with CHARLIE HARPER

What’s happening now in Los Angeles was probably inevitable, sad to say. US President Donald Trump has now deployed to the city a detachment of US Marines from Camp Pendleton, the sprawling Marine base located by the Pacific Ocean about midway between Los Angeles and San Diego. He also overrode tradition and bypassed California’s governor to directly order National Guard units to join the Marines.

In doing so, he is using US military forces against Americans within the borders of the United States. This rarely happens, and it has already sparked both partisan and non-partisan outrage.

The reason for the deployments is the probably unavoidable community response in South Central LA to several recent raids and roundups by the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement service, better known as ICE. The area known as Paramount City, separated from the quiet leafy streets of Beverly Hills by many miles and several freeways, is southeast of Watts and adjacent to areas such as Compton that have frequently witnessed clashes with local authorities.

Whether Trump’s ICE deliberately goaded the community into reacting violently in order to fulfill his campaign promises to use federal resources to stamp out such dissent, as some allege, is unknown. But there is little question that the president and his allies must welcome this opportunity to flex their muscles in squashing the protests.

Trump cannot like California in general very much anyhow, and he has often expressed a distaste for its two most prominent cities, San Francisco (home to Nancy Pelosi’s district) and Los Angeles, where a notoriously liberal-supporting movie industry resides. The state is reliably blue in presidential elections, and its governor, Gavin Newsom, is likely a serious candidate to seek the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028.

Newsom, now engaged in a full-scale war of words and lawsuits against the Trump administration, has jousted in recent years with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth and other prominent GOP leaders as he tries to buttress his claim to be the ablest combatant in the race to lead the Democratic ticket in three years.

It’s early in the hot summer season. College kids and many high schoolers are out of school. There is plenty of dry kindling around for the sparks of passionate protest and general civic unrest to burst into flame all around the US. There’s evidence that the American president is eagerly awaiting further opportunities to stifle this potential dissent.

A law-and-order crusade is just what Trump needs right now. His giant, signature budget bill is just beginning its tortuous journey through the US Senate and its inevitable, contentious ‘reconciliation’ negotiations with House committees and leadership. Trump’s campaign claims that he would end the wars in Ukraine and Gaza immediately upon taking office are now demonstrably fatuous.

On the plus side, Trump can certainly claim to have secured the southern US border, as he promised he would do. But Trump’s spiteful use of his powerful office to punish political opponents isn’t seen as being broadly beneficial to the nation. And Trump’s tariffs are only just beginning to bite into the disposable income of American consumers.

It’s also hard to avoid the conclusion that Trump’s current breakup with Elon Musk is anything but undignified, and it besmirches much of their joint efforts to reduce the size of some government agencies. To many, the attack on bloat in the federal government was worthwhile and overdue; now, DOGE and the rest look much less serious.

So the current troubles in Los Angeles are probably just a harbinger of much more civic unrest around the country and massive retaliation by the current administration, both because it will boost Trump’s powerful image and because it will distract voters from the damage to consumers’ disposable income that many of his policies and legislative proposals are certain to cause.

What about the Democratic response to this chaotic government? Granted, the party goofed badly in propping up frail Joe Biden for months just last year at this time when they could have been actively holding primary elections for younger, much more robust leadership. But they didn’t.

What now? Maybe the answer can be found in 1991 and 2007. In 1991, the US was winding up the first term of angular, courtly George HW Bush, the patrician Connecticut resident turned Texan who had served for eight years as vice president to Ronald Reagan.

Winning his own presidency in 1989, Bush saw Reagan’s massive defence spending surprisingly sink the USSR. He launched a quick, successful strike to expel Iraq’s Saddam Hussein from neighbouring Kuwait in what is now known as Operation Desert Storm during the Persian Gulf War. Bush looked unbeatable. The Democrats were hopeless; they were leaderless.

Then the elder Bush unravelled. He uttered his famous “no new taxes; read my lips” remark – just before he signed off on large tax increases that facilitated the roaring ‘90s economic boom in the US that eased the path for his successor.

That successor was an obscure Arkansas governor, Bill Clinton, of whom hardly anyone in Washington had ever heard before 1991. As Bush stumbled, Clinton soared to a nomination that few had sought, and then won the presidency and was easily reelected four years later. Still charismatic despite sagging health, Clinton galvanized his party and the nation.

Then, 16 years later, another young, inspiring legislator emerged from the obscurity of the Illinois state senate to surge to an unexpected 2008 presidential nomination, victory and reelection. Barack Obama is still among the most admired Americans a decade after leaving office and despite apparently spending much of his time enjoying the lifestyle of a jet-setting millionaire.

Here we are in 2025, shaken to the core by a president whose values do seem discordant and even unpatriotic. It falls to the Democrats to find and support candidates who will overturn slim GOP majorities in both houses of Congress next year and prevail in 2028 to begin the process of reversing the damage Trump is daily inflicting on the country.

Are they up to the task? On two earlier occasions in recent memory, they turned to unknowns. The party and the country may have already soured on several prominent governors whose stars seemed ascendant just a year ago but who may be tarnished by their temporal association with the Biden calamity.

Newsom may be at the head of that group. But we aren’t hearing much these days about Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, Illinois governor J B Pritzker, Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer or other Democratic Party ingenues of the recent past. Who is going to emerge?

Over 80 percent of Trump’s second term remains. The clock is ticking.

Europe’s investing in defence bad for Putin

While all this tradition-shattering chaos continues and even intensifies in the US, with Trump seeming to push many boundaries just to see who and if anyone will successfully stop him, the Ukraine war continues its dreary, deadly course as an existential threat to Europe.

It seems clear that Trump won’t do the work to have any real impact on achieving a ceasefire. What’s going to happen? Western Europe remains a region critical to the US, Trump’s occasional blathering about NATO notwithstanding.

A couple of New York Times journalists had an insightful on-line exchange recently that offered useful perspective. Here are some excerpts:

“My feeling is that Russia retains the upper hand now, in a very slow, grinding way, and on a pure military level. Russian history is full of these wars that are won not by skill or daring but really by endurance — endurance of horrible conditions for the civilian population at home and an unbelievable amount of death suffered by its troops. And then eventually you just wear the other side down.”

“If I were Putin, I would be looking at how things are going in Europe and how quickly the dialogue about Russia is changing in Europe. Trump has been very bad for Putin, by making Europeans understand that it’s possible that Trump will simply disengage and that the US could just disappear.”

“Contemplating what that looks like for Ukraine, and for the rest of Europe while facing Putin, has actually caused a more productive, unprecedented discussion in Europe. It seems they’re now suddenly willing to pay more for defence. There’s discussion of peacekeeping troops. And that’s really bad for Putin. Strategically, that’s terrible for Putin.”