Chartbook 390 Beyond LA: Logics of escalation from Black Lives Matter (2020) to "No Kings" (June 14 2025)

Early in the morning of June 10 2025 a battalion of US Marines were moved to LA, America’s second city, to join in the militarized policing of protests, protests which erupted when armed and unidentified agents began violently arresting people designated as illegal immigrants.

The paramilitary overreaction in LA was already massive, before the Marine Corps was deployed.

Amidst the chaos, there is agreement on the basic political logic at work.

The Trump administration wants escalation on all fronts. The President is committed to a violent crackdown on illegal immigration and is happy to court clashes with protestors. The images of militarized police confronting protestors on city streets resonates with the dark, right-wing imaginings about the “truth” of modern America. The entire scene helps to consolidate and motivate the MAGA base.

Beyond the general desire for confrontation and a civil war atmosphere, is there a more specific policy logic at work in this escalation? There may be.

In Chartbook 388, last week, I argued that the political difficulties around Trump’s two signature economic policies - the tariffs and his signature fiscal policy package, the Big Beautiful Bill - might well unleash an escalatory dynamic.

As I argued in Chartbook 388, the political puzzle in both cases is that neither policy has much political momentum, other than desperate loyalty to Trump. Trump wants tariffs for their own sake and he wants the renewal of the 2017 tax cuts of his first term. Both are personal obsessions. To fail on either front would be a humiliation. But, as much as Trump wants them, according to conservative insiders, neither the tariffs nor the tax cuts have an actively mobilized social coalition behind them. Oren Cass described the Big Beautiful Bill (BBB) as nothing less than a political “death march”.

So what might happen, I asked last week? One possibility is deadlock and paralysis. An other option is radicalization:

So, put the two major policy planks of the first six months of the Trump administration end to end - tariffs and BBB - and you have a truly strange political phenomenon, driven ultimately by Trump’s preoccupations with his own personal legacy, which is both powerful, and domineering and fragile.

One plausible scenario is that the result is disintegration and deadlock. Will the clash with Musk hinder or accelerate the passage of BBB? Who knows? Recently one would have imagined that Musk would wage no-holds political war against BBB’s backers. Perhaps now he has other worries on his mind.

But we should not ignore the possibility that polycratic rivalry and dysfunction around a single dominant figure leads not to impasse but to cumulative radicalization.

To see this logic at work, ask the question: If Trump’s high-handedness on tariffs and the lop-sidedness of BBB are beginning to generate dissent and disagreement, what might the Republicans unify around? One obvious answer is racist xenophobia. And who better to deliver that message than Stephen Miller? … Where political economy of a more straight-forward kind no longer has traction, expect racism, xenophobia and civilizational appeals to the “West” to enter in.

Over the weekend it became clear that what we are getting is radicalization.

Open the FT this morning and you find a piece on Stephen Miller making precisely the connection from the militarized response in LA to BBB.

The City of Dreams has become “occupied territory”, Stephen Miller declared on X, adding a “fight to save civilisation” was happening in California’s largest city. “Stephen in the White House, every single day, is holding down the anchor of the populist nationalist movement,” Charlie Kirk, a prominent rightwing podcaster, said as he hosted Miller on his show last week. California-born Miller is on a quest to complete what he struggled to achieve during Trump’s first presidency. Then, some of the administration’s strictest immigration policies, including the original so-called “Muslim ban” and the building of the wall at the southern border with Mexico, were stymied by a combination of lack of funding from Congress, a popular backlash and the courts. During the president’s first term, his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, was a “countervailing influence” on Miller on immigration, but now the adviser has acquired “larger than life value in Trump world”, Chishti said. … in the face of unfavourable court rulings on deportations in early May, he said the White House was “actively looking” at suspending “habeas corpus” — the constitutional right to challenge one’s detention … Later in the month, he visited the headquarters of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency and demanded officers accelerate the pace of deportations out of frustration that they were falling short of Trump’s goals. “All of a sudden, we’re just seeing this explosion in enforcement,” said Camille Mackler, an immigration lawyer and founder of Immigrant Arc … On Kirk’s podcast, Miller defended Trump’s flagship tax and spending bill, contending that the legislation would not only fulfil the president’s 2024 campaign promises to cut taxes but also to clamp down on illegal immigration. “The three major constraints on [migrant] deportations are personnel, prisons and planes. At the most fundamental level, this bill is the largest ever increase in those three categories,” he told Kirk. About $140bn has been allocated to border security and immigration-related enforcement in the bill, according to the National Immigration Forum, an advocacy group.

Source: FT

To put things in perspective, Kirk the pundit interviewing Miller, has declared Mexican President Claudia Scheinbaum to be a greater threat to the USA than Vladimir Putin. If BBB does pass, and who would bet against it, $140 billion will provide a lot of new hardware and personnel of ICE. And the MAGA base, to judge from twitter at least, is loving it.

So where does this go from here? Who knows! But I figure two points of reference may be useful.

One point of reference is in the past: The climactic confrontation of Trump’s first term, the Black Lives Matter protests of the summer of 2020, that culminated in a struggle over the deployment of the US military to American city streets, which Trump lost. These no doubt left a scolding memory in the minds of people like Stephen Miller.

The other point of reference is June 14 - this Saturday - with the coincidence of Trump’s birthday, a giant parade to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the US Army, and the “No Kings” (sic) protests against Trump, planned in 1500 plus American cities.

We don’t know what will happen at the weekend, but looking back at Black Lives Matter helps to offer some perspective on the scale of the protests, confrontations and violence that America is capable of.

Thanks to COVID restrictions, curfews, intense media politics and anxieties about the November 2020 election, the protests and the extraordinary reaction by the US state apparatus, were not as widely witnessed or reported on as you might imagine. But it is clear that BLM was the most dramatic series of protests and confrontations that the US has witnessed since the 1960s.

I’m not going to get into a detailed history here, but let me just quote one summary from ACLED, a data-gathering initiative with connections to Princeton:

The longstanding crisis of police violence and structural racism in America hit a new flashpoint this year. On 25 May 2020, Minneapolis police officers arrested George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, for allegedly using a counterfeit $20 bill. One officer pinned Floyd to the ground and kneeled on his neck for eight minutes and 15 seconds, killing him. Other officers looked on (BBC, 16 July 2020). Floyd’s death prompted a surge of demonstrations associated with the Black Lives Matter (BLM)² movement that quickly spread from Minneapolis throughout the country. Between 26 May, the day after Floyd’s death, and 22 August, ACLED records over 7,750 demonstrations linked to the BLM movement across more than 2,440 locations in all 50 states and Washington, DC.

The data compiled by ACLED are truly impressive.

The protests spiked early in the “hot summer” of 2020:

There was violence from the side of protestors. But as ACLED insists:

The vast majority of demonstration events associated with the BLM movement are non-violent (see map below). In more than 93% of all demonstrations connected to the movement, demonstrators have not engaged in violence or destructive activity. Peaceful protests are reported in over 2,400 distinct locations around the country. Violent demonstrations,⁶ meanwhile, have been limited to fewer than 220 locations — under 10% of the areas that experienced peaceful protests. In many urban areas like Portland, Oregon, for example, which has seen sustained unrest since Floyd’s killing, violent demonstrations are largely confined to specific blocks, rather than dispersed throughout the city (CNN, 1 September 2020).

The rash of incidents and demonstrations, suitably packaged by the media, encouraged the belief on the part of the Trump base that there was a dangerous, revolutionary threat. The specter known as “Antifa” was labeled a terrorist organization by the Trump camp. That in turn licensed a massive escalation of police force:

Despite the fact that demonstrations associated with the BLM movement have been overwhelmingly peaceful, more than 9% — or nearly one in 10 — have been met with government intervention, compared to 3% of all other demonstrations. This also marks a general increase in intervention rates relative to this time last year. In July 2019, authorities intervened in under 2% of all demonstrations — fewer than 30 events — relative to July 2020, when they intervened in 9% of all demonstrations — or over 170 events. Authorities have used force — such as firing less-lethal weapons like tear gas, rubber bullets, and pepper spray or beating demonstrators with batons — in over 54% of the demonstrations in which they have engaged. This too is a significant increase relative to one year ago. In July 2019, government personnel used force in just three documented demonstrations, compared to July 2020, when they used force against demonstrators in at least 65 events. Over 5% of all events linked to the BLM movement have been met with force by authorities, compared to under 1% of all other demonstrations. In some contexts, like Seattle, Washington and Portland, Oregon (see below), the heavy-handed police response appears to have inflamed tensions and increased the risk of violent escalation (New York Times, 31 May 2020).

The climax of the 2020 escalation was reached, then as now, in June with the extraordinary scenes in Washington DC, around the beleaguered White House:

The president called governors “weak” for allowing demonstrations in their states and instructed them to call in the National Guard to “dominate” and “cut through [protesters] like butter” (Vox, 2 June 2020). Senator Tom Cotton from Arkansas, an advisor to the president, recommended that the administration “send in the troops” and give “no quarter for insurrectionists, anarchists, rioters, and looters” (New York Times, 3 June 2020, 23 June 2020). Rhetoric soon translated to action: in early June, the government used National Guard troops, Secret Service agents, and US Park Police — among other federal agents — to violently disperse peaceful protests in Lafayette Square outside the White House to create a photo opportunity at St. John’s Church (Vox, 2 June 2020; New York Times, 10 June 2020). The incident prompted a rare public condemnation from former Secretary of Defense James Mattis and an eventual refusal from … Defense Secretary Mark Esper to support the invocation of the Insurrection Act, which would allow the deployment of active-duty troops to respond to demonstrations (Atlantic, 3 June 2020; TIME, 3 June 2020).

This incident, subsequently became a key anchor of the “liberal general” myth so beloved of the Atlantic et al.

Meanwhile, the escalation of repression and the creation of institutions of militarized domestic policing continued.

By the end of June, President Donald Trump seized on the topic to issue an executive order authorizing federal agents to pursue demonstrators who pull down statues or damage federal property, spurring the creation of the Protecting American Communities Task Force (PACT) and the deployment of Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agents to protest sites across the US. … DHS deployed agents around the country, including in Portland, Oregon; Seattle, Washington; and Washington, DC (Al Jazeera, 23 June 2020). Since Floyd’s killing, ACLED records over 55 federal and National Guard deployments across the country, including members of PACT as well as forces affiliated with Operations Legend and Diligent Valor.

Operation LeGend was an aggressive crackdown on protestors in Kansas City.

Operation Diligent Valor was targeted at Portland Oregon, where the protests were most sustained.

If Black Lives Matter in 2020 is the benchmark, there is little doubt that Stephen Miller wants to turn LA into a mega-Portland. Here a selection of tweets from his account last night (9-10 June) in which he spars with Governor Newsom and rallies the MAGA faithful against the “invasion” of LA.

To the delight of the MAGA faithful, their common hatred of Newsom may even bring Musk and Trump back together.

But, beyond the local politics of MAGA and California, the crucial question is, do the confrontations spread, in earnest, from LA to the rest of the US?

Which brings us back to this Saturday, June 14th, and the coincidence of Trump’s birthday, his BIG BEAUTIFUL military parade & the No Kings protests.

The giant military parade is Trump’s pride and joy. It may cost $45M, including $16M for street repairs. For the protestors it is a grotesque and threatening display of his vainglorious ambition.

The odd title of the “No Kings” protests was chosen with reference to that Trump tweet and the resonance in the American historical imagination of the revolution against the British monarchy in the 1770s. On Trump’s side, make no mistake about it, there are plenty of folks who would love to earn a medal in service to MAGA and their hero President.

Perhaps the only thing we do know for sure, is that coming weekend, everyone is going to be wrapping themselves in the American flag!

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