The Trump Administration Needs Better Opposition
And Americans deserve dissenting voices that aren’t inept and crazy.
Donald Trump needs better enemies. More accurately, the American people need the president and his allies to have a higher quality opposition. In office, President Trump has embraced some truly terrible—and occasionally dangerous—policies, including federalizing National Guard troops and mobilizing U.S. Marines to deal with riots that really should be left to California officials to handle or fumble as their abilities allow. But his opponents insist on embracing lunacy and ineffectiveness and making the president look reasonable by comparison, effectively giving his actions a pass.
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Feckless Opponents
"Donald Trump, without consulting with California's law enforcement leaders, commandeered 2,000 of our state's National Guard members to deploy on our streets. Illegally, and for no reason," complained Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom after the president turned local rioting into a federal issue.
Newsom expanded on his objections in a glitch-filled speech that focused more on Trump than the riots. It played into the reputation for incompetence he's gained over years of ignoring his state's problems, including all of the missteps that led to the recent wildfires in and around Los Angeles.
Those fires didn't exactly cover Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass in glory either, and neither has her response to the chaos. She's alternated between supporting demonstrators protesting the federal immigration raids that sparked the riots and vowing crackdowns on violence. One minute she touts her work with "community organizations, legal advocates, and local leaders to ensure that every resident knows their rights" and the next she reminds Angelenos that downtown is under curfew.
That's unfortunate, because the feckless California officials raise legitimate concerns about the president's actions. There are good reasons to object to a president responding to local events with federal troops.
Valid Concerns Lost in the Chaos
"Preemptive nationwide deployment of the military is the very opposite of using the military as a 'last resort,'" warns Elizabeth Goitein of the Brennan Center's Liberty and National Security Program. "It is so wildly out of keeping with how the Insurrection Act and 10 U.S.C. § 12406 have been interpreted and applied that it should be entitled to no deference by the courts."
The law that President Trump relied on—10 U.S.C. § 12406—allows the president to "call into Federal service members and units of the National Guard of any State" to repel invasions, suppress rebellions, or enforce the law when regular forces are insufficient. Invoking that law over local disorder before state and local officials have had much of a chance to do anything is a stretch of the law's intent as well as a slap at federalism. The law says nothing authorizing the use of regular military forces, leaving the impression that the Marines Trump dispatched are just hitching a ride on his presidential memorandum to bypass the Posse Comitatus Act's restrictions on the domestic use of the military.
Which means that Newsom and Bass had a great opportunity to show their chops and object to federal interference—if they were up to the demands of that role. They're not.
Rioting Overshadows Legitimate Protest
Worse, though, are the rioters themselves. As Matthew Ormseth and James Queally described the scene for Los Angeles Times readers, "some in the crowd lobbed bottles and fireworks at the LAPD," "vandals set fire to a row of Waymos," and "people wearing masks flung chunks of concrete—and even a few electric scooters—at" California Highway Patrol officers. That speaks for itself—but not as loudly as the idiots throwing Molotov cocktails at police.
Rioting understandably became the dominant news story, overshadowing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids that originally set off protests before they turned violent.
Smarter protesters would have kept demonstrations peaceful and attention focused on arrests that we were told would target violent criminals but too often ensnare harmless people.
"Federal immigration officials appeared to target day laborers in raids Monday at a Home Deport in Santa Ana," the Los Angeles NBC affiliate reported this week. Traditional gathering places for immigrants seeking work—and not so many vicious gangbangers—have been targeted across the country. "Stephen Miller, a top White House aide and architect of the president's immigration agenda, asked ICE officials to step up the pace of immigrant deportations, including in Home Depot parking lots and at 7-Eleven Stores," according to The Wall Street Journal.
ICE has also gone after immigrants navigating the bureaucratic path to legal immigration and even citizens who were wrongly detained.
Those outrages were pushed into the background when rioting inevitably grabbed the headlines.
Not that Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson gives a damn about keeping the message straight. As violent protests spread across the country, he urged his constituents to "rise up" and "resist." Apparently, he doesn't want to miss out on the excitement of watching parts of his city burn.
Wanted: Competent and Sane Political Opposition
Not everybody is impressed by this version of opposition to the Trump administration.
"I unapologetically stand for free speech, peaceful demonstrations, and immigration—but this is not that," Sen. John Fetterman (D–Penn.) warned this week. "This is anarchy and true chaos. My party loses the moral high ground when we refuse to condemn setting cars on fire, destroying buildings, and assaulting law enforcement."
Fetterman has, somewhat surprisingly, emerged as a voice of sanity for his party. He's called Democrats to account over the antisemitism of the party's progressive wing and now for confusing tantrums in the street with effective opposition. A few more Democrats like him would go a long way towards rescuing the party from its self-inflicted wounds and giving the U.S. a functioning political opposition.
The country could really use a functioning opposition. The Trump administration's turn towards economic nationalism, unilateral power, authoritarianism, and xenophobia cry out for criticism and alternative solutions. That criticism should be peaceful and those alternatives should be sensibly presented. Ideally, they should also advance liberty and limit government.
For the moment, though, that may be too much to ask of Democrats. Many of them are still wrestling with the temptations of appearing to be either inept or dangerous lunatics.
