Rage in America Donald Trump has thrown gasoline on the fire to appease MAGA base

Protests in LA broke out on Friday after rumours about Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids

Scenes in Los Angeles, CA are reminiscent of a civil war: Protestors setting cars on fire, police firing rubber bullets, armed National  Guard troops taking positions, while an increasingly authoritarian president threatens to arrest a state governor. It is an apt, though mild, reenactment of last year’s dystopian thriller with the same name, set in an America that was at war with itself under a despotic president.

Protests in LA broke out on Friday after rumours about Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids at a department store in a predominantly Latino-American suburb. 

The protests were largely peaceful until President Donald Trump threw gasoline on the fire.He exploited the crisis to appease his MAGA base and to settle scores with the Democratic-run state, dispatching 2,000 National Guard troops,overruling the opposition from the state governor, Gavin Newsom.

As of yesterday, even while the crisis was de-escalating, Trump sent an additional 2000 national Guards and 700 active Marines, upping the ante and fuelling anger. Meanwhile, protests flared up in Republican-run Texas, and police arrested protesters infront of the Trump Tower in New York.

Chaos in LA is a manufactured crisis by the American president, who used it to cater to the raw impulses of his MAGA base and to humiliate Governor Newsom, whom he has regularly clashed with and repeatedly called “Newscum”.

“The very incompetent ‘Governor,’ Gavin Newscum, and ‘Mayor,’ Karen Bass, should be saying, ‘THANK YOU, PRESIDENT TRUMP, YOU ARE SO WONDERFUL. WE WOULD BE NOTHING WITHOUT YOU, SIR.’ Instead, they choose to lie to the People of California and America by saying that we weren’t needed and that these are ‘peaceful protests.’” Trump wrote in his Truth Social.

Newsom has sued the Trump administration over the deployment of Federal troops and described the action as a dangerous step towards authoritarianism.

This is the first time in more than 60 years that a President has bypassed a governor to deploy the National Guard. Lyndon B Johnson did so in Montgomery,  Alabama, to protect the civil rights leaders in the Jim Crow era Southern state. Trump’s objectives were the polar opposite.

The protests were also the predictable outcome of race-baiting and the weaponisation of immigration by Donald Trump, who exploited the paranoia of America’s nativist base to win the presidential election.

Since his assuming power, the Whitehouse has set hefty targets for ICE of 3000 daily arrests, leading to harrowing scenes of family separations and regular use of excessive force. 

The most primal of his voters relish at this regular humiliation ofillegal immigrants, the vast majority of whom are law-abiding tax-paying citizens, though Trump has demonised them as rapists and murderers of MS 13 and Venezuelan underworld cartels. 

In the meanwhile, there are others, such as Latinos for Trump, who now feel buyer’s remorse as Trump doubles down on his promise. He recently removed the protected status of  Cuban and Venezuelan asylum seekers- a demography that generally producesthe most rabidly Republican voters. 

Trump America is a case in point of the self-reinforcing effect of race-baiting, which, once put in place, takes a life of its own, creating a carnal base with an insatiable appetite. Unlike many leaders in this part of the world, such as India’s Narendra Modi or our own Mahinda Rajapaksa, who resorted to nativism to win elections but also knew how to put breaks on once in power, Donald Trump has persisted in it. He has turned it into the primary source of his political legitimacy, more so as much of the other promises are crumbling in the face of a self-defeating trade war and a looming recession.

However, at least a part of the problem precedes the Trump Presidency. President Joe Biden and Democrats abysmally failed to control a growing tide of illegal immigration. That indifference or incompetence proved to be self-destructive, considering that uncontrolled migration was a major concern of the average American voter. 

Liberal indifference

However, America is not the only country facing a populist pushback against liberal indifference to mass migration. Every European country that saw a large-scale influx of migrants in the past decade is now in the throes of a far-right revival, many of who mare at the gates of political power, threatening the future of liberal democracy as the most sought-after form of government.

By international comparison, protests in LA are a storm in the teacup. There were no fatalities and no serious injuries except minor bruises. However, that is how even the most gravity-defining revolutions began, from Maidan to Arab Spring and recently in Bangladesh- some also de generated into unremitting carnage. It is unlikely that the chaos in LA will be anything more than it has already been, except in a rare eventuality that Trump overplays his hand to drive it into a major escalation.However, the divisions that Trump’s policies have created will persist and poison society. 

All politics is local. Let’s spare a thought about our protests of yesteryear.

Sri Lankans occupied the Galle Face Green and many other makeshift sites nationwide for six weeks. Finally, they stormed the President’s House, toppling a government without police firing a single bullet. All the while, many ambassadors and their leaders were telling Gotabaya Rajapaksa and, later, Ranil Wickremesinghe to exercise restraint. No one has yet told Donald Trump that. When Gota was deposed without firing even a rubber bullet, local sycophants made it an opportunity to credit the American ambassador et al. for the absence of violence. If anyone deserves the credit for that, it was the deposed Gotabaya Rajapaksa. 

Spontaneous public activism

The Sri Lankan protests were spontaneous public activism,  though they were later hijacked by the sleepers of the JVP and Peratugamis- akin to the Muslim Brotherhood  strategy  put into action to take power in Egypt.  All the while, there was regular hypocritical cant of human rights abuses when Ranil Wickremesinghe’s administrationwater-hosed protesting Peratugamis and university students. Even in comparison to America, that was child’s play. 

Sri Lanka could depose a president without the military or police firing a shot because the man who was at the helm of power decided to leave without making a scene- just like Mahatma Gandhi could cripple British India with his non-violent activism, which could not have lasted a day under Hitler or the Imperial Japanese.Do we still have the amenable and tolerant political space under the new rulers, who, when in opposition,were, if anything, good at talking trash about the country?