Authoritarian America: Trump’s Crackdown on Protest and Civil Liberties
The protests that erupted in Los Angeles over the weekend were not spontaneous, nor were they unpredictable. They were the inevitable response to a federal government that no longer hides its disdain for civil liberties. At the heart of the unrest is Donald Trump’s hard-line immigration crackdown: an escalation of raids, detentions, and deportation orders targeting migrant communities in sanctuary cities like LA. But this is about more than just immigration. It is about the fundamental question of whether dissent, civil disobedience, and even disagreement can survive in the current political climate.
What’s unfolding in California is not a skirmish. It is a showdown, a test, and a warning.
There is great and bitter irony in the fact that the man who incited a violent attack on the Capitol - whose supporters smashed windows, assaulted officers, and paraded Confederate flags through the halls of Congress - is now posturing as the nation’s moral authority on “law and order.” He pardoned or promised pardons to individuals who took part in the January 6 insurrection - people who actually assaulted police officers with flagpoles, bear spray, and fists (Reuters, 2025).
To put it bluntly: this is a man who has not only undermined the rule of law but has become the most prominent convicted felon in American presidential history. That he now dares to lecture the country on “respecting authority” is dangerously hypocritical.
But there’s more at play than just one man’s vendetta against protest. What we are seeing is the aggressive consolidation of executive power, and a deepening hostility toward any form of opposition. Trump deployed the National Guard to Los Angeles against the express wishes of California Governor Gavin Newsom (The Guardian, 2025). It is federal power being weaponised to punish states and cities that defy him politically.
This intolerance flows from the top down. Trump’s administration views Blue states not as partners in a federal republic but as hostile territory. Their governors are treated like disobedient subordinates. Their citizens, when they protest, are labelled enemies of the state. And their rights - whether to asylum, to protest, or simply to exist without harassment - are being stripped away under the guise of national security.
This is the context in which LA now finds itself: under siege not just physically, but politically. The crackdown unfolding there is not isolated. It is a prototype. A test run for what could be exported to any state that resists Trumpism and defies the leader.
Will Red states look away, comfortable in the knowledge that it’s not their communities being targeted (for now)? Will the rest of the country accept Trump’s narrative of “order” while ignoring the authoritarian tactics used to enforce it? Or will they recognise that what’s happening in Los Angeles is not the end of something, but the beginning?
History tells us that authoritarianism rarely arrives all at once. It creeps. It tests. It pollutes, and pushes boundaries until resistance collapses or becomes too dangerous to mount. What’s happening in LA is not just a flashpoint. It’s a flare in the dark.
The fire this time is burning in California. The question is: who is paying attention?
The Erosion of Civil Liberties in the Immigration System
The American immigration system has long been a site of injustice, but under Donald Trump’s renewed presidency, it is being pushed into outright authoritarianism. What was once selective, if still flawed, enforcement is becoming a machine driven by quotas and powered by fear. The new target, imposed directly by White House Deputy Chief of Staff, Stephen Miller, is to carry out 3,000 migrant arrests per day (NBC News, 2025). This is not a goal shaped by public safety, judicial oversight, or legal necessity. It’s an arbitrary number, political metric imposed from above, with devastating human consequences below.
The logic of such a quota is chilling. It turns enforcement into an industry of capture, one where the success of agents is measured not by justice served, but by bodies collected. The NBC report reveals how Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents are under increasing pressure to escalate their operations: to detain more people, more quickly, and in greater numbers than ever before. And it is here that the system begins to lose any pretence of constitutionality.
In pursuit of these numbers, due process becomes a casualty. Migrants complying with court appearances are being arrested outside courthouses. Others are detained during routine check-ins with immigration officials, at job sites, on the way to school drop-offs. This is about volume. And when volume is king, nuance dies. The legal protections that should shield individuals - particularly asylum seekers and those with no criminal history - are ignored in favour of bureaucratic efficiency and political optics.
A system that arrests 3,000 people a day must cut corners. It must sweep broadly, indiscriminately, and aggressively. In this quota-driven context, the question is no longer ‘who is a threat?’ but ‘who is available?’ This is how people who have committed no crimes, who may be in the middle of legal proceedings, or who qualify for relief, are swept up. The operation becomes less about law enforcement and more about harvest: faceless, rapid, and violent.
The tactics are increasingly militarised. Masked agents, armed with rifles and supported by armoured vehicles, are executing dawn raids in residential neighbourhoods. Entire apartment blocks have been targeted. Families are taken in front of children. Doors are broken down without warrants. All of this is done in service of hitting a daily number; a numerical goal that has no relationship to justice, only to control.
What we are seeing is the bureaucratisation of state terror. And it raises urgent questions: what happens when ICE agents can’t find enough ‘targets’ to meet their 3,000-per-day quota? Do they begin arresting individuals with pending legal status? Do they take the undocumented mother collecting her child from school, the father waiting outside a medical clinic, the teenager on a city bus? When arrest becomes an institutional compulsion, no-one is safe.
The courts, too, are becoming complicit. NBC’s reporting highlights how courthouse arrests are increasingly common. Defendants and witnesses alike detained as they enter or exit judicial proceedings. The chilling effect is enormous: people stop turning up to hearings, stop applying for legal aid, stop trusting the very system that claims to offer justice. The line between court and trap has all but vanished (NBC, 2025.)
This is a profound erosion of civil liberty. The quota system turns the machinery of law into something else entirely: a state apparatus designed to punish existence rather than enforce accountability. The implications are clear. If this continues unchecked, immigration enforcement will become a template for wider political repression. Detain first, justify later. Arrest not because you must, but because you were told to.
This is Trump’s vision of America: one governed by the spectacle of force and where might makes right. Migrants are the testing ground. The rest of the USA may be next.
The President Who Can’t Take a Protest
Donald Trump cannot tolerate protest. He cannot tolerate criticism or disobedience of any kind - especially not when it comes from Democratic officials or citizens living in so-called Blue states. Dissent, in Trump’s worldview, is not a democratic right. It is a personal affront. And those who dare to exercise it are enemies, not just of him, but of the state itself.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the way he has responded to the protests in Los Angeles. Rather than engaging with the substance of the demonstrators’ concerns or even acknowledging their constitutional right to assemble. He has deployed the National Guard over the explicit objections of Governor Gavin Newsom and Mayor Karen Bass, a move that in any other era would have been seen as an extreme federal overreach. But for Trump, it’s just another day of asserting dominance.
And then, as if to make the authoritarian subtext entirely explicit, Trump posted this to Truth Social:
“We made a great decision in sending the National Guard to deal with the violent, instigated riots in California. If we had not done so, Los Angeles would have been completely obliterated. The very incompetent ‘Governor,’ Gavin Newscum, and ‘Mayor,’ Karen Bass, should be saying, ‘THANK YOU, PRESIDENT TRUMP, YOU ARE SO WONDERFUL. WE WOULD BE NOTHING WITHOUT YOU, SIR.’ Instead, they choose to lie to the People of California and America by saying that we weren’t needed, and that these are ‘peaceful protests.’ Just one look at the pictures and videos of the Violence and Destruction tells you all you have to know. We will always do what is needed to keep our Citizens SAFE, so we can, together, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
— Donald J. Trump, Truth Social, 9 June 2025, 5:10 PM
This is not the language of a president. It is the power-play of a would-be dictator.
Trump’s mocking of Newsom as “Newscum” is not just childish; it is deeply revealing. He doesn’t see elected officials as peers in a functioning democracy. He sees them as inferiors who owe him deference. The quote “THANK YOU, PRESIDENT TRUMP, YOU ARE SO WONDERFUL” is almost comical in its narcissism. But behind the egotism is something much more sinister: the demand for obedience. Trump isn’t interested in policy success or public consensus. He wants praise. Total, unquestioning praise. Anything less is betrayal.
This is the same man who pardoned the convicted January 6 rioters - people who smashed windows, beat police officers, and attempted to stop the peaceful transfer of power. For them, Trump offers sympathy and pardons. For LA protesters marching in the streets against unconstitutional immigration raids, he sends in the military. The message is clear: if you support him, violence is justified. If you oppose him, peace is a provocation.
In this warped hierarchy of loyalty, citizens have no rights, only conditions. Governors must thank him. Protesters must vanish. Journalists must flatter. Police must obey. Trump’s America is not a republic. It is a fiefdom.
There is a name for this: dictatorship.
When Trump deploys troops against his own citizens while demanding praise from those in office, he is not acting like a commander-in-chief. He is acting like an autocrat. One who sees the state not as something he serves, but as something he owns. His disdain for Newsom and Bass is not just personal; it is institutional. He refuses to accept the authority of any government structure he does not control. Federalism means nothing to him. Consent means nothing to him. All that matters is submission.
The irony, of course, is that Trump - a convicted felon - is positioning himself as the sole protector of “law and order.” This from the man who incited an insurrection, continues to undermine the judiciary, name-calls the LA protestors as “professional agitators, they’re insurrectionists. Bad people who should be in jail” (Fox News) without any hit of irony and believes that laws are only valid when they serve his own interests. That he now lectures America on respect for authority is grotesque. That he demands sycophantic praise from elected officials is un-American.
In deploying the National Guard to California over the objections of the state’s leadership and then boasting about it in a post laced with insult, delusion, and megalomania, Trump has reminded us once again that his real enemy is not illegal immigration, or even protest. It is democracy itself.
This behaviour should surprise no one. As we argued in a previous Plague Island piece, Teflon Don 2.0: How Roy Cohn’s Playbook Created Trump’s Mafia State, Trump does not operate like a traditional politician. He behaves like a Mafia boss. His obsession with loyalty, his theatrical demands for praise, and his zero-tolerance policy for disobedience all flow from a worldview shaped by Cohn: punish enemies ruthlessly, reward sycophants blindly, and never admit defeat. He does not govern. He rules. And he rules with the expectation that every subordinate, from governors to federal agents, will kiss the ring or face the consequences.
Deploying the National Guard: Authoritarian Theatre
The decision to deploy the National Guard to Los Angeles was not made in consultation with state leaders. It was not a reluctant last resort. It was a deliberate power play, executed over the objections of California Governor Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, both of whom publicly opposed the move as unnecessary and inflammatory. Trump’s decision to send in the troops anyway reveals not a desire for stability, but a desire for domination. It was about humiliating enemies and reminding everyone who is in charge.
That is not governance. It is authoritarian theatre.
It is the performance of state power as spectacle: troops on the ground, helicopters overhead, masked guards in fatigues standing watch over a city that dared to dissent. It is a calculated image: a warning shot to other Democratic strongholds, who dared to exercise their right to protest, that defiance will be met not with dialogue, but with force.
In Trump’s America, the National Guard is not a tool of emergency response. It is a weapon of political punishment. And it’s being wielded not just against perceived chaos, but against political opposition itself. Newsom and Bass were not consulted, they were overridden. The state of California was not assisted. It was occupied. And Trump, far from showing restraint or regret, boasted about his actions on Truth Social with a level of self-regard more commonly seen in dictatorships than democracies.
Now, a dangerous precedent has been set. If the president can deploy troops to a state against its will, without invitation, without oversight, and without consequence, then federalism is dead in all but name. The balance of power between state and federal government is being rewritten. What is to stop him from doing it again? Or from sending the Guard into other ‘uncooperative’ cities during future protests, or even future elections?
We have already seen how he behaved when he lost the 2020 election.
This brings us to the deeper question, one America must now ask with urgency: What happens if Trump loses the midterms?
What happens if, despite the intimidation, the spectacle, the silencing of protest, voters deliver a rebuke at the ballot box? Will Trump respect that outcome? Will he accept a Democratic House or Senate with grace and restraint? Or will he, as he always has, treat electoral defeat not as democracy functioning, but as an insurrection against his rule?
If a peaceful protest in Los Angeles was enough to trigger troop deployment, what might a peaceful transfer of legislative power provoke?
Authoritarian Drift and the Two Americas
There seems to be an acceleration unreality to life in the United States now, two versions of the same country, drifting further apart with every protest, crackdown, and Truth Social post. In one version, people march in defence of their rights. In the other, they are branded terrorists for doing so. In one version, federal overreach is cause for alarm. In the other, it’s cheered as strength.
What’s happening in Los Angeles is not isolated. It is the inevitable consequence of allowing authoritarianism to take root within the structures of a democratic state. The Guard on the streets, the ICE quotas, the contempt for local governance, these are not the excesses of a rogue regime. They are now the operating principles of American federal power.
The institutions that were once trusted to hold the line: Congress, the courts, the press, are now being bypassed, ignored, or intimidated. Governors are mocked. Journalists are smeared. Protesters are surveilled. All of it delivered with the glib arrogance of a man who believes that power belongs to him, and him alone. A man who now faces no internal resistance from his own party, and precious little from those supposed to oppose him.
America is being carved into two realities. In one, Trump’s every move is cast as heroic: a noble defence of national pride and domestic peace. In the other, those same moves look like the creeping advance of authoritarianism. The question is no longer whether the president respects the rule of law, it is whether half the country even wants him to.
Because this is the heart of the crisis: not just that Trump is behaving like a dictator, but that millions are fine with it. They see civil rights as weakness, the media as the enemy, and dissent as sedition. These are mainstream beliefs within the Republican Party. And they are being institutionalised with every executive order, every militarised operation, every call to “restore order” by force.
The old idea that ‘it can’t happen here’ now sounds pathetic. It is happening is America right now. The playbook is being live-streamed. And while some states push back, others are already adapting to the new reality: criminalising protest, purging public education, and silencing opposition under the guise of patriotism.
In one version America, the rule of law is under siege. In the other, it is already dead.
The great drift is not just political. It is moral and existential. And unless there is a serious, collective reckoning with what this presidency actually represents, the gulf between these two Americas could become unbridgeable.
Conclusion: Will the Republic Hold?
The fire this time began in Los Angeles. But the sparks were lit long before the first protesters took to the streets. This was a fire fed by dehumanising immigration policy, and the normalisation of authoritarian impulses. Under Trump’s renewed leadership, those impulses are policy. What happened in LA is a blueprint.
From the ICE quotas that turn human lives into statistics, to the National Guard patrolling a state that never asked for them, this administration has shown its hand: it does not believe in negotiation. It does not believe in oversight. It does not believe in dissent. It believes in control. In force. In loyalty. It believes in total obedience to the leader.
The Truth Social post demanding thanks from elected officials says it all. Trump is ruling, and he expects to be praised for it. This is not just about one protest, or one state, or one immigration policy. This is about whether the United States remains a democratic republic or becomes something else entirely.
The irony is stark. A convicted felon lectures the nation on law and order. A man who pardoned insurrectionists sends troops in against demonstrators. A president who brands governors as enemies when they refuse to bow, demands gratitude from the very people he overrides. There is no clearer picture of a government unmoored from democratic norms.
Assuming the midterm elections go ahead, what will happen if Trump loses the House, the Senate, or both? If peaceful protest triggered military intervention, what will an electoral loss provoke? Another baseless claim of fraud? Another attempt to overturn results? Or worse: a new round of repression, cloaked in the language of patriotism and public order?
The question before America is no longer ‘What will Trump do?’ but ‘What won’t Trump do to consolidate power?’
Los Angeles has drawn the line. Now the rest of America must decide where it stands. If the USA accepts the idea that protest is criminal, that loyalty is mandatory, and that federal power can be deployed at the president’s whim, then the republic will not fall all at once. It will instead dissolve - one raid, one post, one silence at a time.
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References:
Fox News (2025) ‘Trump gives blunt response to Newsom daring Homan to arrest him: ‘I would.’’ Fox News, 9 June. Available online: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-gives-blunt-response-newsom-daring-homan-arrest-him-i-would[Accessed 9 June 2025.]
The Guardian (2025) ‘Police clash with Los Angeles protesters as opposition to Trump intensifies.’ The Guardian, 8 June. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/08/los-angeles-protests-immigration-ice [Accessed: 9 June 2025.]
Plague Island (2025) ‘Teflon Don 2.0: How Roy Cohn’s Playbook Still Rules America.’ 26 February. Available at: https://www.plagueisland.com/p/teflon-don-20-how-roy-cohns-playbook [Accessed: 9 June 2025.]
Reuters (2025) ‘National Guard deployed to Los Angeles amid protests against immigration raids.’ Reuters, 8 June. Available at: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/national-guard-deployed-los-angeles-amid-protests-against-immigration-raids-2025-06-08/ [Accessed: 9 June 2025.]