To the Editor:

Martin, you are consumed with Ukraine but ignore the growing concerns at home that only Americans can solve. You bifurcate Trump into, 1) a failing foreign affairs president who coddles Putin against our national and free world interests, insults our allies, and can’t make and follow a plan on tariffs, and 2) the president whose “domestic actions speak louder than words for good.”

Last week, the twin megalomaniacs got into a junior-high bitch-slapping match over who was the biggest feculent voice in Trump II. Musk said Trump should be impeached, and Trump tooted that Musk was a “big-time drug user.” This is the same guy to whom Trump handed the government, including Social Security, to make deep cuts before even defining and identifying what comprised “fraud, waste, and abuse” “Trust me,” Trump said. “Only the best people,” he said.

To further his power grab over the other two branches of government, run a test case for SCOTUS, and divert attention from the rabid exchange with Musk, Trump declared an out-of-control “rebellion against the US government,” and federalized and eventually ordered 4000 National Guard troops to Los Angeles to create a chaotic spectacle of a “city out of control,” protesting ICE agents invading businesses and workplaces searching for “possible illegal aliens.” Trump’s incursion made the situation far worse, but that was the point.
No one advocates violent protest, but neither the governor, mayor, nor LAPD, requested assistance, or were consulted, as required for federal military intrusion into a sovereign state. Five EV robot taxis were set on fire on Sunday. Some rocks were thrown after the police fired with painful but non-lethal “bullets.” The arrest count, as of Monday morning, was 56 people, not good, but by no means a “rebellion.”

Trump falsely packaged his LA directives as a Constitutional prerogative reserved to cases of insurrection, invasion, or “rebellion against the government.” Contrary to his reaction to the January 6, 2021, insurrection of the federal Capitol building, in which hundreds were arrested and five people died as a result of the violence against Capitol Police and death threats against the then-Speaker and Trump’s own VP. Those Trump-induced criminals were pardoned by him as “hostages of the state.”

Trump has now endorsed the ICE arrest of “grossly incompetent” Governor Newsom. Most of the National Guard soldiers were never needed to patrol LA but, on Monday, Trump deployed additional military of 700 heavily-armed Marines into LA. A diversion to cover, for instance, a push by Mark Levin and others, for Trump to bomb Iran. The blood lust is no longer under wraps.

The attempted power-grab in Los Angeles is a test case for Trump’s future federal military force, no matter how unfounded the provocation, unless the courts intervene. Trump has bragged that he “will send troops everywhere.” Alarmingly, the House Budget includes legislation forbidding all courts to issue injunctions or TROs without financial deposit, which will make it financially impossible to stop the government from doing whatever it wants.
If Trump succeeds and citizens become afraid to exercise First Amendment rights in reasonably peaceful protests of budget cuts, or other issues, because federal military troops will attack them as a “rebellion” or “disappear” them in defiance of the Constitution, we are lost. Martin, Trump’s domestic actions really do “speak louder than words,” but not “for good.”

Kelly Scoles,
Fillmore, Ca.