On Monday, the Pentagon sent700 active-duty marines to Los Angelesand doubled the number of national guard troops deployed there to 4,000, to quell protests Donald Trump said on Sunday were already “under control”, “still simmering ... but not very much”.
The same day, the US president used the word “insurrectionists” to describe demonstrators against the unprecedentedly large and fierce immigration deportation raids by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) that started on Friday in that city. The remark echoedhis long-held desireto invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act, which would authorize him to send the military anywhere in the country to put down dissent.
California governor, Gavin Newsom, sued the Trump administration, arguing that it isunconstitutionalto use the armed forces inside the US, except in the most extreme situations.
Put another way, the government is not allowed to wage war against its own citizens. But this is what it is doing.
In its first months in office, the Trump administration enacted what could be called soft authoritarianism: rhetorical glorification of white masculinity and derision of frailty and difference; intimidation of liberal democratic institutions – universities, law firms, the press, and the arts; weaponization of the judicial system against Trump’s perceived foes.
Laced through this non-violent aggression are real violence and reward for violence toward selective populations: the denial of life-saving medical care for transgender people and pregnant women in distress, in deference to the “personhood” of their fetuses; the pardon of the insurrectionists who attacked the Capitol and killed officers on 6 January 2021. And most prominent, the kidnap, deportation without due process, and rendition of immigrants to foreign gulags.
But in the last week or so, a second phase has begun unfolding: the literal weaponization of the government to contain dissent. It is no hyperbole to call this, and the less visible mechanisms that reinforce it, fascism.
This weekend in Los Angeles, protests broke out over Ice raids across the city, especially at workplaces including a clothing warehouse and Home Depot, where migrants muster for day labor. The raids were aimed at meeting an unattainable quota of 3,000 arrests per day. In this diverse city, which immigrants are rebuilding after the devastating fires, the outrage Ice provokedwas inevitable.
Some of the resistance was not peaceful – objects were thrown at cars, for instance – but the LA police got matters in hand. Still, over the objections of Newsom and LA’s mayor, Karen Bass, Trump deployed 300 national guard troops to the scene. They carried long guns and shields and fired “less-lethal munitions,” including flash-bangs, tear gas, and rubber bullets into the crowds; they also wielded their batons.
At the same time as repressing citizens’ free speech, Ice ispreventing elected officialsfrom fulfilling their responsibility to oversee federal detention facilities in their jurisdictions. Sunday, two US representatives from New York were denied entry to the federal building in downtown Manhattan where about 100 immigrants had been kept for days in small, short-term holding cells, some sleeping on bathroom floors. A month earlier, themayor of Newark, New Jersey, was arrested outside a federal detention center for attempting to do the same thing.
Speaking on Friday with NBC News, border czar Tom Homan would not rule out arresting Newsom or Bass if they interfered with the deportation raids. “I’ll say it about anybody,” he proclaimed. “You cross that line, it’s a felony to knowingly harbor and conceal an illegal alien. It is a felony to impede law enforcement doing their job.”
Homan later walked back his threat to arrest Newsom, who had dared him to do so.Trump expressedno reservations. “I think it’s great,” he told the press.
Like every authoritarian regime, this one justifies doing its “job” as a defense of public safety necessitated by lawlessness. “Despite what you may be hearing, the record checks show that we arrested illegal aliens with criminal histories including CHILD CRUELTY, DOMESTIC VIOLENCE, DRUG TRAFFICKING, ASSAULT, ROBBERY, HUMAN SMUGGLING,” Homan postedon X.Did they? Ice always says it is arresting only criminals, but it conflates undocumented status with criminality. Yes, it is afelonyto conceal or harbor an “alien” – but giving sanctuary, as churches have long done, was rarely penalized until now. Being in the US without documentation, meanwhile, is not a crime. It is a civil, administrative offence.
Nor is it a crime to peacefully resist the government’s torment of one’s family and neighbors. “Our officers and agents continued to enforce immigration law in LA, despite the violent protesters,” Homan continued. Somenews outletshave called the protests “riots”, a characterization that local observers, including the governor, the mayor, and radio hostCharlemagne the God, reject. They counter that the demonstrations were loud, angry and almost entirely nonviolent before the national guard arrived to escalate the tension.
This sequence of events is not accidental.On Facebook, Katherine Franke, a tenured Columbia law school professor who was forced to resign after defending student protesters against the war on Gaza, recounted a recent conversation with “a prominent Democratic attorney general”. Asked where things are going, he predicted, on “good information”, Franke paraphrased, that in May or June the federal government would intensify the crackdowns to provoke resistance, “then use that provocation as a justification for declaring martial law”. The declaration, she continued, could free the administration not just to deploy troops but also to suspend elections or the writ of habeas corpus.
Trump seems to be affirming these predictions. “We’re gonna have troops everywhere,” hetold reporters. “If we see danger to our country and to our citizens [the response] will be very, very strong.” He nattered on about protesters spitting on police. “They spit, we hit,” said the poet-president, looking pleased with himself.
While manufacturing peril, authoritarian regimes seek to manufacture consent, as Noam Chomsky put it – or, better, enthusiasm – for the exercise of their power. To do so, they stage mass rituals of adulation andspectacular displays of the military might at the beloved leader’s command. On the US army’s officialFacebookpage, the ad campaign for the 14 June military parade celebrating the Army’s and Trump’s simultaneous birthdays is unceasing. Repeatedly refreshed is avideoof himt at his desk. “I am thrilled to invite everyone to an unforgettable celebration, one like you’ve never seen before,” he reads woodenly. “This is your army. This is your country. This is America250,” says the quietly awed narrator of anothervideo. The first eight seconds of the one-minute spot feature Trump.
But enthusiasm is not easily won, and trying to compel obedience through force creates backlash. Better to attain anticipatory consent through fear. This is where surveillance comes in. To complement the FBI, the National Security Agency, and myriad state-level snitching mechanisms for everything from abortion to teaching Black history, the administration has, perhaps unintentionally, created a sophisticated spying apparatus at the so-called “department of government efficiency”, or Doge.
The Heritage Foundation wrote the plan to reduce the administrative state to the size of a supply closet; thus, Doge was born. But Trump never cared about waste, fraud and abuse (he believes in them all). For him, the aim was to build a force of unswervingly loyal apparatchiks. In fact, as theWashington Postreports, the department is now scrambling to rehire federal employees. It turns out that things the government does, such as process tax filings and fly weather balloons, need people who know how to do them.
But Doge is not obsolete. Now that the supreme court has turned over the nation’s personal data to Big Balls and the boys, and AI is connecting every dataset with every other dataset, it may have a more useful function: coordinating the surveillance state. Homeland security is alreadyspidering through IRS datato locate undocumented immigrants through their tax filings ($96.7bnin federal, state and local taxes in 2024).
While the shock troops do the dirty work and the marching bands inspire the masses, Doge may expand from enforcing fealty in the federal workforce to exacting it from everyone. Violence, propaganda and surveillance: the triumvirate makes fascism.
Judith Levine is a Brooklyn journalist and essayist, a contributing writer to the Intercept and the author of five books