Between 2020 and 2025, you had a lot of folks allied with Trump, making plans during the interim between his two terms to invoke the Insurrection Act more quickly and more rapidly in the event of violent protests. So against this backdrop, you get a sense — and you’ve long had a sense — that the administration is spoiling for a fight, and when I say a fight, I don’t mean a political fight, I mean a literal fight in the streets.
And so when the protests kicked off in Los Angeles and they devolved from peaceful protests into violent protests — look, violent protest is utterly unacceptable. It has to stop. But California, this is a very small-scale protest at the moment, and California has immense resources. This is not out of California’s control. And California didn’t ask for or want any federal intervention, but almost as soon as it kicked off, you saw this rhetoric, this explosion of language across the online space that reminded me — did either one of you guys see the movie “300: Rise of an Empire,” which was the sequel to the movie “300”?
Cottle: David. Really?
French: I mean, maybe we don’t have the same movie taste. I’ll just go out on a limb and say that, but there’s a moment where Xerxes, the king, comes out in front of a giant crowd and he yells, “For glory’s sake, war!”
Audio clip from movie: For glory’s sake, for vengeance’s sake: war!
And the crowd just rises in a thunderous roar. And you felt like that was the online version. You had Stephen Miller saying insurrection, you had JD Vance calling it an invasion. You had Pete Hegseth in a very frantic post saying the Marines stood ready. And so you’re thinking: OK, wait a minute, are they about to just bring down the hammer? And then you find out Trump nationalized about 2,000 members of the National Guard, which is a relatively modest deployment, but he did it without invoking the Insurrection Act. He did it under a much more modest legal authority that essentially allows the president to defend the federal facility from an attack.
So on the one hand, there’s some comfort in that. This was not a broad invocation of the Insurrection Act that could theoretically impose control over all of Los Angeles. It was much more modest. But I think it’s a small comfort. It’s a very small comfort because you feel like the predicate is being laid. There’s a very easy A to B if, after a day or two or three, you don’t see the violence stop, you could imagine easily that Trump would use that as a pretext for a much more sweeping assertion of power. So we are at a very, very dangerous time. The rhetoric is maximal rhetoric. The deployment is relatively minimal, but I’m worried it’s only a matter of time before the deployment matches the rhetoric.
