photo by: Contributed

Froma Harrop

The president is doing his best to inflame passions within and at California. Calling in the National Guard against the governor’s wishes is a provocation. Sending in Marines to add drama to his show is an insult as well as incitement. The Marines are not a fashion accessory. They are trained to confront foreign threats, not in policing the streets of American cities.

On Sunday, when the demonstrations in Los Angeles began, most Los Angelenos didn’t even notice. They were going about their business, having brunch and visiting the beach.

I once attended a community meeting at a Manhattan police precinct. The subject was crowd control. At the time there were demonstrations around Trump Tower. Though the protesters were orderly, the police were out in force.

The evening’s speaker showed us how the police outfit themselves with arms and riot gear. Those shields, ballistic helmets, batons and tear gas are largely intended to serve as a visual warning to those who might act out. In other words, their purpose was to prevent violence.

That’s what modern policing is about: maintaining order.

The Los Angeles Police Department seemed well trained to do just that. The LA protests have been largely peaceful, and those who stepped out of line were quickly restrained and arrested. The police know there are some professional agitators in the crowd and know who they are.

Mayor Karen Bass further ensured calm by putting into effect a nighttime curfew. The activity was so contained that her curfew covered only one square mile in a city of 500 square miles.

Trump’s vision of leadership is ostentatiously un-American. He operates as a South American caudillo turning the military into his personal muscle. The rally he put on at Fort Bragg — with troops whooping and laughing — was a disgrace.

The U.S. military is proudly non-political, and the officers at the base failed to maintain that discipline. And as a final offense showing how little he respected the institution, Trump ended his performance doing his little boogie, shaking his hips and waving his ass at the cameras.

Immigration is Trump’s issue, and one he can use to turn attention away from the economy he’s in the process of wrecking with monster deficits and a trade war. No American city should declare itself a sanctuary unwilling to cooperate fully with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Unfortunately, Los Angeles did just that, giving him an opening to portray it as a bastion of illegal migration, rather than as a strong economy adjoining Mexico.

Sure, Joe Biden failed to control the border until the very end of his four years. But Congress is largely responsible for decades of frustrated immigration enforcement, while ignoring the economy’s need for legal labor.

Toward the end of Biden’s term, Trump bullied the flaccid Republican Congress into rejecting a bipartisan bill that would have put teeth in border enforcement. Trump, meanwhile, has always opposed laws that would have required employers to check the legality of workers they hire. Roughing up brown people offers the optics he treasures. But it’s not immigration enforcement.

At the start of his second term, Trump said he’d initially go after the criminals, which made great sense. He hasn’t done nearly as good a job of that as Barack Obama had.

Never mind Los Angeles, Trump now has immigration enforcers doing mass arrests of farm workers in California’s Central Valley. California supplies over 33% of Americans’ vegetables, and more than 75% of their fruits and nuts. Wonder what that’s going to do to food prices.

Los Angeles is not giving Trump the cinematic riots he yearns for. Too bad for him. Good for the country.

— Froma Harrop is a syndicated columnist with Creators.