On Monday, Trump posted a warning on social media to those demonstrating in Los Angeles against his immigration crackdown and confronting police and members of the National Guard he had deployed: “IF THEY SPIT, WE WILL HIT, and I promise you they will be hit harder than they have ever been hit before. Such disrespect will not be tolerated!”
The discrepancy of Trump’s response to the two disturbances – pardoning rioters who beat police on Jan. 6, which he called “a beautiful day,” while condemning violence against law enforcement in Los Angeles – illustrates how the president expects his enemies to be held to different standards than his supporters.
“Trump’s behavior makes clear that he only values the rule of law and the people who enforce it when it’s to his political advantage,” said Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth College.
Trump pardoned more than 1,000 people who tried to halt the transfer of power on that day in 2021, when about 140 officers were injured. The former U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, Matthew Graves, called it “likely the largest single day mass assault of law enforcement ” in American history.
Trump’s pardon covered people convicted of attacking police with flagpoles, a hockey stick and a crutch. Many of the assaults were captured on surveillance or body camera footage that showed rioters engaging in hand-to-hand combat with police as officers desperately fought to beat back the angry crowd. While some who were pardoned were convicted of nonviolent crimes, Trump pardoned at least 276 defendants who were convicted of assault charges, according to an Associated Press review of court records. Nearly 300 others had their pending charges dismissed as a result of Trump’s sweeping act of clemency. Roughly 180 of the defendants were charged with assaulting, resisting or impeding law enforcement or obstructing officers during a civil disorder.
“They were extremely violent, and they have been treated as if their crimes were nothing, and now the president is trying to use the perception of violence by some protesters as an excuse to crack some heads,” said Mike Romano, who was a deputy chief of the section of the U.S. Attorney’s office that prosecuted those involved in the Capitol siege.
A White House spokesman, Harrison Fields, defended the president’s response: “President Trump was elected to secure the border, equip federal officials with the tools to execute this plan, and restore law and order.”
Trump has long planned to use civil unrest as an opportunity to invoke broad presidential powers, and he seemed poised to do just that on Monday as he activated a battalion of U.S. Marines to support the presence of the National Guard. He mobilized the Guard on Saturday over the opposition of California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, both Democrats.
The Guard was last sent to Los Angeles by a president during the Rodney King riots in 1992, when President George H.W. Bush invoked the Insurrection Act. Those riots were significantly more violent and widespread than the current protests in Los Angeles, which were largely confined to a stretch of downtown, a relatively small patch in a city of 469 square miles and nearly 4 million people.
The current demonstrations were sparked by a confrontation Saturday in the city of Paramount, southeast of downtown Los Angeles, where federal agents were staging at a Department of Homeland Security office.
California officials, who are largely Democrats, argued that Trump is trying to create more chaos to expand his power. Newsom, whom Trump suggested should be arrested, called the president’s acts “authoritarian.” But even Rick Caruso, a prominent Los Angeles Republican and former mayoral candidate, posted on the social media site X that the president should not have called in the National Guard.
Protests escalated after the Guard arrived, with demonstrators blockading a downtown freeway. Some some set multiple self-driving cars on fire and pelted Los Angeles police with debris and fireworks.
Romano said he worried that Trump’s double standard on how demonstrators should treat law enforcement will weaken the position of police in American society.
He recalled that, during the Capitol attack, many rioters thought police should let them into the building because they had supported law enforcement’s crackdown on anti-police demonstrations after George Floyd was murdered in 2020. That sort of “transactional” approach Trump advocates is toxic, Romano said.
“We need to expect law enforcement are doing their jobs properly,” he said. Believing they just cater to the president “is going to undermine public trust in law enforcement.”
