By Cynthia Strathmann, Executive Director, SAJE

June 11, 2025

This past weekend, a few protesters graffitied a few blocks of downtown, and then burned a few Waymo cars. They did not burn a whole bus, as fans did after the Dodgers won the World Series, or graffiti a train, as a crowd did after…well, no one knows what, but it happened a few weeks ago and has now been deservedly forgotten. 

Donald Trump has used the weekend’s protests as a pretext to escalate tensions, sending in the national guard (against the state’s wishes) and the marines (against everyone’s wishes, except a handful of squeaky, amped-up Trump minions). This folly is costing taxpayers an estimated $134 million, far outpacing any damage caused by the protests.

The protesters were responding, of course, to the paramilitary-style ICE raids last week that led to the arrest of at least 118 people, many of them from workplaces. Agents also arrested a well-known labor leader, David Huerta, for flimsy reasons while he was documenting their activities, and are now trying to pin even flimsier charges on him. The way these raids and arrests are being carried out is absurd if the point is to constructively address the United States’ broken immigration system (there are an estimated 900,000 undocumented migrants in Los Angeles) or even to maintain the rule of law (some of the arrests appear to be illegal). But these arrests have been very effective at stoking fear. And, of course, that’s what this is about. 

We do need to be firm in condemning the Trump administration’s cruel approach to immigration, as well as their harebrained, yet also dangerous, deployment of troops. But we need to strike a tone that does not let Trump feel like he is winning by scaring us with his political stunts, impressing us as the strongman he so desperately wishes he could be, or ratifying his caricature of L.A. as a dysfunctional dystopia. Now is a moment for responses that are critical, calm, brave, and brutally honest. In terms of discourse, shrewd is better than shrill. 

Trump is trying to be taken seriously, and while he is certainly generating problems that need to be taken seriously and handled carefully, he is not a serious person-–he is an idiot savant of trolling. Social media feeds—and the media itself—are full of alarmist and fearful descriptions of what is happening in L.A. Staff at SAJE have gotten email messages from friends all over the world concerned about our well being. Certainly, if you are in danger of being deported by ICE, there is much to fear. But so far, outside of the ICE raids themselves, there have been few violent encounters. Nevertheless, there is now a curfew in place for downtown L.A., solely to manage a few square blocks and a few hundred people.

We need to remember that the Trump administration’s actions are absurd and predicated on hysterical fictions. Re-creating the type of hyped-up rhetoric that Trump himself excels at only supports his framing. We should not be talking about Trump’s policy decisions as if they were the actions of a serious person. This means finding a third discursive path between compliance and panic—or between silence and engaging with the issues on his terms, in his tone, and at his tempo.

Trump, always the showy, shallow grifter, is pursuing political discourse the way he pursues his business dealings, with a lot of smoke and mirrors and a pattern of leaving the hard work for others. Let’s not do that work for him.