Sound and Fury

The Pointless Spectacle of Los Angeles

Protests in LA on 8 June, Eric Thayer, AP

In the Greek cities, the tyrants looked out only for themselves—for their own safety and for the growth of their personal households…nothing they did is worth mentioning…they accomplished nothing remarkable.

The White House is triumphantly beating its chest, celebrating the federalization of 4,000 Californian National Guardsmen and 700 Marines. Donald Trump is musing about arresting Gavin Newsom and reconquering Los Angeles. The grand spectacle promised throughout his campaign has finally arrived: the United States military has been thrust into domestic affairs.

It will amount to—as a better writer than I once remarked—a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury. Signifying nothing.

The Insurrection Act has yet to be invoked, and without that, the most that federal troops will do is stand around. As it stands, they have no actual function outside of actors costumed for a play in a televised game of political partisanship.

I’m sure there will be plenty of chances for a good photo of Guardsmen holding riot shields for the Associated Press, but otherwise, they will be left with little else to do.

This will, of course, inflame tensions as the Trump Administration’s theatrical rendition of authoritarian showmanship will no doubt draw thousands of irate individuals into the streets…but so what?

What will any of this have accomplished outside of images to be flashed across Fox News? They will have generated mass political blowback, and in turn, they will only have Tweets to show for their efforts. Congratulations, you get to tell your supporters that you got to shoot rubber bullets at some people. So fucking what.

The Trump administration will not achieve anything with any of this. There will be people arrested and harmed from the resulting unrest over this, that is without a doubt.

What is being built with this? Who can point to their lives being improved by National Guardsmen sleeping on the ground? What policies is this advancing outside of looking the part of a strongman on television?

We have yet to see any trade deals.

Most of Trump’s Executive Orders have been halted by the courts.

He is no closer to a notable foreign policy achievement now than he was six months ago.

His administration has already lost one National Security Advisor and one Elon Musk.

His one legislative accomplishment will likely be tax cuts and kicking people off Medicaid.

What a fucking win.

Surrounded by advisors who were chosen for their sycophancy, rather than their competency, there’s very little left at this point besides the use of unilateral executive power to gin up crises for the cameras.

I have no doubt they will attempt to invoke the Insurrection Act at some point—but honestly, so fucking what.

What do they think is going to happen? It would do nothing but end up as more of an exhaustion of this administration’s already thin attention span, just so they can see more people get tear-gassed on television.

The only thing they will get out of this will be the erosion of trust in the United States Military. They are one institution that still holds universal bipartisan trust, but that will begin to flag if they allow themselves to become dragged into these spectacles.

The militarization of ICE raids mixed with the presence of active duty troops on American streets will be a difficult image to untangle in the American consciousness. Moreso if the military becomes enmeshed in civil unrest and the American public sees nightly images of servicemembers firing pepper balls into crowds.

It will have just been one more American institution that will have to be fixed when these people are gone. Like the reforms of the 70s and 80s, after Vietnam, we will have to again repair the relationship between the United States and our Military.

It will, at best, be able to spur on a new generation of civil-military academics to finally abandon Huntington.

But more importantly, from all of this, they’ve lost all sense of aligning policy intent with resources on hand. It has never been more evident that the White House is nothing but an insulated circle of amateurs playacting at governance.

They have no real sense of grip of what they are working with—and will therefore fail to accomplish anything of note.

The real work of governing is a delicate balance of placating stakeholders and rationally calculating options to achieve desired outcomes. You look at what your political capital is, and you prioritize your attention and resources around what you can accomplish with that capital.

It takes insightful perceptions, skillful coalition management, constant feedback, and genuine buy-in to realize anything that will last. FDR was not who he was because he simply hit the button to send in federal troops at the slightest hint of disagreement.

The fact that they’ve now resorted to sheer idiocy like this is the greatest evidence I can give you that the second Trump administration will have come and gone without achieving anything. These are the actions of a rudderless government consumed with putting on a staged play for an increasingly shrinking audience.

Los Angeles probably won’t be the end of this. But like Macbeth screaming impotently in a castle alone, it’s largely the end of the Trump Administration.