Fight and Fight Hard

This is exactly right–Democrats need to learn that the only way to fight Trump is to punch back hard.

Angelenos know the score and have responded in kind. As TNR’s Melissa Gira Grant wrote this week, “What we are witnessing in Los Angeles is not only a protest; it is self-defense.” When indiscriminate ICE raids ramp up in other metropolitan areas, I’d expect the same level of citizen resistance. But the protests have been a vital counteroffensive to Trumpism, as well: As TNR’s Matt Ford explains at length, they have done much to expose the weakness of the president and the fakery behind his anti-immigrant crackdown. Over at The New York Times, Jamelle Bouie concurs, wryly noting that “strong, confident regimes are largely not in the habit of meeting protests with military force, nor do they escalate at the drop of the hat.”

The Trump administration is angry and humiliated—and grossly unprepared. They have not done the planning necessary to pacify a city, and they don’t have the numbers to do it either. The National Guard members they have activated are famously sleeping on floors and complaining about how the administration is using 29-day deployments to avoid having to pay for active-duty benefits. And the president’s coalition is starting to fracture: Florida state Senator Ileana Garcia, who helmed Latinas for Trump during the election campaign, denounced the president’s crackdown this week. Another California Republican issued a statement urging the administration to “prioritize the removal of known criminals over the hardworking people who have lived peacefully in the Valley for years.”

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While these displays of courage should be celebrated, there are still too many Democrats in Washington who are hesitant to step up—and who mirror the administration’s lack of preparedness. This week, California Senator Alex Padilla demonstrated that he was up for the fight, disrupting a press conference from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and getting manhandled and briefly detained as his reward. Still, many of his Capitol Hill colleagues seem to not understand the moment at all. Even as Angelenos were putting themselves in harm’s way to stop ICE raids and humiliate the Trump regime, 75 House Democrats were signing their name to a resolution expressing “gratitude to law enforcement officers, including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel, for protecting the homeland.” Beyond that, I’m seeing the same basic reluctance among Beltway Democrats to recognize that they’re in a content-creation war. Republicans are still much quicker to grab a microphone or position themselves in front of a television camera. And even Trump understands that the biggest virtue of deploying Marines to California is that he’ll get the media to report it.

But this is precisely why Democratic reluctance to frontally confront Trump, in the hopes that some more favorable political terrain might reveal itself—or the president might finally, fatally, shoot himself in the foot—is dangerous. Like I said, we are at all times hurtling toward a conflict with this administration. And the number of people carrying guns to this conflict continues to go up. At some point, someone is either going to be ordered to fire one of those guns on a civilian or they are going to refuse the order to do so, and we’ll be knee-deep in the big muddy of a turbocharged crisis. At that point, pivoting to the price of eggs isn’t going to be sufficient.

But see, Bill Cassidy told Chuck Schumer in the Senate gym that he really doesn’t like what’s going on. What if we just wait for Republicans to come to their senses and start standing up to Donald Trump? Have Democrats tried that yet?

At any rate, the time for anticipating what Trump might do has long passed. The conflict has arrived, and we are in a perilous moment. That said, I’d worry more if the people were mirroring the reticence and timidity of many of our political elites. But as we’ve seen in Los Angeles—and are likely to see as anti-Trump protests spread across the nation this weekend—no one is waiting for politicians to step in and be the grand marshal of this growing dissident movement. Democratic leaders may still be waiting for the “time, place, and manner of our choosing” to take the fight to Trump. But Angelenos have countered, “What better place than this? What better time than now?”

But what about our comity?