Civil disobedience will become necessary

I don't need to tell you that the Trump regime is manufacturing a crisis in Los Angeles. America's response will determine our future.

Jun 10, 2025

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The correct response to law enforcement escalating a protest over authoritarian policies is to pop a wheelie and ride right on by. (Photo by Jacob Lee Green/Sipa USA)(Sipa via AP Images)

Many thanks to Steven Monacelli for spelling me these last few weeks while I got a bit of a break from the madness. I’ve had some time to reflect on how to move forward in an environment in which many people, myself included, are simply overwhelmed by the news. More on that in the coming days and weeks.

For now, summer is here, which means it’s the season of chaos. There will be more people on the streets; more time on people’s hands; more interactions between Americans and law enforcement; and a president in clear cognitive decline who has a penchant for escalating situations like what’s happening in Los Angeles. I’d love to be on a plane heading to LA right now but money is a bit tight at the moment. To help send me into the shit — the subtitle of my forthcoming book, after all, is “the Life and Times of a Domestic War Correspondent” — I’m running a summer special for the month of June to help fund these endeavors. The Fighting Season discount gets you 20 percent off the normal cost of a subscription to American Doom — $4.80 a month or $44 a year, down from $6 and $60, respectively.

- jg

***

The parking lot at my doctor’s office is packed. I arrive 30 minutes early and drive around for 10, circling farther and farther away from the entrance as I begin to wonder how long this will take.

Down a lane I spot a burgundy Ram pickup with a suspension lift and 40 inch tires. I can hear its diesel engine idling as it takes up two spots in the middle of this very busy parking lot on this very busy Monday morning. I honk twice, waving and hoping to get the driver’s attention. The tinted window remain rolled up.

I look at the Trump 2024 sticker on the back and another on the rear passenger window that shows Trump’s grinning face, making it look like he’s sitting in the backseat. Then I get out and walk up to the driver’s door. A white guy in his 60s rolls down the window and looks at me without saying anything.

“Hi, do you think you could move into just one of these spots?”

“No, this big truck won’t fit in just one.”

“Well, parking is really tight around here so maybe you could try.”

“There’s parking spots over there,” he said, pointing to an area of the parking lot that I’d just come from.

“No, there isn’t,” I said. “I’ve been driving around for 10 minutes and lots of other folks have been too.”

“Hang on,” he says, “you might be in luck. I might be leaving.”

He rolls up the window and takes a call, then rolls it back down and says he’s leaving.

“Thanks, I appreciate it,” I responded, avoiding the urge to tell him exactly what I think of people like him. I did not tell him that maybe if he didn’t have so big of a truck — which serves no practical purpose for construction or any other occupation, and is in fact simply a statement of identity in the way that someone who drives a Lamborghini doesn’t need it, but wants everyone else on the road to know that they have enough money to have it. I did not tell him that it’s not surprising someone who’s a big enough asshole to take up two parking spots for their unnecessarily large truck would have Trump stickers all over it, that that makes total sense because Trump supporters are, by and large, assholes who think everyone else should bend to their will.

I didn’t say any of these things — not because I’m a better person than this guy or than I used to be, but because it just didn’t seem like a productive use of my energy. But the episode was instructive, especially as I emerge from a month of being relatively sequestered from the daily noise of the news, and especially as I take in the scenes of what’s happening in Los Angeles.

I don’t need to tell you that what’s happening in LA is another in the long line of crises manufactured by Trump and his authoritarian partners. That much is obvious. He sent his immigration goons into LA — armed like they were storming Kandahar when in fact they were arresting busboys and garment workers — and were met with resistance by the city’s everyday citizens. In response, Trump, who has long lusted after violence against Americans he doesn’t like, nationalized some of California’s National Guard in yet another in a long line of Trump actions: the historically unprecedented use of law to carry out policy.

In this case, Trump did what hasn’t been done since 1965, when the Guard was nationalized to protect civil rights marchers. Naturally, Trump is doing pretty much the opposite in LA: nationalizing the Guard to likely violate people’s civil rights. It’s unnecessary, not just because there is no real threat to the federal property that the Guard is supposedly protecting, but because even the immigration raids themselves are unnecessary. There is no threat to American sovereignty from undocumented immigrants. There isn’t even really a threat to Americans’ jobs. How many Americans do you know who work as farm laborers and dishwashers, or spend all day at a sewing machine?

It’s all for show. Then, when the inevitable pushback comes, Trump and his authoritarian acolytes like Stephen Miller claim they’re the ones being attacked. It’s all as stupid and obvious as a guy with an unnecessarily large truck taking up two parking spots, just so he can hopefully have a confrontation with someone so he can prove how tough he is. Today, at least, I wasn’t taking the bait. And the guy in the truck proved what has been made clear to me over and over as the last decade of Trumpism has dragged on: these people are largely cowards, masking their own insecurities and abject fear of just about everyone around them with a facade of toughness.

Like driving a big truck only to move it when confronted by someone with a polite but firm demeanor. So, I hope people in LA and elsewhere continue engaging in civil disobedience to these ICE raids. Because the people being targeted by them aren’t always in the position to stand up for themselves. If violence ensues, we should not give law enforcement or the Trump regime the benefit of the doubt that they didn’t actually cause it. After all, they’re the ones trying to ram their unnecessary policies down all our throats.

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