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The Trump administration has tried to portray the Los Angeles demonstrations against its ICE enforcement raids as chaos at a scale worthy of military intervention. Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Police Department has repeatedly disputed that claim.
In a statement Monday, the department’s chief responded to reports that the administration planned to deploy National Guard in the city, saying the deployment was unnecessary and could pose an impediment to the police carrying out their duties.
“The possible arrival of federal military forces in Los Angeles absent clear coordination presents a significant logistical and operational challenge for those of us charged with safeguarding this city,” Chief Jim McDonnell said, adding, “The Los Angeles Police Department, alongside our mutual aid partners, have decades of experience managing large-scale public demonstrations, and we remain confident in our ability to do so professionally and effectively.”
On Wednesday, Trump seems to have taken McDonnell’s statement as praise. “If we weren’t there, if we didn’t bring in the National Guard and the Marines, you would probably have a city that was burning to the ground,” Trump told the press at a performance of “Les Miserables” at the Kennedy Center. (In reality, the largely peaceful protests have been confined to just a few blocks in the city.) Trump continued, “In fact, the chief of police said so much, if you look at what his statements were. He said, ‘We’re very lucky to have had them.’”
But McDonnell rejected that claim. Asked by CNN host Kaitlin Collins if Trump’s characterization of his statement was accurate, McDonnell said, “No. We were not in a position to request the National Guard.”
McDonnell listed the resources local law enforcement officials have at their disposal to respond to demonstrations, should they get out of hand. Then he stated flatly that the protests haven’t risen to a level that warrants military intervention. “We’re nowhere near a level that we would be reaching out to the governor for National Guard at this stage,” he said, “And my hope is that things are going in the right direction now and that we wouldn’t have had to have done that, or we won’t either.”
The Trump administration — with the encouragement of its conservative allies in media and in Congress — has been champing at the bit to use military force to crack down on its foes. In an effort to justify this escalation, they’ve relied on deceptive videos and, in some cases, outright disinformation. Trump’s claim about the LAPD (itself certainly no bastion of progressivism) welcoming troops in response to American protesters appears to fall into that latter category.