Already tense
Vance is going to Los Angeles to rub their noses in it.
The vice-president will meet with law enforcement and military leadership deployed by Donald Trump in the city to help control violent protests.
“Vice-president JD Vance will travel to Los Angeles, California, where he will tour a multi-agency federal joint operations centre, a federal mobile command centre, meet with leadership and Marines, and deliver brief remarks,” according to a readout.
The visit risks inflaming the already tense relationship between Gavin Newsom, the state’s governor, and the White House.
It doesn’t so much risk inflaming it as make a point of inflaming it.
An appeals court on Thursday allowed Mr Trump to keep control of National Guard troops he deployed to Los Angeles.
The decision halts a ruling from a lower court judge who found Mr Trump acted illegally when he mobilised the soldiers despite opposition from Mr Newsom.
The court said that while presidents don’t have unfettered power to seize control of a state’s guard, the Trump administration had presented enough evidence to show it had a defensible rationale for doing so and that Mr Newsom had no power to veto the president’s order.
That’s not good news. He’ll be doing it at every opportunity now.
Especially since they have apparently set a very low standard for evidence of a defensible reason. He did not have a defensible reason; he made shit up, did what he wanted, and the court he appointed said, okay, fine with us.
I believe it was Tim Miller at the Bulwark who made the point that a lot of people keep holding up regimes like Orban’s Hungary as a frightening vision of where the U.S. might possibly, potentially, hypothetically be heading sometime in the remote future, yet there are no soldiers in the streets of Budapest. Nothing that’s been happening in Hungary comes close to the authoritarianism we have already seen a few months into Trump’s second presidency. To call Trump a “threat” to the future of democracy at this point is rather like describing asteroids as a “threat” to the future of the dinosaurs or icebergs as a “threat” to the future of the Titanic. We can stop worrying that Trump is going to kill democracy. As practically every horror movie ever made will remind you, you can’t kill what’s already dead.
Argh. I wish I could disagree but I can’t.