A Showdown Made in Heaven
By Marvin Kalb
He observed it from afar, and loved what he saw.
It was 1989, and Tiananmen Square in Beijing was flooded with tens of thousands of protesting Chinese students, angrily objecting to communist rule. The regime, frightened and embarrassed, dispatched tanks and troops and mercilessly crushed the uprising, leaving the streets as bloody testimony to deep, popular discontent.
Watching with fascination from New York, real estate magnate Donald Trump thought the Chinese leaders “almost blew it;” but acting “vicious” and “horrible,” they “put it down with strength,” adding, with admiration, “that shows you the power of strength.”
The anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles, now having spread across the country, have never, in any way, measured up to the Tiananmen massacre, but Trump as president has apparently seen parallels between Los Angeles and Tiananmen. Seizing the moment, he decided to act swiftly, his show of “the power of strength.” Using overwhelming military force while breaking precedent about deploying troops in a domestic setting, he federalized close to 5,000 National Guard troops, adding 700 Marines ready for combat overseas but not law enforcement in an American city.
It was almost as if Trump was declaring war on one of the 50 states, flexing his political authority in an ongoing struggle with California’s liberal governor, Gavin Newsom, and Los Angeles’s even more liberal mayor, Karen Bass.
It is no secret that since Trump returned to the White House in January 2025, he has been signing executive orders with elaborate fanfare, pushing the boundaries of presidential authority well beyond the outer limits. He promised to expel “millions” of “illegal immigrants,” but has yet to deliver any number close to that. He’s determined, one way or another, to throw out thousands more, busting into homes and workplaces with masked ICE agents, spreading fear and leaving massive disruption everywhere.
To justify his actions and win popular support (which he has failed to do, except in the eyes of his fawning GOP followers on Capital Hill), Trump has maliciously labeled the immigrants, legal or illegal, as “insurrectionists” and “foreign enemies,” who have “invaded” the United States. As he has done many times, he has painted a dark, depressing picture of an America under attack, desperately requiring his strongman (many would say despotic) leadership to save it. Meanwhile, donning his touchstone red “Make America Great Again” baseball hat at staged rallies, he has viciously denounced the media, while at the same time relying on its extraordinary powers of communication to spread his message.
And spread it they have, almost as if they had no other choice. In LA, while covering the generally peaceful anti-ICE protests in a small section of a very large city, reporters with cameras and iPhones, concentrating on the action before them, conveyed the impression of a violent, uncontrollable explosion of urban chaos, the perfect backdrop—and excuse—for a show of Trumpian strength. There was, in fact, violence (seemingly unavoidable in our media-obsessed era), but it could easily have been contained by LA’s sizeable police force, soon abetted by the state’s National Guard, activated by Newsom and welcomed by Bass. At least, that’s what the reporters on the scene judged to be the case.
Once Trump saw the unintentionally hyped TV image of urban violence and street-corner chaos, he sensed his moment and leaped into action, transforming a serious local problem into a national crisis.
One must understand that Trump watches TV news throughout much of the day and night. It is the way he has lived for most of his life. His sense of reality is formed by what he sees and hears on the TV screen. He rarely reads. Since he is obsessively narcissistic and convinced that the world rotates around him, he inhales images that conform to his worldview or, more importantly, that flatter his ego. With a phone call, he could easily have learned the truth about the TV images of LA’s protests. My guess is he never bothered. The image of urban chaos was enough for him to act.
Given the pervasive power of the TV screen, his impulsive decisions to federalize the National Guard and dispatch the Marines to LA with no training in urban law enforcement only worsened the initial local problems, nationalizing their effect and encouraging Trump to doubledown, as is his wont, and cripple a nation’s ability to think clearly about at the very same time it is slipping into a major international crisis in the Middle East. In this challenging region, Trump appears to be on the edge either of a diplomatic breakthrough with Iran on containing its nuclear program, or of a war with Iran.
How many crises can Trump manufacture and manage at the same time?
Marvin Kalb, Murrow professor emeritus at Harvard, former network correspondent at CBS and NBC, is author of the recently published “A DIFFERENT RUSSIA, Khrushchev and Kennedy on a Collision Course.”
It's horrifying to learn he liked the Tiananmen put down. But not surprising. I continue to put the blame on those who elected him and on the politicians who continue to enable him. Without those enablers, he would be what he should be, NOTHING. I watched Alex Padilla not only being hoisted out of the conference room but then, when he was no longer in there, the Noem enablers threw him on the ground and handcuffed him. I hope he sues the entire DHS, Noem and those 3 who manhandled him.
Since January, I have watched the Loser formulate crises for which only he can be the savior. And I, too, concluded that he can't juggle all the exploding balls all the time for long. So, let's see which is the one to blow up in his face. Or, as Rick Wilson said yesterday, let's see what happens when he, very soon, croaks from a predictable health collapse. Because, his minions? Nobody voted for them.