opinion is foursquare behind deporting criminals and prosecuting rioters; far more queasy about shipping away longtime residents with jobs and U.S. citizen nuclear family.
Which brings up a final point that conservative deportation enthusiasts should be clear about, just as they press opponents to admit they don't want noncriminals to be deported: The expulsions they have longed for are sending legal residents to foreign prisons in authoritarian countries, being carried out in White House defiance of the Supreme Court, and under the auspices of a deputy chief of staff who believes this cause demonstrates that "the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus can be suspended." American citizens (including a U.S. marshal) who either "fit the description" or are reckless enough to not be carrying an ID have found themselves detained and even jailed.
We are almost, if not quite, living in a Tom Cotton universe. And sure enough, here was the militaristic senator taking a victory lap in The Wall Street Journal Tuesday afternoon, advocating an "overwhelming show of force," describing "areas of Los Angeles" as "lawless hellscapes," and arguing, cretinously, that "if anything, these riots are worse" than in 2020.
The Insurrection Act that Cotton advocates using as of Tuesday had not yet been invoked, leaving the summoned military mostly in the role of protecting federal buildings. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who Monday night asserted that L.A. is "not a city of immigrants, they are a city of criminals," reportedly wrote a letter Sunday to Hegseth urging him to have the U.S. Marines make arrests, which would likely run afoul of the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act.
The protests in L.A. Monday were reportedly quieter than Sunday; Tuesday's are only now getting started. One can only hope, against all recent experience of American political violence, that both sides choose not to engage in the escalation that they have clearly, and frighteningly, been pining for.
