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A miniature statue of US President Donald Trump stands next to a model bunker-buster bomb, with the Iranian national flag in the background, in Kananaskis, Alberta, Canada, on June 19, 2025.
What We’re Watching: US’s Iran decision postponed, Court OK’s Trump’s use of the national guard in LA, Rwanda detains top opposition leader
Trump gives himself, and Iran, two weeks
US President Donald Trump said Thursday that he will decide whether to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities “in the next two weeks,” a move that re-opens the door to negotiations, but also gives the US more time to position military forces for an operation (and the expected retaliation). Speaking of negotiations, European leaders were reportedly set to meet with Iranian officials in Geneva today to explore a diplomatic solution to the crisis. Meanwhile the war itself rages on: Tehran struck a hospital in Be’er Sheva in southern Israel on Thursday, while Israeli forces bombed the unfinished nuclear power plant at Arak and struck industrial targets in Northern Iran. And Tehran is now rushing to export as much oil as possible as fears grow that the war could result in closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Iran’s biggest oil customer? China.
Court clears Trump’s control of California National Guard
A federal appeals court ruled Thursday that Trump acted legally when he took control of the California National Guard despite objections from the state’s governor. The decision overturns a lower court ruling from last week. Trump “federalized” the National Guard to quell protests and riots against his hardline immigration enforcement. The LA unrest has calmed – Mayor Karen Bass rescinded a curfew on Tuesday – but the court’s ruling sets a precedent Trump can point to in future protests against immigration or other aspects of federal policy.
Rwanda’s opposition leader arrested
Rwandan authorities arrested prominent opposition leader Victoire Ingabire on Thursday, alleging that she created a criminal organization and incited public unrest. Lawyers for Ingabire, who was jailed from 2012 to 2018, say the move is politically motivated. President Paul Kagame, who has ruled Rwanda for three decades since the 1994 Genocide, has won plaudits for resurrecting the economy and keeping the peace. But he brooks no dissent – last year he won the presidential election with 99% of the vote.
President Trump takes on the Judiciary
From Supreme Court rulings on deportations and birthright citizenship to federal troop deployments in Los Angeles, the courts are becoming ground zero for challenges to executive authority. Emily Bazelon tells Ian Bremmer that the judiciary can’t save American democracy alone—and with Congress sidelined and the DOJ increasingly politicized, checks and balances are wearing thin. “The judges cannot save the country from an authoritarian president… by themselves."
GZERO World with Ian Bremmer, the award-winning weekly global affairs series, airs nationwide on US public television stations (check local listings).
New digital episodes of GZERO World are released every Monday on YouTube. Don't miss an episode: subscribe to GZERO's YouTube channel and turn on notifications (🔔).
Was it legal for Trump to deploy federal troops to Los Angeles?
In this clip from a larger interview for the latest episode of GZERO World, New York Times Magazine staff writer and Yale Law School fellow Emily Bazelon sits down with Ian Bremmer to unpack President Trump’s unprecedented decision to send National Guard troops and US Marines into Los Angeles without the governor’s consent. She argues the administration may have intentionally provoked the unrest through targeted immigration raids in the Latino neighborhoods of a densely populated city.
As California Governor Gavin Newsom sues the federal government, Bazelon makes clear that legal recourse may be limited. Even if Newsom wins, she says, Trump could comply with consultation requirements after the fact and proceed as planned. “The judges cannot save the country from an authoritarian president... by themselves,” Bazelon warns.
GZERO World with Ian Bremmer, the award-winning weekly global affairs series, airs nationwide on US public television stations (check local listings).
New digital episodes of GZERO World are released every Monday on YouTube. Don't miss an episode: subscribe to GZERO's YouTube channel and turn on notifications (🔔).
8 thoughts on Trump’s Los Angeles crackdown
On Saturday, US President Donald Trump activated 2,000 members of the California National Guard to quell protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s deportation efforts in Los Angeles, after small but highly visible demonstrations had popped up across the city in the days prior – with some instances of violence, opportunistic looting, and property damage. California Governor Gavin Newsom disputed that federal intervention was necessary and condemned Trump’s deployment decision as illegal and inflammatory, blaming it for stoking the protests.
Though the protests had largely petered out by then, on Tuesday the president dispatched an additional 2,000-plus National Guard troops and 700 active-duty Marines to the area. Downtown LA had a quiet night on the back of a curfew, but anti-ICE (and, more broadly, anti-Trump) demonstrations have started to spread to other major cities like New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Austin, Dallas, and Atlanta, with more planned in Las Vegas, Minneapolis, San Antonio, and Seattle. Texas Governor Greg Abbot has already called in the National Guard ahead of any potential unrest in his state.
Here are my eight key takeaways:
- Trump’s decision to send federal troops into Los Angeles was extreme. It marked the first time in 60 years that the National Guard had been deployed to a US state without the consent of its governor. The last such instance was in 1965, when President Lyndon B. Johnson federalized the Alabama Guard in defiance of Governor George Wallace, one of the nation’s leading segregationists, to protect civil rights demonstrators led by Martin Luther King Jr. from violence. Needless to say, federal supremacy over states’ rights is being asserted in a very different context, by a very different president, and in service of a very different goal today.
- It’s legal – for now. Trump’s deployment pushes the envelope politically, but as long as the troops limit their role to protecting federal personnel and facilities while refraining from taking law-enforcement actions (as they reportedly have thus far), it will stay within the bounds of presidential authority. That’s a key legal distinction, as the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act bars active-duty forces from engaging in domestic law enforcement unless the president invokes the 1807 Insurrection Act. That’s a step Trump hasn’t taken (yet at least), suggesting that he still sees as high a bar for it as he did during the George Floyd protests in 2020.
- The door is open to a more radical use of emergency powers. The counterpoint is that Trump referred to the LA protesters as a “violent insurrectionist mob” (he does know a little something about those) and on Tuesday refused to take the invocation of the Insurrection Act off the table. He also warned that any protesters at this weekend’s military parade in Washington, DC – peaceful or not – “will be met with very big force,” and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth hinted at a desire to use military forces on domestic soil more extensively going forward. This pattern suggests that Trump’s threshold for activating emergency powers or using troops against Americans is lower than last time around, when he was repeatedly talked out of extreme steps by institutionalist advisors. I wouldn’t be shocked if the administration invoked the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act (aka IEEPA, the same law it used to levy reciprocal tariffs on Liberation Day) to freeze the assets of individual American citizens and organizations it accused of aiding and abetting “foreign invaders” (aka undocumented aliens). Or if it used the Communications Act to pressure internet platforms into throttling protest-related content. These scenarios may sound far-fetched, but so did the unilateral deployment of the National Guard and Marine Corps to Los Angeles less than 200 days into the first year of the Trump presidency. In his second term, Trump has proven willing to push the legal and political limits of executive power, against precedent and despite long odds of success.
- Trump’s LA deployment was designed to score political points, not restore peace. The City of Los Angeles was unaffected by the protests, which were confined to a handful of downtown city blocks. The Los Angeles Police Department had things under control (at least until Trump escalated the situation), and local officials saw no reason to request federal help. In fact, they warned that adding federal troops to the mix would risk heightening tensions and endanger public safety. But Trump wasn’t trying to solve a security problem – he was playing politics.
- Trump is eager to pick public fights over immigration. This is the one issue area where the president has had consistently positive approval ratings, save for a brief dip underwater caused by the administration’s mishandling of the Abrego Garcia case. For Trump, the political upside of doubling down on the migrant crackdown is twofold. First, it shifts attention toward his biggest strength and away from headlines that are more problematic for the administration, such as his failure to secure trade deals, his inability to end the Russia-Ukraine war, and his messy breakup with Elon Musk. Second, it forces Democrats into defending politically unsympathetic targets and positions, much like they did with Abrego Garcia (before the White House overplayed its hand) and Harvard University.
- The optics of the LA protests play straight into Trump’s hands. Images of burning Waymos and protestors flying Mexican flags lend credence to the White House’s false claim that undocumented immigrants are dangerous foreign invaders and their defenders are radical anti-American traitors, allowing the president to discredit opponents of mass deportations as threats to public order and safety. That only a small number of troublemakers were illegal aliens doesn’t matter; Trump is betting (correctly, in my view) those visuals will drive public opinion away from the demonstrators and toward more aggressive deportation policies.
- More deportations are coming. Trump has made measurable progress in curbing illegal border crossings, but so far, deportations have fallen far short of his campaign pledge (and even of deportations during Joe Biden’s last year in office). That’s not surprising; large-scale interior removals are much more politically, economically, and logistically fraught than border enforcement. But according to the Wall Street Journal, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller recently ordered ICE to step up its game, demanding that they stop targeting migrants with criminal records, asylum requests, and court petitions and instead “just go out there and arrest illegal aliens” at their jobs and schools. In other words, snag anyone who looks illegal, no probable cause (let alone warrant) needed. That approach was reportedly what sparked the LA protests last week. The backlash was instrumental to Miller’s goals: by signaling that Trump is making good on his deportation promise, standoffs with law enforcement can make deportations more popular and give Trump the political capital to ramp up more visible and disruptive workplace and neighborhood raids, particularly in Democratic-run cities. These operations will trigger more protests, which will in turn be met with more repression and stepped-up enforcement, and so on.
- On immigration, don’t bet on TACO. Trump faces fewer internal constraints in implementing his policy agenda on immigration than in any other area. Unless and until it starts dragging on his approval ratings, he is likely to double down: more aggressive raids, more confrontations with Democratic governors and mayors, more troop deployments to quell public protests. Mass deportations will disrupt local life in places like Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, and Chicago. Backlash to aggressive enforcement tactics, family separations, and mistaken detentions will be the primary source of domestic unrest in the coming months, but Trump won’t back down. This is a fight the White House is happy to fight.
Trump's deployment of troops to Los Angeles was less about taking control of the streets and more about taking control of the narrative. The strategy is confrontational by design, with immigrants and Democrats as foils and civil unrest as a feature, not a bug. This playbook may work politically. But in the long term, the result will be more conflict: between cities and Washington, between red and blue, between civilians and the military, and between competing visions of American identity. The most politically divided and dysfunctional industrialized nation will only become more so.
Members of the California National Guard stand in a line, blocking an entrance to the Federal Building, as demonstrators gather nearby, during protests against immigration sweeps, in Los Angeles, California, USA, on June 9, 2025.
Trump deploys Marines to LA as political battle escalates
Overnight, hundreds of US Marines began arriving in the city of Los Angeles, where protests, some of them violent, against the Trump Administration’s immigration enforcement have been ongoing since Saturday.
The move marked an escalation by the White House beyond its initial deployment of National Guard troops on Saturday, and it came just hours after California’s Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom sued the Trump administration over that decision, calling it an “unprecedented usurpation of state authority,” and accusing the White House of provoking the protests.
Why are the Marines there? The troops are officially acting on orders to protect federal property rather than to restore order more widely, though US President Donald Trump has suggested they are there to suppress protesters he has labeled “insurrectionists.”
Legal scholars say this rhetoric suggests Trump may be leaving the door open to invoke the Insurrection Act, which authorizes the direct use of the military against US citizens to suppress rebellion.
“The Insurrection Act is still sitting there on the shelf and gives the president enormous power,” Yale Legal Expert Emily Bazelon told Ian Bremmer on the upcoming episode of GZERO World.
It allows the military to go beyond protecting federal property, to potentially breaking up and policing the protests themselves. In an eerie historical echo, the last time a president did this was in 1992, when President George H. W. Bush deployed Marines to quell racially charged riots in Los Angeles that were touched off by the acquittal of police officers in the beating of Rodney King, a Black motorist.
Trump has already tested the legal bounds in LA. When he deployed the National Guard over the objections of Governor Newsom – the first time a president has defied a governor in this way since the 1960s, he invoked Title 10 of the US Code. That’s a law which permits the White House to “federalize” state-based National Guard units if necessary to “execute the laws of the United States,” – in this case immigration enforcement.
California’s lawsuit says that the White House overstepped its authority and that local law enforcement is capable of managing the protests alone.
In the White House vs California standoff there are risks for both sides. On the one hand, Trump has public approval for stricter immigration policy, with a slight majority of Americans, and a robust majority of Republicans, in favor of his policies, according to polls taken before the weekend upheaval.
And with polls showing that only a third of Americans support the LA protests, Trump, who has long styled himself as a “law and order” leader, may also relish the notion of Democrats associating themselves with images of unpopular chaos and disorder on American streets.
But the deployment of federal troops also poses risks – if they are seen harming US citizens there could be a public backlash against an administration that is seen to be overstepping its bounds.
For now, Trump seems keen to push the envelope. “It is 100% true that they’re enforcing immigration laws and that there are lots of people in the country illegally. However, if you were just playing the numbers game, you would go to a poultry factory in the middle of nowhere in the Midwest and pick up a lot of factory workers,” says Bazelon.
“When you choose to go into the heart of a city, onto the streets and publicly snatch people up, you’re kind of asking for a reaction.”
Trump deploys National Guard to LA amid immigration protests
The deployment, which has sparked protests across the city, marks the first such federal action without a governor’s approval since 1965, when President Lyndon B. Johnson sent troops to Alabama to protect civil rights demonstrators from segregationist Governor George Wallace.
“This is obviously very different kind of politics,” said Ian, “but nonetheless reflecting of where the country… is increasingly oriented—not in becoming more progressive… but instead in securing the border.”
Images of protests featuring Mexican flags, Ian notes, feed a narrative the president is eager to promote.
“If Trump continues to respond in a public and aggressive way, there’s certainly a risk that tensions could escalate,” Ian warned, “especially as deportation operations ramp up in the coming months.”
- Where does Trump’s immigration crackdown stand, nearly 100 days in? ›
- Trump-appointed judge strikes down use of wartime powers to fast-track deportations ›
- What does Trump’s mass deportation mean for Canada — and immigration policy? ›
- Trump’s immigration plan faces hurdles ›
- What We're Watching: Trump calls out National Guard, US-China trade talks, Russia-Ukraine violence escalates ›