“You have just (explained) shot on the journalist!”
Australian journalist Lauren Tomasi was in the middle of a live cross, covering the demonstrations against the mass deportation policy of the Trump administration in Los Angeles, California. While Tomasi spoke to the camera, microphone in hand, a lapd officer in the background seemed to target She directly, striking her in the leg with a rubber bullet.
Earlier, information emerged that the British photojournalist Nick Stern undergoing emergency surgery After being also struck by the same “non -lethal” ammunition.
The situation in Los Angeles is extremely volatile. After the non -violent protests against raids and arrests by immigration and customs’ application agents (ICE) began in the suburbs of Paramount, American president Donald Trump published a memo describing They as “a form of rebellion against the authority of the United States government”. He then deployed the National Guard.
“Can’t you just shoot them?”
As the coverage noted, this is not the first time that the National Guard has been deployed to suppress demonstrations in the United States.
In 1970, members of the National Guard fired and killed four students Protest war in Vietnam at Kent State University. In 1992, the National Guard was deployed during demonstrations in Los Angeles after acquittal Of four police officers (including three whites) in the murder of a black man, Rodney King.
Trump has long speculated on the violent deployment of the National Guard and even soldiers against his own people.
During his first administration, at the height of the demonstrations of Black Lives Matter, the former defense secretary Mark Esper alleged What Trump asked him: “You can’t just shoot them, shoot them in the legs or something?”
Trump has long sought other people opposed to his radical program to reshape the United States and his role in the world. He classified them as “non -American” and, therefore, deserving contempt and, when he deems it necessary, a violent oppression.
During the electoral campaign last year, he promised “Untracted the Communists, the Marxists, the Fascists and the Radical Thugs who live as the vermin within the limits of our country”. Even the Washington Post characterized This description of Trump’s “political enemies” as “echoing Hitler, Mussolini”.
In addition, Trump has long stood out of baseless plots on “sanctuary cities”, like Los Angeles. He described them as paradise without law for his political enemies and his places which were “invaded” by immigrants. As anyone who has already visited these places knows, this is not true.
Allison / EPA dinner
It is not surprising that, in the same places, Trump characterizes as “Dehonde our country», There was a strong opposition to its program and its ideology.
This opposition has merged in recent weeks around the activities of ice agents, in particular. These agents, carrying masks to hide their identity, arbitrarily owned people, including American citizens and childrenAnd disappearing from street people. They also stopped the caregivers, leave the children alone.
Yuki Iwamura / AP
As Adam Serwer wrote in the Atlantic during the first iteration of Trump in America, “Cruelty is the point».
The Mass Expulsion Program of the Trump administration is deliberately cruel and provocative. It was still only a matter of time before the demonstrations had fun.
In a democracy, a non-violent demonstration of hundreds or perhaps a few thousand people in a city of ten million is not a crisis. But he has always adapted Trump and the movement that supports him to make crises.
The deputy chief of staff of the White House, Stephen Miller, a key architect of the mass deportation program and a man describe by a former advisor like “Waffen SS”, called The manifestations “an insurrection against the laws and sovereignty of the United States”. Trump himself too describe Protesters like “violent crowds and insurrectionists”.
Nowhere Memo presidential Deployment of the name of the National Guard The specific location of events. This, and the extreme language leaving the administration, suggests that it lays the foundations for an additional escalation.
The administration could leave space to deploy the National Guard in other places and invoke the insurgency law.
The incidents involving the deployment of the National Guard are rare, although politically cataclysmic. It is always rarer that the National Guard is deployed against the wishes of a democratically elected chief of a state, as Trump did in California.
A wider assault against democracy
This deployment is wider at a time of crisis for American democracy. Trump’s long -standing attacks on independent media – which he describes as “false news” – increases. There is a reason why during the current demonstrations, an agent of the police appeared if at ease to target a journalist, in front of the camera.
The Trump administration also actively targets independent institutions such as the universities of Harvard and Columbia. It also aims and undermines the judges and reduces the power of the independent courts to enforce the rule of law.
Under Trump, the federal government and its state -based allies are targeting and undergoing the rights of minority groups – police on the bodies of trans persons, targeting reproductive rights and starting the process of Cancel the civil rights law.
Trump is, for the moment, without constraint. Asked at night what is the bar to deploy the navies against the demonstrators, Trump replied: “The bar is what I think it is”.
Allison / EPA dinner
As a columnist for the New York Times Jamal Bouie recently observed::
We must deal with Trump and his openly authoritarian administration as a failure, not only of our party system or our legal system, but of our constitution and its capacity to significantly constrain a destructive and fatal force in our political life.
Although the situation in Los Angeles is unpredictable, it must be understood in the broader context of the active and violent threat that the Trump administration poses in the United States. Looking at, American democracy vacillates by the edge.
