Polls have long shown immigration and crime are areas of vulnerability for Democratic Party

California Governor Gavin Newsom and United States President Donald. Combination photos / Saul Loeb and Jim Watson, AFP

As Democratic senators gathered yesterday for their closed-door weekly lunch, they heard from their California colleagues, Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff, who carefully differentiated between isolated cases of vandalism in Los Angeles and the larger number of peaceful protesters who swarmed the streets to oppose United States President Donald Trump’s deportation efforts.

At roughly the same time, Trump was across town in the Oval Office unspooling stories of violence, asking the assembled cameras, “Did you see the guy throwing the rocks at the police cars?”

For Democrats, the scattered yet searing scenes of unrest in Southern California have uncomfortably thrust to the centre two issues that have powered Republican gains in recent years — immigration and crime — as party leaders worry that the President is setting a dangerous political trap with provocations too outrageous to ignore.

Trump’s extraordinary decision to send military troops to quell domestic protesters over the objection of local authorities, including Governor Gavin Newsom, has unleashed an avalanche of condemnation from Democrats who argue that the President’s actions were authoritarian and unconstitutional.

“Democracy is under assault before our eyes,” Newsom said in a speech.

As he spoke, demonstrations were spreading to other cities and the Los Angeles mayor had announced a curfew for parts of downtown.

In an interview, Schiff urged his party to push back on Trump without falling prey to his political framing.

“The President would like nothing better than to create a conflict in LA to demonstrate his strongman credentials by then cracking down on the chaos,” said Schiff, who has clashed repeatedly with Trump and led his first impeachment.

“The President is a chaos agent. He thrives on disorder. He thrives on situations that allow him to pretend, to act like a strongman.”

Trump has used viral images of car fires, damaged property and masked protesters brandishing foreign flags to bolster his claims of a mandate for a crackdown.

And he has used them as justification, sometimes after the fact, for his decision to deploy National Guard troops and Marines despite the objections of Newsom, a Democrat.

Polls have long shown immigration and crime as areas of Democratic vulnerability. And some Democrats see a risk that the party will seem soft on crime and criminals without clearer denunciations.

Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, a Democrat who has increasingly broken with his party, described the scenes unfolding in Los Angeles as “anarchy and true chaos”, posting a photo that Republicans have heavily circulated of a masked man waving a Mexican flag standing on a vandalised car surrounded by fire.

“My party loses the moral high ground when we refuse to condemn setting cars on fire, destroying buildings, and assaulting law enforcement,” Fetterman wrote on Tuesday.

The confrontation — politically and in the streets — between Trump’s hardline immigration agenda and the nation’s biggest blue state felt almost inevitable.

“We all knew that this day would come,” Representative Jimmy Gomez of California said yesterday on Capitol Hill, flanked by other Democrats from the state.

Newsom asked a judge to block the Trump Administration’s planned troop deployment. One influential House Democrat said yesterday that Trump’s actions amounted to an impeachable offence.

But even as Democrats try to fight back, few issues have left the party more divided than immigration enforcement, with some in the party shifting to the right along with the American public in recent years.

Most prominent Democrats have denounced the recent violence, and many have cited local officials who say such incidents have been mostly isolated.

“It’s a Trump-manufactured crisis, beginning with the increasing theatrics, the increasing cruelty, the increasingly aggressive ICE raids,” Padilla said in an interview.

“At the end of the day, we have to both hold Trump accountable and remind everybody he’s doing this to distract from his horrible, failing agenda.”

Newsom has used his confrontation with Trump — who has mused about arresting him — to elevate himself as one of the leading Democratic foils nationally to Trump, responding to the President’s comments with bravado and seemingly in real time.

Heading into the weekend, America’s political class had been consumed by the operatic demise of the warm relationship between Elon Musk and Trump.

Musk attacked the centrepiece of the President’s legislative agenda as a “disgusting abomination”, and Trump threatened retaliation against the tech billionaire’s companies.

Now the attention is on California, where Trump is explicitly pushing the boundaries of his powers.

His deployment of federalised troops without a state’s consent was the first since they were sent to protect civil rights demonstrators in Alabama more than a half-century ago.

The current situation has reminded some of the protests and riots that followed the murder of George Floyd, an unarmed black man, by a Minneapolis police officer five years ago.

The political effects for both parties — a racial reckoning and a subsequent backlash — continue to linger.

There is yet another potential tinderbox looming this weekend, when Trump has planned a military parade for the Army’s 250th birthday — which coincides with his own.

“Those people that want to protest, they’re going to be met with very big force,” he warned.

Trump and his aides, including his long-time immigration whisperer and deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, appear intent on reappropriating the term “insurrectionist”, which has often been used to describe the rioters who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Now they use it to describe anti-deportation protesters and Democrats.

“This is the definition of insurrection,” Miller wrote on the social platform X about the Democratic Mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, after she called for an end to the federal immigration raids.

Schiff said such messaging “would be amusing if it weren’t so galling” coming from a White House that pardoned the January 6 participants.

He urged his party to cast Trump’s actions not just as an over-reach but also as a breach of his pledges to focus on securing the border and removing violent criminals who entered the country illegally.

“The President promised he would focus on deporting violent criminals and has betrayed that promise,” Schiff said.

Frank Sharry, the founder of America’s Voice and a long-time advocate for immigrants and an immigration overhaul, said the lack of a unified Democratic vision on the issue — how to handle the border and those in the country illegally — was hobbling the party’s ability to respond more forcefully.

“The reason some Democrats fear leaning into immigration is they don’t have a particularly good defence, and what they’re really lacking is a good offence,” Sharry said.

“If Democrats had a very clear, solution-oriented stance on immigration, they would be contrasting Trump’s extremism with their pragmatism, and that’s a debate Democrats can win.”

The problem, he said, is that no such stance yet exists.

“Democrats need to figure out not only what they’re against, but what they’re for,” Sharry said of opposing Trump’s tactics.

“I know it sounds trite, but you can’t beat something with nothing.”

A 54% majority of Americans supported Trump’s programme to deport those in the country illegally, according to a CBS News/YouGov poll taken on the eve of the current immigration fight.

Americans were in favour of Trump’s goals, if not necessarily his approach.

Trump also made significant inroads with Latino voters in 2024, when he made an immigration crackdown a centrepiece of his campaign.

In recent days, he and his allies have continued to argue that California in general and Los Angeles in particular are descending into a lawless state of chaos.

At the same time, local officials have said that outbursts of violence have been only sporadic, even as they spread widely on social media.

In a post of his own yesterday, Trump claimed with his customary hyperbole that if he had not deployed thousands of National Guard troops to Los Angeles, the “once beautiful and great City would be burning to the ground right now”.

Arms of the federal Government amplified his argument.

The official Department of Homeland Security account on X posted a video of the same scene that Fetterman cited, with burning cars and a masked man waving a Mexican flag, adding, “California politicians must call off their rioting mob.” The post singled out Newsom.

One of the most veteran Democrats on Capitol Hill, Representative Maxine Waters, who represents a district in Los Angeles County, claimed everything had been peaceful despite images of clashes.

“There was no violence,” Waters said in a video clip that Republicans soon circulated. “I was on the street. I know.”

Representative Yvette Clarke of New York, the chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, said she believed that Trump’s actions — sending in troops over the objection of local officials — rose to the level of impeachable offences.

“If this president is willing to send military troops into an American city over peaceful dissent, we must ask what happens next,” she said at a Capitol news conference. “What American community will be next.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Written by: Shane Goldmacher

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