Bulwark Takes - Could The Rage after LA Defeat Trump or Embolden Him?

Episode Date: June 9, 2025

Trump's administration ramps up mass deportations in Los Angeles, triggering intense protests and clashes. Against California’s wishes, Trump deploys the National Guard, raising tensions over immigration enforcement and the role of protests in political resistance. JVL and Sarah Longwell question whether demonstrations effectively challenge policies or inadvertently strengthen Trump's hand.

Hello everyone, this is JVL here with my best friend Sarah Longwell publisher of the bulwark It is a Monday Monday in America and stuff is happening Most of it bad stuff because that's the world we live in If you want to follow along with all this hit the like button hit subscribe do us a solid help us grow this channel Sarah so I've, uh, we've, we've got some, some bad stuff happening. We have, uh, the president's administration ramping up, uh, mass deportations, targeting the city of Los Angeles.

Uh, this provoked some protests against the ICE raids and the president then over the weekend called up the National Guard against the express wishes of the governor of California, all of which is creating a situation which is problematic, I think. Not good, not good for anybody, except maybe Donald Trump could be good for him. And there's a whole bunch of different questions going on around this. And I don't know what you wanted to talk about. One of the things I was I was interested in, I wrote about it a little bit today, was they do protests.

Protests good or protests bad? Do they accomplish anything? Do they not accomplish anything? And I got a level with you to start. I have many more questions than answers. Wanna talk through it together? Yeah, that's what we're doing. So you and I are not protest people. We're not temperament. I went to my very first rally on Friday for the free Andre

before the show that we did. And that was my first rally like that. I've seen many people living in Washington, D.C. do such things. I've been invited to living in Washington DC do such things. I've been invited to many many things over the years but it's just you're right it is not my temperament to rally but... No but for different reasons you and I like I mean my reasons for not going to these things because there are people and

I don't I just generally don't like being around the people and When I have to be around people I judge them and so like you know Getting me to rally against a cause the surest way to do that is putting me at a rally for the cause whatever it is Yeah, take me to an ice cream day rally. I'm gonna be like, yeah, you know what ice cream blows you people are suckers You I think are probably just a little more of your your lapse for publicanism, right? Like you look at this like the big Lebowski, you're like, get a job. Yeah. The bums had their chance, Mr. Lebowski, and they lost. I think a little bit of it is that for a long time, it's just such a it's been sort of a

is that for a long time, it's just such a, it's been sort of a social justice posture to think like, we gotta, everything needs a protest. And it didn't matter, like right or left. Like I never would have done tea party stuff. It's just not, it's not what I do. That's what I'm saying, these things are like temperament. Yeah, they're just temperament, right? They're deep down, characterological things.

That being said, I do recognize the importance of bodies in the streets at certain times. And I think we're maybe just we're getting to a place where now, I guess, I guess it's true that during black lives matter I did some standing on the street like good for you you went in the very early days uh like where we lie in 16th street a little bit and we like took our kids. Because it was, I don't know. The point is, it's not something I do very often, but I have been feeling of late. And by of late, I mean, since Donald Trump, you know, that the part of me that says, no, this is this does require people to do something like I can feel that sort

of welling up in me in a way that were even the women's march where I felt deeply sympathetic, like I didn't attend. And I just still felt like this isn't for me, like the hats and the signs. But I'm the viewer Bradley Baggs. Yeah. I don't know what that is. I actually think somebody was I think we were asked about this at the show. Did you listen to the big gay show? I haven't. I have. Yeah, I can't wait. We were we were asked. They like we did a thing where we did straights versus the gays and they showed us a picture of a bag.

I didn't know what it was, but I think it was that very friendly, whatever that is. There you go. It's a middle-aged wine mom thing You're not there. Okay, so tell me what you make of these protests Yeah, I don't I don't know and again, so I start by Understanding my blind spots here, which is that I don't like protests not for me

but protests movements can be really powerful and they can achieve things, right? The Solidarity Movement in Poland, which helped bring about the end of the Soviet Empire, the color revolutions in Eastern Europe, the Civil Rights Movement in America, which was like a 14-year long struggle. The Tesla takedown. very, very recent vintage, very. I mean, as these things are a pretty small scale protest, we're talking hundreds of thousands of people, not tens of millions made a very, very real difference. So they can they can matter.

They can also not matter. And like I think at the end of the day, this is without passing any value judgment on Occupy Wall Street or Black Lives Matter or like the Campus Gaza protests. Just from a purely, did this create an outcome that was helpful to the cause? I think the answer is pretty clearly no. Right. They didn't. And they can be counterproductive.

I would say the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville probably wound up hurting the cause of white nationalists overall. And that was a rally and a protest. We think of always like rallies and protests as being on our side, but they happen on all sides. And so you don't know. You don't you don't know what you're getting when you when you open up that box and you have a protest movement. And the other thing I struggle with is this idea of like, well, they got to be nonviolent. Yeah. The reason I struggle with that is because I mean, there are 330 million people in this country. You put a hundred thousand or even just ten thousand people on the street like. You do that at a football game. Somebody is going to be violent.

Right. And there is no there's no such thing as a perfect protest. Right. I mean, they're messy. These are like all human endeavors are. They're messy. And that, you know, like- Sorry, go ahead. We don't have leaders. I'm sorry, I apologize.

It's just, when I think about perfect protests, I don't know that I agree that there wasn't such a thing. Like the protest movement that Martin Luther King led and the civil rights movement was enormously cognizant of the PR components of protests. They understood that they had to be nonviolent. They had to show peace and solidarity, but that the face that they wanted to show the world had to be one that, you know, didn't invoke backlash. And they were just, they were just smart about it.

Whereas I think today, the absence of a leader who can set the tone for these things and can can lead a movement in such a way that people are following a person's lead. I think is just a big part of the problem, right? Like if because because to point, to imagine trying to you trying to control what you can. But then there's a bunch of people there who are like, oh, yeah, but I want to set some way Mo's on fire. Yeah. And you have that during the civil rights movement, too, right? I mean, you had Malcolm X leading a more militant branch of the civil rights movement and, you know, you have the Black Panthers and later New Black.

I mean, that's what I'm saying. Like these things are always, you know, like, they're always messy. And they're always gonna be able to, you know, put 10,000 people together, somebody somewhere is going to shove someone or throw a water bottle or something. And like, if, if, if your standard is like, they got to be totally perfect, well, then what your standard is, is like, they there can't be protests at all. And I don't think that I'm with that. I think that they probably are good.

Another component is they can't go on for forever. People's capacity to live in that is pretty time limited. I would say in history protest movements, like one to three years is pretty time-limited. I would say in history, protest movements, like one to three years is pretty much, you know, like the median for very serious protest movements. Like, I don't know what the point of protesting now, four months into the Trump administration is. Like, what's the end goal?

What's the decision point? Also, what's the ask, right? I mean, this is a, there's something I talked with Bill about. I mean, people I think are protesting what they believe to be and I believe to be. I agree with them.

Right. Like really bad, inhumane law enforcement actions. But legal law enforcement actions, for the most part, because this is what people voted for. You know, part of me is like, for the most part, because this is what people voted for. Part of me is like, I don't know, don't you save your protest for like Kilmore Abrego Garcia where he has been illegally extradited, right?

And just like ICE agents being terrible and carrying out a horribly immoral policy, that's different than illegal. Like, you know what I'm saying? Like part of me is just like document it all. Like come out, come out on the streets, don't protest it. Just come out on the streets with your cameras and just videotape all of it, right?

Get all of that stuff published now into the world so the world can see what the government does. But like, I don't know. I mean, do you want to go to the mattresses on this? I don't know. Do you see what I'm saying? Like, you know, can you focus on illegal stuff? But maybe this is wrong. As I said, I have many more questions than answers. Yeah. I mean, I'm just thinking it through with you. I think part because I'll be honest, with you, I think part because I'll be honest, this would not have been my flashpoint, probably. I think the disappearing people to the foreign prisons without due process, for me is a

much easier thing to show up for. Although, you know, what's happening in LA, it's like, here's the problem, is like, this goes back a long way. Like, essentially, what happened in our country is that we made a tacit agreement, culturally, that yeah, we knew there was a lot of people here illegally, that were either overstaying their visas or had come here from some place. And now they were cleaning houses and they were going to the home depot and they were working on construction crews and they were working in the fields and they were working in kitchens and the rest were citizens who went to college.

Right. Yeah. And like, and we basically just, everybody kind of. Said as a, like, we don't have the system to process everybody. And so we're all going to just, it's sort of like weed, I feel like in the 70s or something, where 80s, where it's like, yeah, it's illegal, but like everyone's doing it. And there's a whole cultural movement around it. And cops like, yeah, they bust people for it, but also lots of times they don't.

And, um, and some people get to get away with it more than other people get away with it. Uh, and so I just, I feel like then we suddenly changed the contract, right? Like Donald Trump came in and said, no, we're gonna get rid of everybody who, now, but he did, and this is, you and I have talked about this a lot, I know that Donald Trump gave people a pretty clear vision of what he wanted to do.

Like if you came here illegally, you're going back. But like a lot of people, they were so used to that tacit agreement, that under the table agreement we all just lived with, that they were like, well, I heard criminals and gang members, not the person who's lived here for 15 years, who has American children and who's been cleaning houses

or working hard driving a truck, whatever it is they've been doing, like they're part of the community and so you can't tear people out of a community. This is what happened with Carol, right? When somebody is embedded in a community and then you take them out, people are like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait a minute. This is not what I meant because this is part of this thing we've all been doing for a long time that we understood and was cool. I thought you were going to go after bad guys. And then everybody else says, no, no, no, guys. He was pretty clear he's going to deport millions and millions and millions of people. And if you think that, you know, 20 million people are criminal, are like, they're here illegally, like they did do a thing that's not legal. But they

did it at a time when America was like, we know, we know we were doing this. And then we're basically just putting them to work. And because we never put in it's our fault. We never built a system that was meant to deal with these people. So yeah, you can't just go rip them out of communities now without expecting some backlash. Yeah, yeah. And, and it's a lot. I don't know. So this is my my question to you then is, and maybe this is sort of an academic question, because the truth is, none of us have any control over protest. Protest movements are like, you know, the patterns, flocks of birds fly in or fish, right, where they're evading a

predator, it's a whole school of them, they all change direction at the same time and move. And that's, that's kind of how protest movements are, right? There's no real way to, you know, unless there's a special leader who emerges to really take control of them, which can be either good or bad, by the way, and they just sort of have a mind of their own. And I'm like, I don't know, it's the kind of thing you feel like, yeah, like we should push a lot of chips into the into the table and center of the table on this one or

Make you a little nervous thing. I do know that Donald Trump wants this to happen And so I think that makes it hard for me to feel great about it happening is because he is desperately looking for a reason He's just sitting there saying give me a reason to come in and screw you guys up. Give me a reason to put the Marines in there. And I know that voters, their reflexive desire to not like chaos, like people in the streets, things being on fire, Trump will come out ahead on this. If there are fires being set and violence in the streets, people will want that to end. And this is where Trump is gonna, I think, be able to bolster himself, even though we're gonna sit here, we're essentially screaming about process.

And everybody else is like, put those fires out. Get the people off the street. And we're sitting there saying like, put those fires out, get the people off the street. And we're sitting there saying like, well, but people get to protest and obviously we want it to be nonviolent and we want it to be peaceful and you can't control a few bad apples. is you will get judged by some of your most destructive people unless you can develop an overwhelming corresponding sort of national effort so that you overwhelm with peaceful protests the very small amount of violent protests. But right now, I mean, literally every headline is like... Waymo's on fire, right?

Everything's on fire. Everything's a catastrophe. And so let me let me, though, offer you a counterexample. OK. There was a protest movement in America not that long ago in which people walked around with long guns and improvised weapons. And they went to the United States Capitol and they vandalized America's Capitol and beat up police.

And those people are now patriots and martyrs and it did not seem to hurt their movement at all. That's not true. Because they had a lot of conviction, right? They had the courage of their convictions. They believed that American democracy had been thwarted. And so they took direct action as our as our Marxist friends would say from the 1970s and and it worked out OK for them.

This is what I just said. What I'm what I'm trying to say is like there aren't ironclad rules. There's just exceptions to everything here. Right. And sometimes it breaks one way and sometimes it breaks the other. And it's really hard to understand why. I guess. Yeah, I don't think it all worked out. I mean, it did ultimately in the sense that Trump pardoned them, but many of them went to prison and went to prison for several years.

And it is the wrongness of that is the fact that Trump pardoned them. Like that is. But of course, it did damage to Republicans in the short term, not the kind of damage it should have done. I don't know. But to say there was no effect. Did it did it damage Republicans? I don't know if Republicans lost many elections because of that. And like Trump, they lost 22 because of Dobbs and January 6th.

Like democracy, like I think the 2022 wave that never crested was a little bit punishment for January 6th, punishment for the Trumpy candidates and punishment for Dobbs. Maybe. I mean, we're really squinting pretty hard, though, to see that then. You know, like, like it. I don't know. I'm just saying, like, sometimes a movement can get away with this stuff. And it's hard to it's hard to parse why. Here's the here's my bigger question to you. I think that there should be a mass mobilization against Donald Trump. Here's my bigger question to you.

I think that there should be a mass mobilization against Donald Trump. And I think it should be whatever inspires mass mobilization. I think my question is like, do you, are you able to build mass mobilization off of LA, off of this issue? Or is there, are there other things that would sort of, because the reason they're uncontainable is because they are an act of sort of last resort to make a visible sign, right? Your lobbying is not working or whatever, like you need to put your body somewhere to show up to show people how upset you are. And I wonder if this is a moment or if you're going to end

up with like all of these little micro moments that don't layer up to something big. Maybe. And I will see you tomorrow. Yeah, we can go to a ball game together. Meat space. And you'll be next to my meat heat. We'll see you later, guys. Good luck. Bye.