Trump Pursues Autocratic Consolidation and a Domestic “Forever War”

Crisis time requires a permanent emergency with an enemy that is never defeated

Every day, the Donald Trump administration is stress testing our democracy, taking actions to accelerate the transformation of the United States into an autocracy. Mr. Trump and his collaborators seek to undermine rule of law by targeting authorities who stand for democratic understandings of politics, government, and institutions. Judge Hannah Dugan was arrested in Wisconsin. Ras Baraka, the Mayor of Newark, was arrested, and then Rep. LaMonica McIver, a member of the opposition party, was arrested and indicted for trying to prevent the mayor’s arrest –a classic authoritarian cycle.

Senator Alex Padilla, also a member of the opposition party, was thrown to the ground, handcuffed, and removed from a government press conference. Sen. Padilla is from California, scene of a government crackdown in Los Angeles involving thousands of federalized National Guard members and hundreds of active-duty Marines. These troops are deployed against civilians who are protesting ICE roundups of immigrants and disappearances of people. Mr. Trump and his officials are presenting the protesters as “insurrectionists” and a “violent mob” to justify the aggression, although most have acted peacefully.

Behind the wildly disproportionate government response to these scattered local protests, and the insistence on mobilizing federal forces to Los Angeles (the LAPD stated it was equipped to handle them) is President Trump’s attempt to assert executive authority over states and cities run by Democrats he sees as political enemies. A judge blocked the Trump administration from deploying the National Guard, ordering return of authority over the Guard to California Governor Gavin Newsom, but an appeals court ruling a few hours later put that return on hold.

That ruling will anger MAGA operatives who have been targeting California elected officials such as Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and Newsom. Trump’s “border czar,” Tom Homans, stated that Bass and Newsom could be arrested if they obstruct any federal efforts to deport illegal immigrants.

The administration is also arguing that Newsom colluded with “the invasion.” “Illegal aliens invaded America. The government of the State of California aided and abetted that invasion,” White House policy head Stephen Miller claimed on X.

Ominously, Department of Homeland Security head Kristi Noem used the language of coups and foreign occupations in describing the government’s ultimate goal for its “operations” in Los Angeles. "We are not going away," Noem said. "We are staying here to liberate this city from the socialist and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country," she said, referring to Newsom and Bass.

State propaganda is now coalescing around this rhetoric of occupation and liberation, as though Los Angeles were a foreign country like Iraq, targeted by the United States for regime change —an operation Noem’s comment about Newsom and Bass evokes.

That makes the choice of the 2^nd Battalion, 7^th Marines, 1^st Marine division for deployment on the streets of Los Angeles especially telling. This infantry battalion served in Operation Iraqi Freedom, as well as many other operations. According to a U.S. Northern Command press release that reads like a war bulletin, the battalion will supplement “soldiers from the 79th Infantry Brigade Combat Team, a California National Guard unit in a Title 10 status, in the greater Los Angeles Area.”

The Marines are undergoing de-escalation training because they are a combat force organized for “lethality,” to use Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s favorite word.

All of these choices tell us how important the ICE operations are to the identity of this nascent regime. The government is willing to do anything –arrest judges and elected officials, and even bring in an entire infantry Marines battalion –to remove any obstructions to mass deportations from state and local officials, the law, and the population protesting in the streets.

Protesters at the Robert Young Federal Building in Downtown Los Angeles, June 9, 2025. Jim Vondruska/Getty Images.

This shows us how dependent this administration is on its fiction of an immigrant invasion. It needs this manufactured crisis to frame its power grabs as saving the nation and to pursue mass deportation as part of its racist population engineering schemes.

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Mr. Trump may have campaigned on ending “forever wars” abroad, but he is likely starting a new “forever war” at home, and so it is fitting that a battalion with experience in the “Global War on Terrorism” would be there at the inception.

We can expect this constructed crisis will continue, because authoritarian history teaches that the emergency must never be over, the adversary is never defeated, and the number of enemies is always expanding.

Yet as tyranny spreads, so does its opposite, and each action they take gives us information that can inform targeted protest strategies against them. This is already happening, from the Hands Off! Actions of April, to the anti-Tesla protests, to the upcoming No Kings demonstrations.

The power and moral force of collective action, as seen on the streets of Los Angeles and countless other cities, has already forced the government into extreme actions. This is not a sign of their strength, but a revelation of their weakness.

What Trump and Hegseth Really Fear

With each arrest, new heroes are created for our movement and our moment, with new visibility. Slowly, more eyes will be opened to the gravity of the situation and the preciousness of our rights and our freedoms. We are just getting started.