The Daily - Federal Troops Enter L.A. — and the Trump-Musk Feud Hardens

Episode Date: June 9, 2025

During an extraordinary weekend, President Trump deployed 2,000 troops from the National Guard to suppress protests in Los Angeles against his own immigration policies, and his bitter breakup with the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, entered a new stage of acrimony.Shawn Hubler, The New York Times’s Los Angeles bureau chief, and Jonathan Swan, a White House correspondent, join Michael Barbaro to walk listeners through an eventful 48 hours.Guests: Shawn Hubler, the Los Angeles bureau chief for The New York Times.Jonathan Swan, a White House reporter for The New York Times.Background readingLaw enforcement officials fired tear gas and crowd-control ammunition at protesters in downtown Los Angeles on Sunday.Mr. Trump’s decision to remove a close associate of Mr. Musk from the running to lead NASA helped doom an extraordinary partnership.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

From New York Times, I'm Michael Bobarro. This is The Daily. During an extraordinary weekend, President Trump deployed 2,000 troops from the National Guard to suppress a protest in Los Angeles against his own immigration policies, and his bitter breakup with the world's richest man, Elon Musk, entered a new stage of acrimony. Today, my colleagues, Los Angeles Bureau Chief Sean Hubler and White House correspondent Jonathan Swan, walk us through an eventful 48 hours.

It's Monday, June 9th. Sean, you appear to be in your car. June 9th. Sean, you appear to be in your car. That's right. Why are you in your car? Because Los Angeles is a very big place, and to cover Los Angeles is to be in your car. Most of the time. Fair enough. Well, thank you for doing this from your car, because I'm sure it's not a dream scenario. I just want to explain something. We had originally planned to make an episode for Monday about the acrimonious feud between President Trump and Elon Musk,

when an even bigger story emerged from the city you cover for the Times as Bureau Chief. So we want you to tell us that story, the story you're covering from your car, about how we reached this point where the president has deployed the National Guard to put down protests in the city, which are still very much ongoing as we talk to you at almost 8 o'clock PM Eastern time. So this has been an issue that's been kind of building for quite a while in California. There have been periodic immigration enforcement actions around the state. There have been immigration agents that have showed up at public schools doing welfare checks. There's been a lot of wariness and nervousness around immigration enforcement

all over the state in California. But in Los Angeles, it really came to a head at the end of last week on a Friday in a part of Los Angeles that is very dense and very busy. So on Friday afternoon, outside of a clothing wholesaler, immigration and custom enforcement agents showed up. And they showed up to start arresting people who had been deported once already, but who they believed had come back. Got it. So, they were there to detain them and probably to deport them again.

That's right. So federal agents come into this clothing wholesaler at about 1 30 in the afternoon, and they show up and they start detaining people, you know, employees inside this business and loading them into vans as other agents in riot gear start to kind of close in on the area. And people inevitably in this cramped closed space start to freak out and make phone calls and word gets out. And people start to show up and gather around. And in this kind of military display of power, these federal agents start to disperse the crowd

and they're dressed in military gear and they're driving you know sort of military tactical vehicles and trucks and just sort of the show of force is so unnerving to people that protests erupt. And this is clearly now a confrontation from what you're describing between protesters and federal agents. It's explicit. It is an explicit confrontation between federal agents and activists and also just general

members of the working public in downtown Los Angeles. There were a hundred people who were arrested according to the U.S. Attorney's Office and things did eventually calm down. But the sense was that this was sort of a one and done outburst that had happened kind of organically and that it hadn't gone too badly. That was on Friday night. So by Saturday, the sense is that the worst of this is potentially over. Right. Then Saturday morning, about 20 miles away from downtown Los Angeles, in a working class suburb called Paramount, word has gotten out that there's going to probably be another immigration action enforcement at this Home Depot where there are a lot of immigrant laborers and word begins

to spread that there might be this enforcement action that there might be a sweep that they might be rounding up day laborers. And so protesters begin to show up, crowds begin to gather. So suddenly it doesn't necessarily look like the worst of this is over. Suddenly it's apparent that the worst of this may not be over at all. This incident too involves authorities and military gear and begins to escalate, you know, over the course of the day. We see you for what you are, a terrorist organization, ice out of Paramount. You are not welcome here. People protest, they yell things, they throw rocks at cars, they sort of clash with federal agents. Hey, what happened to you, bro? They shot you in the head? You all right?

And so as Saturday morning gives way to Saturday afternoon, gives way to Saturday night, the authorities order the crowd to disperse and start again to disperse them with pepper spray and flashbang grenades and so on. And as all of this is unfolding kind of throughout the day in Los Angeles, word gets out that President Trump has been on the phone with Governor Newsom and has told him that he's planning to send in the National Guard. And what does California's governor say in response in this call? He says, Mr. President, that's not a good idea. Governor Newsom tells President Trump that this is only going to inflame the situation. That sending in the National Guard more military force is only going to terrify Californians and or incite people who are on the fringes to do even more violent and crazy

things. Hmm. That no good can come of it. And in any case, it's not necessary because Governor Newsom tells the president, look, we're handling this. We can handle this. We have, you know, local authorities who can disperse the protesters. It isn't out of control, the governor tells the president.

It is actually in control. As a matter of fact, at one point in the city of Los Angeles on Saturday, the Los Angeles police department put out a press release commending the protesters within LA city limits for conducting civil disobedience in such a peaceful way. And whatever you may be seeing on social media, it's easily quelled. Nevertheless, President Trump ignores the governor, and by dusk or so in Los Angeles,

he has issued this order, federalizing the National Guard and sending 2,000 troops into Los Angeles. And Sean, just explain for those of us who don't think a lot about what it means for the president to federalize the National Guard, which has always been this complicated hybrid state federal entity, what it means for the president to do this and do it the way he did over the objections of a governor is highly unusual for the president to commandeer the national guard the national guards are usually controlled by governors and when they're deployed for something. it's usually something big and it's usually with the governor's consent and often with the governor's request You know in many ways this was something that was sort of the worst nightmare of California something that California

Authorities had seen coming and had been concerned about and in fact actually had even gamed out a little bit in the run-up to the election Just explain that. Well, in Trump's first term, he talked then about wanting to use the National Guard to put down protests, to put down the George Floyd protests, for example. Right. And there was also talk in the run-up to the election about using the National Guard to do things like help with immigration enforcement. And so there was concern long before the election in California that we may have gotten through the president's first term without something like this happening in California, but we might not get through two terms. And that this was almost certainly going to happen. And what was California going to do when it did? And the reason for this is that

authorities here knew that the law wasn't going to give them a lot of options. What the president is doing is perfectly legal, and he was acting under a provision of something called Title 10 of the U.S. government code that allows him to summon the National Guard to see to it that federal authorities are able to conduct the people's business without interference. And so that was the provision under which he decided to call up the Guard. But what Governor Newsom and Mayor Karen Bass and many other folks in Southern California are saying is that, yeah, legal or not, this is not what the National Guard

is supposed to be used for. That this is, as the governor put it, purposefully inflammatory. And that in fact, it was the federal government that was the problem here. That it was their presence, their military attitude, their confrontational attitude that was really causing the problem and creating a risk for everybody involved. Sean, I'm curious. I mean, those are Democratic officials who may have many layers of objections to what the president has done here. Some may be principled, some may involve some politics. Based on your reporting, based on what our colleagues have seen, does sending the National Guard out to contain the protests you have described, which sound like they have been meaningful

and at times have gotten violent, but whose scale is a little hard to measure. Does it seem proportional to the situation on the ground there? No, it does not seem proportional to the situation on the ground. From the standpoint of anyone who's lived in Los Angeles for any length of time, these protests are,

they're nowhere close to the level of protest, the level of disruption that the National Guard has been called in to address in the past. Look, I was in Los Angeles in 1992. 1992 was the last time the National Guard was sent to Los Angeles to put down a riot. Right. At the request of the governor. At the request of the governor. And that was done with the approval of most of the public. I was here when the riots broke out. They were all over the city. They involved bricks and rocks and bottles being thrown at traffic, people being killed, people being pulled out of their cars and trucks and beaten up to near death. A real breakdown in social order.

This was not that. This was not even an echo of that. Well, Sean, to the degree that the National Guard is now there at this hour. What are they doing exactly how is this working and as best you can tell is it as governor new some and the democratic leaders in the state fear. Inflating the situation or is this show of federal military might bringing these at times violent protests to an end. at times violent protests to an end. So right now the National Guard troops seem to be sort of gathered around guarding federal buildings. They seem to be refraining from confrontations with protesters, but it certainly is not

quelling the protests. So far, the protests have been scattered and sporadic. And there have been some clashes, but this is not going away. And this appears to be a real showdown. And Governor Newsom formally asked to pull the National Guard out of Los Angeles. He called the president's deployment order unlawful. He said, we didn't have a problem until Trump got involved. This is a serious breach of state sovereignty and inflaming tensions while pulling resources from where they're actually needed, the governor said. And there are a lot of folks who really see this as a situation in which the longer the

National Guard troops or any sort of military forces deployed in connection with these immigration enforcement that the more likely it is that people who are civilians will be arrested, that there will be serious confrontations with protesters, and that this will be framed increasingly in political terms, and that this is going to only escalate as time goes on. And as one of the political experts here in Los Angeles, who I interviewed today, said to me, it looks like the president wants a fight, and it looks like Los Angeles could very well give him one. Well, Sean, thank you very much. We appreciate it.

Thank you, Michael. My pleasure. On Sunday evening, the situation in downtown Los Angeles appeared to deteriorate. A group of protesters attacked five driverless taxis, slashing their tires, smashing their windows, spray painting them with anti-ice messages, and setting at least three of them on fire. After the break, Jonathan Swan on what's actually behind Trump's very public breakup with Elon Musk. We'll be right back. The bromance is definitely over. The Elon Musk and Donald Trump alliance has gone up in flames, total and utter flames. Elon Musk is blasting a massive spending bill backed by President Trump. Musk called the bill a quote disgusting abomination. Trump clapping back. He knew

everything about it. He had no problem with it. All of a sudden he had a problem. And it didn't take long for Musk to respond to say without me, Trump would have lost the election. Trump threatens to terminate Musk's government contracts, writing, The easiest way to save money in our budget, billions and billions of dollars, is to terminate Elon's governmental subsidies and contracts. The president said Musk had Trump derangement syndrome. I guess they call it, but... Then Elon posted on X, time to drop the really big bomb,

and wrote that Trump is, quote, in the Epstein files. The accusation from Musk is about as nasty as it gets, accusing somebody of being a pedophile and covering it up. The president also says he has no desire to repair his relationship with Musk, accusing the billionaire of being quote, disrespectful to the office of the president. We're now seeing this completely fraying relationship on a full display. It's very remarkable. A public meltdown unlike anything the country has ever seen.

Jonathan, you're traveling with President Trump on what's turning out to be a very consequential weekend. We just spoke with our colleague, Sean Hubler in Los Angeles about the implications of Trump's really historic decision to dispatch the National Guard in that city without the permission of the state's governor or leaders. We turn to you because you have been reporting on something else happening over the past couple of days and that's this now days long and high stakes feud between Trump and Elon Musk, which continues right up until now. And you've spent a fair amount of time trying to understand what's really

been at the heart of it. So what have you found? Yeah, it seemed worth trying to understand how in the space of less than a week, Donald Trump and Elon Musk went from being best friends in the Oval Office to Elon Musk saying, actually, I think DJT may be a pedophile, you know, maybe on the Epstein list. So maybe there's some things that happen behind the scenes that we need to figure out. And so what I set out to do with my colleagues, Maggie Haberman, Teddy Schlieffer, Tyler Pager, Ryan Mack, was to figure out what led to this.

And what we found is that you remember this press conference that Donald Trump held in the Oval Office on Elon Musk's last day in the White House. Today it's about a man named Elon, and he's one of the greatest business leaders and innovators the world has ever produced. He stepped forward. So this was two Fridays ago

where there was this public display of friendship. I expect to remain a friend and an advisor. Certainly, if there's anything the president wants me to do, I'm at the president's service. There was an indication that they would continue to be great partners, even as he left the government. ...as a presentation from our country. Thank you. Thank you, Elon.

Thank you. Take care, Eason. Thank you. Thank you, Elon. Thank you. Take care. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. All fake. Hmm. At that point, the relationship was extremely strained. Particularly from Elon Musk's side, he, over a period of months,

was feeling more and more like the work he had been doing inside the Trump administration was for nothing. So from his perspective, he comes in, he starts doge the Department of Government Efficiency with this stated mission to cut a trillion dollars out of the federal budget. He slashes and burns parts of the government in a pretty haphazard way, gets a lot of tough critical media coverage as a result of that. And at the end of all of this, from his perspective, whatever the number is, it's some number of billions, it gets wiped out by the big beautiful bill, the main piece of legislation that Donald Trump is pushing through Congress for tax cuts.

Just to explain what you mean, you know, the tax cuts in that bill are so big that independent non-parse and analysts literally explain that it's going to add $2.4 trillion in debt to the country. Right. And then actually on this very last day in the White House, he gets another punch in the face. What happened immediately before that meeting was the president was in his dining room, which joins the Oval Office, and he gets presented by an aid with a packet of opposition research or negative information about a man named Jared Isaacman, who is a close friend of Elon Musk's who Donald Trump had appointed to run NASA. This was one of the big things that Elon Musk had asked of Donald Trump during transition.

He really wanted this. Obviously, NASA is hugely important to Elon Musk's rocket business, SpaceX. It's also his whole mission of getting to Mars. There is no federal agency more important to Elon Musk. Than NASA. Yeah. So Trump names Jared Isaacman as his NASA administrator, and he was set to actually be confirmed with a vote from the full Senate the very next week.

But right before the press conference where they're giving Musk this very warm farewell, Trump is handed this packet with all of these donations that Isaacman has made to Democrats. And right after the press conference, the cameras stop, the press gets kicked out, and then there's this extraordinary meeting in the Oval Office with quite a large group and Elon Musk. And Trump starts reading aloud to Musk and the room

these donations that Isaacman had made to Democratic politicians and saying, you know, this is not good. We can't have this. And what proceeds is this extraordinary scene where Trump is essentially humiliating Musk in front of a large group of White House staff. But can I just make sure I understand this scene you're describing? Right after Trump has just warmly said goodbye to Elon Musk in the Oval Office and the doors are closed, the cameras leave, the president is starting to read to everyone in the room, including Musk, from an opposition research file in which he's finding more and more things

about Musk's choice to run NASA that he doesn't like. And he's subjecting Musk to that. It's a public humiliation. And Musk is sitting there kind of taking it. And one other thing Trump does is in front of Musk, he asks different aides in the room, well, would you hire him? Would you?

Would you hire him? Would you hire Jared Isaacman? Yeah, yeah, would you do it? And no one really stands up for him in the room. And eventually Trump decides to withdraw the nomination of Isaacman. So essentially what you and our colleagues have found is that Elon Musk, the first buddy, by the time he's on his last day of service in this administration, literally the day that he's saying goodbye to the president, he's deeply wounded. He's wounded because

the president in his mind has completely undermined the work he's done for Doge and blown a hole in the budget that Elon Musk was trying to shrink by cutting government spending. And the president is about to kneecap Musk's choice to run NASA, the single most important agency in the government to Musk. And that wounded Elon Musk is the person who leaves the White House and starts this feud. That's exactly right. And you have this effort from people close to Trump to say that this is all self-interest from Musk. It's really because the big, beautiful bill got rid of subsidies for electric vehicles.

And I'm sure there's some truth to him being irritated about the way that they handled electric vehicle subsidies. But what we found in our reporting is that the much more important reasons for this feud was that Musk felt over a period of weeks that his work for Doge was being cancelled out by their tax bill. And what you saw in the next few days is Musk moving in his public commentary on X from criticizing the legislation, calling it a disgusting abomination, to attacking Trump personally.

Jonathan, let's say for the sake of argument that this relationship really is over or entering a very different stage of itself that's deeply diminished. Who has, based on your reporting, more to lose from it being over? Which I guess is another way of asking which of these men, the president or the world's richest man, has greater leverage over the other? I will answer that question, but I think it's really important to take a slight step back and just understand that Trump doesn't have normal human relationships.

He is transactional. If he can see value in somebody, if he can see that someone could do something for him, Donald Trump is always open to some form of reconciliation. I flew with Trump on Air Force One on Friday afternoon to New Jersey. On the flight, I asked Trump about Musk. I said to him, you posted on True Social the other day that a great way to save money for

the federal government would be to cancel Elon Musk's billions of dollars worth of contracts with the federal government. I said, how seriously did you take that? And Trump said, well, you know, we're going to look at it. We're going to look at everything. You know, he's got a lot of subsidy, gets a lot of money. Then he goes, but I'm only going to do it if it's fair. You know, and it was this sort of like nice companies you've got there.

Be ashamed if something would happen to them. So Trump very well understands. That's his leverage. Of course. He has the power to inflict extreme harm on Musk's businesses, which have a huge amount of exposure to the federal government, in particular SpaceX. I mean, we've seen that Donald Trump is willing to use the levers of federal power to go after his enemies, whether it

be law firms, Harvard University, you know, go down the list. So everyone, including Elon Musk, presumably knows that this threat is real. So that's Trump's leverage. I think that leverage exceeds any leverage that Elon Musk has, but people close to Trump are aware that Musk is not without leverage. Right. You can tick through the obvious stuff. He's the richest guy in the world.

He's the biggest donor in Republican politics. But there's also another thing which people don't talk about so much in public, but they'll certainly talk about privately, which is he's seen a lot. He has been allowed into a lot of rooms. He had a lot of exposure to very sensitive conversations. Right. So people close to Trump think that this probably ends up in some form of a transactional truce.

They're not going to have this best buddy romance type relationship that they had before, but I wouldn't be surprised if they come to some form of an agreement where they don't attack each other personally. I don't know if there's a financial component to this. I mean, Musk had already promised Trump that he would give a hundred million dollars to his outside groups ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. He hasn't given that money yet. So does Donald Trump say, guess what, the price just went up?

I don't know whether he will, but he's done similar things before, making people pay a price for peace. But this is the state of where we're at with these relationships and also with Trump's exercise of power in his second term. Right. And in that way, Jonathan, this doesn't seem entirely unrelated thematically to what is happening right now in Los Angeles. Obviously, these are very different situations, but I'm thinking about the word power you just used and Trump's projections of power over the past couple of days. Look, I think what you're seeing in both these instances is the improvised nature of Trump's government. This is one man making decisions very quickly with not really much of a process behind it.

You know, Elon Musk asks him to run this thing called Doge. Trump says, sure, go for it. And we still don't know exactly what happened behind the scenes with this deployment of the National Guard, but we certainly know it wasn't a normal process. And he's doing it over the objections of the state's governor, Gavin Newsom. So what we see in both these instances is one man exercising tremendous power with very limited and eroded checks on that power without any real form of an interagency process. So you have high risk, high speed and a lot of cars colliding.

and a lot of cars colliding. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Thanks for having me. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. The White House, which spent months fighting legal orders to return a man it mistakenly deported to a prison in El Salvador, has returned him to the U.S. Kilmar Abrego-Garcia was flown back on Friday, ending the administration's most high-profile battle with federal courts over the president's immigration policies. Abrego Garcia has landed in the United States to face justice.

During a news conference, Attorney General Pam Bondi said that Abrego Garcia now faces federal charges of illegally transporting undocumented migrants, but it's unclear whether the government has strong evidence to prove that claim. Today's episode was produced by Rachelle Bonja, Diana Nguyen, Eric Krupke, and Alex Stern. It was edited by Lexi Diao, contains original music by Rowan Numisto, Sophia Landman, Pat McCusker, Marion Lozano, and Diane Wong, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Lansford of Wonderly. Special thanks to Efim Shapiro.

That's it for the Daily. I'm Michael Bobarro. See you tomorrow.