Deploying Troops at Home Is a No-Brainer If You Hate Home Like They Do

These people — Pete Hegseth, Tom Homan, Trump himself — finding themselves in control of the most awesome and destructive powers on the planet, want nothing more than to press the Go button. They have already demonstrated their depraved eagerness to kill innocent people abroad, but there’s a pretty solid argument to be made that they collectively hate Americans more than they hate anyone else — and so Los Angeles County, home to more of those Americans than forty entire states, gets to stand as the staging ground for the gleeful militarization of home soil.

As both the state’s governor and the Los Angeles mayor have said, the entire crisis is a manufactured one, a Stephen Miller-concocted wet dream where brutal immigration raids cause a backlash that, with comic disregard for reality, Trump can then claim is one small step from obliterating a city. First it was California’s National Guard — a move that the state will sue over today — but next it might be the Marines, an absurd escalation one would only consider if one actively wanted more Americans to get hurt.

“We’re going to have troops everywhere,” Trump said on Sunday. Hegseth has said the Marines at Camp Pendleton were “on high alert” and could also be sent to a county home to one in 35 of all Americans. The police in LA have already covered themselves in glory, shooting journalists with “less lethal” munitions, tear gassing children, and so on; Trump is aping his various lackeys in calling protesters “insurrectionists” now, a grim bit of January 6 revisionism likely deployed in preparation for invoking an 1807 law that would let him turn the troops loose even further. It is not clear, of course, if National Guard members or Marines or any other service members would share ICE agents’ and various police forces’ apparent enthusiasm to take aim at their neighbors — but it’s not a question anyone should be eager to test out.

There are things about America that Trump and his ilk do like — the dominance of wealth and business interests over the collective good; the increasingly apparent impunity for grifters and hucksters, the more brazen and obvious the better; the physical and figurative distance from the masses that the 0.1 percent can enjoy, a serene and comforting blanket past which consequences generally dare not invade. But the rest of it is basically a giant object of disdain, only worth addressing in order to attempt to undermine and destroy, in service of more grift, more impunity, more castle moats to keep out the riffraff. Why even have a military if you can’t unleash it on your worst enemies?