When Democrat senators gathered for their weekly lunch that was closed Tuesday, they heard from California colleagues Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff. He carefully distinguished between isolated cases of Los Angeles vandalism and more peaceful protesters who flocked around the city to back off President Trump's deportation efforts.
Around the same time, Trump was across from the town of an oval office of violence, asking the assembled camera, “Did you see him throwing rocks at a police car?”
For Democrats, the scattered but burning mayhem scenes of Southern California are both displeased with two issues that have promoted Republican interests in recent years: immigration and crime, as they worry about the president setting up a dangerous political trap with outrageous provocation that cannot be ignored. As demonstrations spread to other cities, the Mayor of Los Angeles announced a curfew for some of the city on Tuesday evening.
Trump's extraordinary decision to send troops to quell protesters in the country over local government objections, including government Gavin Newsom, unleashed an avalanche of condemnations from Democrats who argued that the president's actions were authoritarian and unconstitutional.
In an interview, Schiff urged the party to push Trump back without falling prey to his political framing.
“The president wants nothing more than creating a conflict in LA and showing his strong qualifications at the time,” said Schiff, who repeatedly clashed with Trump and led his first bounce each. “The President is an agent of chaos. He thrives on obstacles. He thrives in situations that allow him to pretend and act like a strong man.”
Trump is using virus images of car fires, damaged property and masked protesters waving foreign flags to bolster his claims on crackdown missions. And he used them as justifications after the fact for his decision to deploy the National Guard and Marines despite objections from Democrat Newsom.
Polls have long shown immigration and crime as areas of democratic vulnerability. And some Democrats see the risk that the party will look soft without making any clear condemnation.
Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, an increasingly broken Democrat, described the scene unfolding in Los Angeles as “anarchy and true confusion,” and posted a photo of Republicans circulating heavily from a masked man waving a Mexican flag standing on a devastated car surrounded by fire.
“My party loses moral highlands when it refuses to burn car settings, destroy buildings, or attack law enforcement,” Fetterman wrote Monday.
The conflict between Trump's hard-hit immigration agenda and the country's biggest blue nation — politically and on the streets, I felt that conflict was almost inevitable.
“We all knew this day was coming,” California leader Jimmy Gomez said Tuesday on Capitol Hill, adjacent to other Democrats in the state.
Newsom asked the judge on Tuesday to stop the Trump administration's planned deployment of troops. Meanwhile, an influential House Democrat said Tuesday that Trump's actions would be a pervertible crime.
But despite the Democrats trying to fight back, there were few issues where the party was split more than immigration enforcement. Most prominent Democrats have condemned recent violence, and many have cited local officials who say such cases are largely isolated.
“It's a Trump crisis that begins with an increase in theaters, an increase in abuse and an increasingly aggressive ice attack.,“Senator Padilla said in an interview: “At the end of the day, we have to remind everyone that we are doing this to hold Trump accountable and distract him from his horrific, failed agenda.”
Newsom used his conflict with Trump, who had meditated on arresting him, to lift himself up to Trump as one of the nationally democratic foils, responding to the president's comments with Bravado and real-time comments.
Heading towards the weekend, the American political class was being consumed by the end of the opera of warm relations between Elon Musk and Trump. Musk attacked the centre of the president's legislative agenda as “nasty hatred,” and Trump threatened retaliation against the tech billionaire companies.
Attention is now being paid to California, where Trump explicitly pushes the boundaries of his power. His deployment of federal forces without the state's consent was the first since he was sent over half a century ago to protect civil rights protesters in Alabama.
The current situation reminds me of some of the protests and riots that followed the murder of George Floyd, an unarmed black man, five years ago by a Minneapolis police officer. The political influence of both parties – racial calculations and subsequent repulsion – continues.
This weekend there are potential Tinderboxes that may be planning a military parade for the Army's 250th birthday. “Those who want to protest, they will meet with great force,” he warned.
Trump and his aides appear to intend to reuse the term “rebels,” which has often been used to describe the mob that stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, including his longtime immigrant whispers and deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller.
“This is the definition of rebellion,” Miller wrote to X about Los Angeles' Democratic mayor Karen Bass after calling for an end to the federal immigration attack.
Schiff said such messaging would be “fun if it wasn't too daring,” which came from the White House, which relented participants on January 6th. He urged the party to cast Trump's actions not only as an overreach, but as a violation of his pledge, focusing on securing borders and eliminating violent criminals who have entered the country illegally.
“The president has promised to focus on deporting violent criminals and betrayed that promise,” Schiff said.
Frank Shally, founder of American Voice, longtime advocate for immigration and immigration overhaul, said the lack of a unified democratic vision on the issue – the way in which both borders and nations illegally dealt with people was hobling the party's ability to respond more forcefully.
“The reason some Democrats fear relying on immigration is that they don't have particularly good defenses, and what they really lack is a good crime,” Shari said. “If Democrats had a very clear solution-oriented attitude towards immigration, they would contrast Trump's extremism with their pragmatism, and that's an argument that Democrats can win.”
The problem is, he said, that such a stance does not exist yet.
“Democrats need to understand not only what they are opposed, but what they are for,” Shirley said of opposing Trump's tactics. “I know it sounds trivial, but you can't beat something that's nothing.”
According to a CBS News/Yougov poll conducted on the eve of the current migrant battle, 54% of Americans supported Trump's program to support illegally deporting people from within the country. Americans supported Trump's goals, if not necessarily his approach.
Trump also made a significant break-in with Latino voters in 2024.
Recently, he and his allies have continued to insist that California in general and Los Angeles in particular have descended into lawless chaos. At the same time, local officials say the outburst of violence is sporadic, even though it is widely spread on social media.
In his own post on Tuesday, Trump insisted, in a conventional exaggeration, that if he had not deployed thousands of National Guards in Los Angeles, “a beautiful and great city that used to be burning to the ground now.”
The federal weapons amplified his arguments.
X's official Homeland Security account posted a video of the same scene that Fetterman quoted with a burning car and a masked man waving a Mexican flag, adding that “California politicians must stop the riots.” The post was selected by Mr. Newsom.
Maxine Waters, one of Capitol Hill's most veteran Democrats representing the Los Angeles County district, claimed that despite the image of the conflict, everything was peaceful.
“There was no violence,” Waters said Tuesday in a video clip where Republicans quickly circulate. “I was on the street. I know.”
New York president Yvette D. Clark, chairman of Congress' Black Caucus, said he believes Trump's actions — sending troops over local officials' objections — has risen to the level of perforable crime.
“If this president is willing to send troops to American cities over peaceful opposition, we must ask what will happen next,” she said at a Capitol press conference. “What the next American community will be.”
Clark and Hispanic and Asia-Pacific American chairs show how immigration issues resonate to the right with conservative trends or questions from right-wing outlets, such as the Washington Times, Epoch Times, Fox News, the Daily Carener News Foundation, the Daily News Foundation, and the Daily Signal.
California Representative Pete Aguilar, chairman of the House Democrats Conference, said Tuesday that his party's response to people in the swing district who were worried about the image of anxiety would compete for Republican cuts to healthcare programs.
“Our message to that audience is, “Your Republican Congress members voted to drive hundreds of thousands of people out of health care and take away basic needs,” he said.
But some people would like to have the right hope that immigration will be as prominent as 2026, just like in 2024.
“The more Democrats maintain this insanity in the protest, the more I think Republicans can actually win a midterm, even if Republicans cut Medicaid,” said Matthew Boyle, the influential Washington director of Breitbart News, who lined up with Trump, “it's unrealistic.”
