The Street Fight Trump Wants

Because it presents the center-left with a catch-22

I spent the last several days at the Lighthouse International Film Festival, blissfully out of touch with current events. I come back, and the news comes back with me, most prominently the news that 700 Marines have been deployed to Los Angeles.

As my fellow Substacker Damon Linker has long argued, if you believe that President Trump wants to install himself as a proper dictator, this would be a good way to achieve that goal. Start by initiating a widespread roundup of unauthorized migrants, and execute that roundup both brutally and sloppily to make it maximally provocative. Both activist groups and ordinary people—citizens and non-citizens—would inevitably protest, and some of the protests would inevitably turn violent (as well as prompting opportunistic violence and looting by random criminals). This would turn public opinion against the protesters, and give Trump the opening to invoke the Insurrection Act and effectively impose martial law in American cities. The president hasn’t invoked the Insurrection Act yet, but otherwise the script is playing out pretty much the way Linker predicted—and he still could invoke it; he’s certainly using the language one would use to justify such a move.

The reason this could have a chance of working—assuming the most extreme and sinister motives on the part of the administration—is that it presents the center-left with a catch-22. If they loudly denounce the administration’s actions, they may appear to be siding with the forces of disorder, and thereby discredit themselves. If they say something more nuanced—accusing the administration of having provoked the violence by deploying troops, or of trying to distract attention from its outstandingly terrible budget bill—they may seem evasive or weak, and may thereby discredit themselves in a different way. If they say nothing, or even support the administration in its efforts while criticizing its excesses and missteps, they’ll be attacked furiously from the left, and may well encourage the administration to push the envelope even further to find the point of resistance, since at some point if you don’t resist you’ve basically handed the administration the powers it sought to gain by provoking confrontation without even putting up a fight.

That’s the thing about a catch-22: there’s no winning move. The only way the center-left could not discredit themselves in the current situation would be by getting the voters to trust them that they would handle the situation better, both in the sense of controlling unauthorized migration and in the sense of preventing riots and disorder. But there’s no way to earn that trust—largely lost through the combination of the 2020 riots and the Biden-era migrant surge—while the situation is ongoing.

California’s Governor Newsom has decided to respond by taking the Trump administration to court, claiming that by not coordinating its actions with him the president has violated the law. But, as Ed Whelan and Jack Goldsmith—both notable conservative legal minds who have been highly critical of the Trump administration—point out, the grounds for the lawsuit are at best highly uncertain. The governor has not even exercised the powers he might have exercised to stop the president from calling out the National Guard. Newsom’s move seems like an empty performance of resistance that may well wind up strengthening the president’s hand, since even if he wins in a lower court the Supreme Court is likely to overturn and rule in the administration’s favor.

These kinds of no-win political situations crop up all the time in “normal” political times. Liberals complain all the time about how conservatives benefit from a rise in crime even when conservatives are the ones who presided over a rise in crime; conservatives complain similarly that liberals benefit from a rise in health-care costs even if liberal policies are to blame for the rise in health-care costs. It takes a lot to change people’s perceptions of which “side” is more trustworthy on a given issue; it was a considerable if perverse “accomplishment” for Democrats to so discredit themselves on the subject of education that they are now no more trusted than Republicans, just as it was a considerable if perverse “accomplishment” for the Republicans under President George W. Bush to so discredit themselves on national security that by 2008 they were less trusted than the Democrats on an issue they had largely “owned” since the Vietnam War. Until that switch happens, when you “own” an issue, you can benefit even when you handle the issue badly, because voters still trust your “side” more to solve a problem that your side owns. Politics is just unfair that way.

The additional element in the current situation, of course, is that Democrats reasonably don’t trust that the Trump administration is playing “normal” politics—they have reasonable fears that he is aiming for something resembling regime change, to turn America’s government into a competitive (or maybe even uncompetitive) authoritarian state. “Normal” politics—avoiding and/or triangulating on issues that are bad for you, focusing on issues that are good for you—seem inadequate to the moment if the issue that is bad for you could be used to fundamentally alter the balance of our government and/or uproot fundamental rights. But the fact that it seems—and may in fact be—inadequate doesn’t mean that there’s a better approach to take.

I wish I had a better idea of how to get out of the trap. My only suggestion is that if the concern about regime change in genuine, the practical focus (not necessarily the rhetorical focus) needs to be on that, on how one’s actions make it more or less likely that such a transformation takes effect. That could have a variety of implications for how best to use the courts, the powers of offices that Democrats hold (like the governorship of California), and the court of public opinion.

I wouldn’t expect, though, that the optimal strategy for preventing regime change would line up perfectly with the optimal political strategy for “normal” politics—which is to say, I wouldn’t expect that it would necessarily be the best way for the center-left to win either elections or policy wins. It might—but it might not. Defending democracy—an issue Democrats still largely own—may be a losing issue politically. Lawsuits that are likely to win might set precedents that obstruct liberal policy goals. Activists and elected officials may continue to be cross-pressured in uncomfortable ways, and everyone will surely continue to be tempted by the siren’s song of the pundit’s fallacy, but with stakes much higher than they are in “normal” times.