Los Angeles Shows How Trump Is Demonstrating Control of the Security Forces
For any authoritarian leader, maintaining the loyalty of the security forces is essential.
When looking at the events of the past few days in Los Angeles it is essential to understand that for authoritarian leaders of any kind maintaining the loyalty of the security forces is an absolute top priority. An authoritarian leader who cannot depend on those security forces will always be vulnerable. On the other hand, if that same president, prime minister or king has a strong control of the security forces, there is very little that the opposition can do other than try to overwhelm him nonviolently-a project that is very difficult and requires massive majorities.
An authoritarian leader can survive a severe economic downturn, a failure to deliver government services, widespread corruption and myriad other crises, but if the people with the guns, bombs and tanks turn on him, then that leader is done. Trump seems to understand this and has spent much of this term ensuring that will not happen.
In the United States the security forces include a large group of organizations. Among them are the US military, the FBI, ICE, thousands of county and local level law enforcement agencies, the National Guard and innumerable private security forces, some of which are semi-state actors.
Since returning to office, Trump has sought to consolidate his authority over all these groups. The last few days in Los Angeles have been a test of his control of the security forces, as he is using the military to quell a mostly peaceful protest. He has also gone over the head of a sitting governor to call in the National Guard and has called for the arrest of that governor over a political dispute. Thus far, it seems like the security forces are demonstrating their loyalty to Trump.
This need to maintain loyalty from the security forces helps explain why people like Pete Hegseth or Kash Patel, as well as others including Kristi Noem and Tom Homan, despite lacking the basic qualifications, have been appointed to their positions.
Patel is a MAGA idealogue with almost no relevant experience in management, law enforcement or justice. Pete Hegseth is a talk show host with no management or government experience to speak of, a substance abuse problem, a history of erratic personal behavior, and a Trump-like relationship with the truth. However, both of these men, along with Homan and Noem, are supremely qualified at being loyal to Donald Trump-and enforcing others loyalty to Donald Trump.
From Trump’s perspective, those are the primary qualifications for their offices. Someone might say that is the sole qualification to serve in any office under Trump, but it is even more acute in the security sector.
Patel has made it clear that he sees the FBI as essentially a personal police force loyal to Donald Trump. He has acted on that belief by ousting FBI officials who participated in investigations of Trump while he was out of office and by demanding political loyalty from new hires. Hegseth has been criticized for trying to fire many high-ranking military officials and eliminating DEI programs in the military, but a major reason he is doing that is to ensure that the people one level below him are loyal to Trump, not the US or the Constitution.
Since coming to Office, Trump has been looking for the opportunity to test the loyalty of the security forces. He began to do that when he asked Homan to turn ICE into a criminal organization-the armed enforcers for a fascist administration. Thus far, from Trump’s perspective, that has gone very smoothly. The next step was always going to be using the National Guard and the military to put down protests. Los Angeles became an opportunity and Trump took it.
Trump did not call in the National Guard and the military in Los Angeles because it was something he needed to do, but because it is something he wanted to do. Similarly, one of the reasons Trump’s ICE acted the way they did in seizing people off the streets, wearing masks, using more force than necessary, violating people’s rights, refusing to follow due process and the like so early in Trump’s term was precisely to get a reaction like this so that Trump would have the opportunity to use force in this way.
It can be a mistake to think of Trump as being capable of nuanced political strategy. He has always been much more of an instinctive or visceral political actor. However, he has always understood, and in fact been enthralled by, the President’s ability to mobilize violent enforcement of his wishes, and of military might more broadly. It is therefore perhaps just a very telling coincidence that the military is attacking demonstrators on California’s streets just as the preparations are being made for Trump’s birthday military parade in Washington on the 14th.
It is also very likely that Trump will continue to test the security forces, calling on them to continue to harass citizens and non-citizens, disrupt demonstrations and perhaps arrest activists, labor leaders or journalists. From there it is a small step for those security forces to be brought in to supervise elections and the vote-counting and implicitly, because their leadership will increasingly be vetted by the likes of Hegseth, Noem and Patel, ensure that Trump and his MAGA movement are insulated from the people’s will, and thus lead to the end of free, fair and democratic elections.
It may sound extreme to assert that this is just the beginning of Trump using the security, forces, and indeed the military, to achieve his political goals, but it would be foolish and unduly optimistic to assume otherwise. The decade-long Trump era has been one extended exercise in what might be called one-more-thingism, meaning liberal elites have been telling themselves for ten years that this or that is the thing Trump will not do-the thing that will finally bring him down. We should know better by now. Trump is using the military to suppress legal and Constitutionally protected activities, and will likely only do that in more egregious ways the longer he remains in power.