While the Democratic senators met on Tuesday for their weekly lunch in camera, they heard their colleagues from California, Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff, who were carefully differentiating from vandalism in Los Angeles and the largest number of peaceful demonstrators who invaded the streets to oppose President Trump.
Above the same time, Trump was through the city of the oval office burning stories of violence, asking the assembled cameras: “Have you seen the guy throwing rocks on police cars?”
For Democrats, the scattered but burning stages of disorders in Southern California have uncomfortable at the center two questions that have fueled Republican gains in recent years – immigration and crime – as party leaders fear that the president will put a dangerous political trap with too scandalous provocations to ignore. While demonstrations spread to other cities, the mayor of Los Angeles on Tuesday evening announced a curfew for certain parts of the city.
Trump’s extraordinary decision to send military troops to suppress domestic demonstrators in the face of the objection of local authorities, including Governor Gavin Newsom, sparked an avalanche of conviction of Democrats who argue that the president’s actions were authoritarian and unconstitutional.
In an interview, Mr. Schiff urged his party to repel Mr. Trump without being proyed in his political framing.
“The president would like nothing better than creating a conflict in Los An His first indictment. “The president is a chaos agent. He thrives on disorders. He thrives on situations that allow him to pretend, to act as a strong man. ”
Trump used viral images of car fires, damaged property and masked demonstrators brandishing foreign flags to strengthen his claims for a mandate for repression. And he used them as justification, sometimes after the fact, for his decision to deploy troops and navies of the National Guard despite the objections of Mr. Newsom, a democrat.
Surveys have long shown Immigration and crime as areas of democratic vulnerability. And some Democrats see a risk that the party seems gentle on crime and criminals without clearer denunciations.
Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, a democrat who has more and more broken with his party, described the scenes which took place in Los Angeles as “anarchy and the real chaos”, displaying a photo that the Republicans have greatly circulated by a masked man waving a Mexican flag standing on a vandalized car surrounded by a fire.
“My party loses high morale when we refuse to condemn the fire of cars, destroy the buildings and attack the application of the law,” wrote Mr. Fetterman on Monday.
The confrontation – both politically and in the streets – between the hard immigration program of Mr. Trump and the biggest blue state of the nation felt almost inevitable.
“We all knew that this day would come,” said California Jimmy Gomez representative on Tuesday on Capitol Hill, flanked by other state democrats.
Mr. Newsom asked a judge on Tuesday to block The deployment of planned troops from the Trump administration. An influential Democrat, on the other hand, said Trump’s actions on Tuesday was equivalent to an impenetrable offense.
But even if the Democrats try to fight back, few problems have left the party more divided than the application of immigration, some in the party move to the right With the American public in recent years. Most eminent democrats have denounced recent violence, and many have cited local officials who say that such incidents have been mainly isolated.
“It is a crisis made by Trump which begins with growing theaters, growing cruelty, increasingly aggressive ice raids,,“Senator Padilla said in an interview.” In the end, we must both keep Trump responsible and remind everyone that he does this to distract his horrible failure program. “”
Mr. Newsom used his confrontation with Mr. Trump – who thought about arresting him – to rise as one of the main democratic foils nationally to Mr. Trump, responding to the president’s comments with the bravado and apparently in real time.
Before the weekend, the American political class had been consumed by the disappearance of the opera of the warm relationship between Elon Musk and Mr. Trump. Mr. Musk attacked the center’s center for the president’s legislative program as “Disgusting abominationAnd Mr. Trump threatened to reprisals against companies in the technological billionaire.
Now attention is on California, where Mr. Trump is explicitly push the limits of his powers. Its deployment of federalized troops without state consent has been the first since they were sent to protect civil rights demonstrators in Alabama more than half a century ago.
The current situation recalled some of the demonstrations and riots that followed the murder of George Floyd, an unarmed black man, by a minneapolis policeman five years ago. The political effects of the two parties – a racial calculation and a subsequent reaction – continue to linger.
There is yet another Tinderbox potential looming this weekend, when Mr. Trump will have planned a military parade For the 250th anniversary of the army – which coincides with his. “These people who want to protest, they will meet very great strength”, ” He warned.
Mr. Trump and his collaborators, including his longtime immigration whisper and deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, seem determined to replenish the term “insurrectionist”, which has often been used to describe the rioters who took the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Now, they use it to describe the anti-carrying demonstrators and democrats.
“This is the definition of the insurrection,” Miller wrote on X on the Democrat mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, after calling at the end of the federal immigration raids.
Mr. Schiff said that such messaging “would be fun if it was not so exasperating” coming from a white house that pardoned The participants of January 6. He urged his party to launch the actions of Mr. Trump not only as an overtaking, but also as a violation of his promises to focus on securing the border and the elimination of violent criminals that have entered the country illegally.
“The president promised that he would focus on the expulsion of violent criminals and betrayed this promise,” said Schiff.
Frank Sharry, the founder of America’s Voice and a longtime defender of immigrants and a overhaul of immigration, said that the absence of a unified democratic vision on the issue – how to illegally manage the border and those of the country – entered the party’s ability to respond more with force.
“The reason for which some Democrats fear looking at immigration is that they have no particularly good defense, and what really lacks is a good offense,” said Sharry. “If the Democrats had a very clear position and focused on the immigration solution, they would contrast Trump’s extremism with their pragmatism, and it is a debate that Democrats can win.”
The problem, he said, is that there is no position yet.
“Democrats must understand not only what they are against, but also what they could,” Sharry said about the opposition to Mr. Trump’s tactics. “I know it seems banal, but you can’t beat anything with anything.”
A majority of 54% Americans supported Mr. Trump’s program to expel those of the country illegally, according to a CBS News / Yougov Poll taken on the eve of the current immigration struggle. The Americans were in favor of Mr. Trump’s objectives, if not necessarily his approach.
Trump also made significant breakthroughs with Latin voters in 2024, when he made a repression of immigration a centerpiece of his campaign.
In recent days, he and his allies have continued to assert that California in general and Los Angeles in particular descend into a state of chaos without law. At the same time, local officials said explosions of violence were only sporadic, even if they were largely spreading on social networks.
In a position on Tuesday, Mr. Trump claimed With its customary hyperbole that if he had not deployed thousands of troops from the National Guard in Los Angeles, the “formerly beautiful city would burn on the ground”.
The weapons of the federal government have amplified its argument.
The official account of the Ministry of Internal Security on X published a video On the same scene as Mr. Fetterman cited with fire cars and a masked man by waving a Mexican flag, adding: “California politicians must cancel their crowd of riots.” The post distinguished Mr. Newsom.
One of Capitol Hill’s most veterans of Capitol Hill, representative Maxine Waters, who represents a district of the County of Los Angeles, said that everything had been peaceful despite images of clashes.
“There was no violence,” said Waters on Tuesday in a video clip that the Republicans Soon circulated. “I was on the street. I know.”
Representative Yvette D. Clarke of New York, president of the Congressional Black Caucus, said that she thought that Mr. Trump’s actions – sending troops on the objection of local officials – had reached the level of imperative offenses.
“If this president is willing to send military troops to an American city for a peaceful dissent, we must ask for what is happening next,” she said at a Capitol press conference. “What American community will be the next one.”
Ms. Clarke and the chairs of the Hispanic and Asian Caucus of the American Pacific have been dotted with questions from the preservatives or right -handing points, in particular the Washington Times, the Epoch Times, Fox News, the daily calls for calls and the daily signal, as a sign of the way the problem of immigration resonated on the right.
California’s Pete Aguilar representative, House President Democratic Conference, said on Tuesday that his party’s response to those of Swing districts next year who were concerned about troubleshooting images would rotate republican reductions in health care programs.
“Our message to this audience will be”, your republican member of the congress voted to launch hundreds of thousands of people from their health care and remove their basic needs, “he said.
But some hope that immigration will prove as protruding in 2026 as in 2024.
“The more the Democrats keep this madness with the demonstrations, the more I think that the Republicans could really win the mid-term even if they cut Medicaid,” said Matthew Boyle, the influential chief of the Washington office for the news of Breitbart lined up by Trump, poin out on x. “What is unreal.”