Trump wants L.A. to set itself on fire. Let’s rebel smarter

Well, what did you expect?

When la migra raids workplaces and tries to enter schools and is vowing to do even more, L.A. ain’t going to roll out the red carpet and throw roses at them.

When Donald Trump calls up 2,000 National Guardsmen to clear the way for his immigration goons, over the strenuous objections of Gov. Gavin Newsom and Mayor Karen Bass, this city is going to push back even harder.

When Trump takes to social media to claim that “once great” Los Angeles “has been invaded and occupied by Illegal Aliens and Criminals” and that his administration will stop at nothing “to liberate Los Angeles from the Migrant Invasion,” we’re going to do something about it.

But this?

Throwing cinder blocks and e-scooters at California Highway Patrol cars from a 101 Freeway overpass? Ripping out the pink tables and benches from Gloria Molina Grand Park to create a makeshift barricade on Spring Street near City Hall? Tagging small businesses, vandalizing the old Times headquarters, skidding a car around the bandstand at La Placita Olvera?

That’s supposed to keep immigrant families safe and defeat Trump?

This is what many people are muttering to themselves after a weekend of protests that ended with chaos in downtown Sunday night. LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell called the damage “disgusting.” Bass posted on social media that “destruction and vandalism will not be tolerated in our City and those responsible will be held fully accountable.” U.S. Senator Alex Padilla told KTLA 5 News that it was “counterproductive.” In a statement, Eastside Assemblymember Mark González decried “agitators [whose] actions are reckless, dangerous and playing into exactly what Trump wants.”

Uprisings have a time and place, but not when they’re a trap you willingly run into. That’s what L.A. is dealing with now, and for weeks, if not months — years! — to come.

Trump called in the National Guard to set in motion his dream of crushing the city and using us as an example for other sanctuary jurisdictions of what happens if they dare defy him. L.A. is everything he loathes: diverse, immigrant-friendly, progressive and deeply opposed to him and his xenophobic agenda. He called in the Guard, even though the skirmishes between protesters and law enforcement that happened Friday in the Garment District and Saturday in Paramount were about as rowdy as when the Dodgers lose in the National League championship series.

The president knew the deployment would be incendiary, and that was the point: Goad L.A. into setting itself on fire.

The National Guard has largely stood by as police officers and sheriff’s deputies beat back unruly crowds who see them as an invading force, even though McDonnell and Sheriff Robert Luna have repeatedly stated that their agencies don’t enforce immigration laws. The clashes led to visuals — protesters flying the flags of Mexico and other Latin American countries as a counterpoint to the Trump administration’s white supremacy, cars in flames, graffiti — that went worldwide and cast the City of Angels as a City in Hell.

Now, Trump is pouncing on L.A. like a cat on a mouse.

Now, Department of Defense head Pete Hegseth has taken a break from his plan to scrub the names of civil rights heroes from naval ships — instead, he’s threatening to send Marines to L.A.

Now, Trump is roaring on social media — “Paid insurrectionists” and “BRING IN THE TROOPS!!!” — like the mad king he is. Now, law enforcement from across Southern California are descending on L.A. to keep the peace.

This is what Los Angeles deserves?

At moments like these, I remember Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous maxim that “a riot is the language of the unheard,” even as he described riots in the same 1967 speech as “socially destructive and self-defeating.” Most who took to the streets last weekend are righteously angry at what Trump has done, and plans to do, to L.A. But their fury was too easily co-opted by the few who want to wantonly destroy and used the cover of protest to do so.

L.A. is famously a city that turns on itself when people have had enough, from the Zoot Suit riots to the George Floyd protests, the Watts rebellion of 1965 and the L.A. uprising of 1992.

“We might fight amongst each other/But I promise you this: we’ll burn this bitch down, get us pissed,” Tupac Shakur famously sang in “To Live and Die in L.A.”

It’s a tendency I can’t fully embrace or condemn — because I get both sides. But we can always do better — and we usually do. L.A. is also the city of the 2006 Day Without Immigrants, where hundreds of thousands peacefully marched through the same downtown streets now in shambles. Where students organize walkouts and sit-ins to fight for a better education. Where working class folks stage electoral upsets against the powers that be.

Revolts in L.A. don’t always need literal flames — because the ones that burn brightest and longest are moral and philosophical.

Protesters shutdown the 101 Freeway as they classh with law enforcement in downtown Los Angeles due to the immigration raids in L.A. on Sunday, June 8, 2025 in Los Angeles, CA.

(Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times)

So I challenge all the folks simmering with rage against Trump’s war against L.A. and itching to do something about it — and that should be every Angeleno right now — to rebel smarter.

It’s easy to chuck rocks at a cop car. How about becoming a political prisoner a la SEIU California President David Huerta, who was arrested Friday for allegedly blocking a law enforcement van from executing a search warrant?

Setting fires to garbage cans in the middle of a street is old hat — how about providing shelter to undocumented families living with the terrifying reality that their time in this country might soon be up? Fanning out across downtown with no real destination is an L.A. tradition — what about joining the many immigrant rights groups who have set up rapid response networks to show up where la migra does?

The feds don’t play — but neither does L.A. Let’s show the world what we do at our best.