As I mentioned in yesterday’s edition of Where Things Stand, there is an element of campaign-promise fulfillment intertwined in the Trump administration’s aggro deployment of National Guard troops to inflame an already tense standoff between LA protesters and local law enforcement. Trump’s spent much of his political career vowing to punish his perceived enemies (in this case, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, and, more generally, a state that won’t give Trump its Electoral College votes). Before he was even back in office this year, he was already formulating a plan to punish states and municipalities that dare to be led by Dems.
The dangerous standoff he’s created in LA between civilians and the military is the real-life manifestation of a running bit in Trump’s psyche, a feud between himself and blue-voting municipalities that, up until this point, he largely stoked via Truth Social posts and, starting in January, executive orders attacking sanctuary cities and those who govern them.
In order to justify the deployment of the military against civilian protesters as anything bigger than him finding an opening for his blue city retribution, it appears he’s enlisted some of his allies in the administration, and in Congress, to perform a bit of shameless spin when it comes to state sovereignty.
When Trump first ordered the federalization of the California National Guard, Newsom surfaced an old tweet from Trump’s DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, which she posted while governor of South Dakota in 2024. The tweet is a clip from an interview Noem did with Fox News’ resident MAGA man Sean Hannity during which she argued that if President Biden “federalizes the National Guard, that would be a direct attack on states’ rights.” (They were expressing disapproval of a theoretical move Biden could take to order the Texas National Guard to stand down when Texas Governor Greg Abbott mobilized it for border enforcement.)
Newsom reposted the tweet on Sunday.
This aged well. https://t.co/Ofb0Gs07RD
— Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) June 8, 2025
Noem is, of course, now living and dying by President Trump’s decision to federalize the National Guard without consulting a state governor, going so far, per a document obtained by the San Francisco Chronicle, as to suggest that Guard members go beyond their current unprecedented deployment and extra-legally join ICE in conducting immigration arrests.
Trump’s pals in Congress, meanwhile, are having to twist themselves a bit more to make the hypocrisy stick.
Take libertarian-in-chief Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), the man who is constantly lamenting federal overreach and professing his strong desire to shrink the size of the federal government. In response to questions about Trump’s decision to federalize National Guard troops and send them into LA, Paul said he supported the decision. He also gave the game away: that the true point of deploying troops was not about mitigating protests but about forcing California, a sanctuary state, to bend to the President’s will.
“I’ve always preferred local law enforcement to federal but this is a time in which it looks as though the state government is resisting enforcing federal law,” he said.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) — the world’s biggest fan of states’ rights when it comes to their ability to impose draconian abortion bans in Roe’s wake — was all in on the dep