June 12, 2025

Of Federal Troops and Mistletoe: Keeping ScOR #8

June 12, 2025

You may or may not have noticed, but the gap between installments #7 and #8 of this newsletter was a bit longer than usual – because I was off for a few weeks, taking an early summer vacation.  

I returned to a barrage of news in the U.S. Which goes without saying in this time of rapid-fire developments and outrages, most of them emanating from the White House. The apparent Trump-Musk breakup happened near the end of my vacation, but that’s not what I’m talking about. Wake me if and when the demise of the Trusk partnership has meaningful impact on Trump’s march toward dictatorship. As I write this, the megalomaniacal billionaires appear to be trying to make up, anyway.

The far bigger story is Los Angeles. Here we have the Trump regime transparently creating an opportunity to criminalize protest and seize control of a major American city (in a blue state, of course). Many predicted this moment would come and here it is. Trump is the first president to send in the National Guard over the objections of a governor since Lyndon Johnson did so in 1965. Johnson deployed the Guard in Alabama to protect civil rights demonstrators when state and local police refused to do so — or were in fact the assailants.

Trump is doing something radically different. His Department of Homeland Security launched raids to arrest and deport undocumented people who were going about their lives – few if any were accused of any crime. Angelenos went into the streets to object and to protect their neighbors, most behaving peacefully though some knuckleheads set vehicles on fire and looted stores. Los Angeles police have arrested several hundred people — the majority for violating a curfew. The LAPD has stated clearly that it can handle the situation and needs no federal help.

Trump and his underlings, though, predictably exaggerated the extent of the violence (Stephen Miller shouted “insurrection” over and over) and used it all as a pretext to federalize thousands of members of the California National Guard.

What is this international phenomenon, this contagion?

This military response to civilian protest is a serious escalation in Trump’s drive to establish authoritarian rule. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth inflamed things further by sending in 700 active-duty Marines. I do wonder how those Guard members and Marines feel about being used as political props.

The pushback has been strong, too, above all from the thousands of protesters resisting ICE’s raids in Los Angeles and elsewhere. L.A. Mayor Karen Bass and California Governor Gavin Newsom bluntly called out Trump’s abuse of power. California’s Attorney General Rob Bonta sued the administration for violating federal law by deploying the National Guard without the required justification.

Trump clearly relishes the fight – one he hopes will be politically advantageous for him. Fox News and other right-wing media are looping images of burning cars and protesters carrying Mexican flags, selling the administration’s tale of a city under siege.

It’s hardly necessary to point out the president’s rank hypocrisy. He called the protesters “insurrectionists” who “should be in jail,” and warned that any protester who spits (spits!) on a law enforcement officer will be “hit harder than they’ve ever been hit before.” This from a man who praised and pardoned actual insurrectionists who brutally assaulted police officers on January 6. Meanwhile, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said last year that any president federalizing the National Guard without the blessing of a governor would be violating states’ rights and the Constitution — if that president’s name was Biden. Facts and consistency are for suckers, not authoritarian regimes.

Trump is playing with fire — as he does. A few months ago I wrote about the danger of America’s cold civil war turning hot, given the regime’s flagrant assault on human rights and the rule of law. Trump’s orchestrated attack on the nation’s most populous state and its second largest city seems designed to take the country closer to the brink.

Under the Mistletoe

Part of my vacation was spent in Poland. My wife Ewa is Polish; she grew up there and goes back most years to visit her elderly parents in her hometown. I often join her for a stretch.

As a result, I’ve been to Strzelce Opolskie, a small town in southern Poland, several times over the past decade. This year we arrived just in time to learn the official results of Poland’s June 1 presidential election. For Ewa, her family and most of their friends, the election was a disaster. By a narrow margin, Poles elected Karol Nawrocki, the candidate of the right-wing Christian nationalist Law and Justice Party, over the mayor of Warsaw, Rafał Trzaskowski, the candidate of the liberal Civic Platform Party.

Law and Justice (its acronym in Polish is PiS) is essentially the MAGA party of Poland. It represents a rejection of liberal democracy and a turn toward authoritarian, reactionary, anti-immigrant, isolationist politics. In a striking parallel to the American story, PiS came to power in 2015. It launched attacks on the courts, the independent news media, and women’s rights – most tangibly, abortion. The regime did serious damage to democracy in Poland before Poles seemed to change course and voted PiS out of the parliamentary majority in 2023 – restoring a former prime minister, the centrist democrat Donald Tusk, to the premiership. Yet even under Tusk, the PiS leader Andrej Duda still held the president’s office, which is largely ceremonial except for its veto power. Over the past couple of years, Duda wielded the veto to knock down many of Tusk’s efforts to reverse the damage done by the far-right regime.

Pro-democracy Poles had been hopeful that with the 2025 election, and Duda unable to seek re-election, they could elect Trzaskowski to the presidency and really, finally, put their country’s experiment in illiberal, Orban-style government behind them. But it wasn’t to be. Nawrocki, the PiS candidate – who visited Donald Trump for a thumbs-up photo op a few weeks before the vote – won overwhelmingly among Poland’s most religious (Catholic) and rural voters and defeated Trzaskowski by less than two percentage points. This outcome likely ensures more years of gridlock, if not worse, in Polish government. Ewa was grieving as we arrived in her hometown, and so were her family and friends.

One morning I joined Ewa and her friend since childhood, Zosia, on an outing to the countryside on the edge of Strzelce Opolskie. The elderberry bushes were in bloom, and this was a tradition Ewa and Zosia had taken on together over the years: gathering baskets of the off-white blossoms for making batches of elderberry liqueur. It was a breezy, sunny morning, the wrens were chirping away, and the three of us were mostly alone on narrow, tree-lined country roads – sniffing blossoms to find the sweetest ones and clipping them into our baskets. My first time at this. “Local color, right?” as Ewa put it.

At one point, Ewa and Zosia were admiring a beautiful black locust tree, probably a couple of centuries old, with its thick trunk and gnarly bark. Sadly, though, as Zosia pointed out, the tree’s upper branches were adorned with beachball-sized globs of invasive mistletoe, like so many giant Christmas ornaments. Eventually, that mistletoe will suck the life from its host and kill it. Zosia saw a metaphor. This tree is Poland, she said. A strong old country with deep roots, now under attack by parasites.

It won’t surprise you that I thought about my own country. In America’s case, the metaphor is imperfect. The trunk and roots of the United States are much younger than Poland’s and in fact are a problem. The country’s current crisis grew straight out of those roots. As we’ve spent hours on Scene on Radio pointing out, the U.S. is a settler state founded on colonialism, genocide, slavery, and other forms of exploitation of people and nature. But that’s not the whole American story, is it. To push the metaphor further: by now, the American tree is a hybrid. Millions of Americans, through liberation and labor movements, have worked hard and sacrificed, even given their lives, to graft on different sorts of branches – healthy branches of justice and decency.

How this all plays out will be decided not by Trump or the people enabling him, but by us.

The “parasites” part of Zosia’s metaphor is powerful but needs qualifying, too. Both in Poland and the U.S., those who’ve managed to attach themselves to power are not a separate, invading species; they’re us, or some of us. Poles and Americans, sucking up profits in the short term while destroying the best and healthiest parts, the living branches, of these societies.

Zosia said what she said with anger. She was out picking blossoms with friends on a beautiful morning but couldn’t stop thinking about what’s happening to the country she loves. I could relate.

What is this international phenomenon, this contagion? Why have voters turned to populist, authoritarian demagogues in the United States, Poland, Hungary, India, Turkey, Italy, Israel, and, in alarming numbers, other democracies? And why now? We’ve all heard the analyses citing a stew of economic frustration, racism, anti-immigrant sentiment, anti-establishment grievance, “stolen pride,” and … and …? I can grasp each of these factors and see how they contribute. And yet, in the end, I can’t get past the mystery of it all. Somehow it doesn’t add up — not even close — to explain why, in the U.S. case, tens of millions of my fellow citizens would embrace this guy. For president. Not once but twice. I suspect I’ll never fully understand.

What piece of this puzzle am I missing? Can you explain it to yourself so the story hangs together?

Living in a Pariah State

This spring I wrote to a prominent scholar in the UK to ask if he’d do an interview with us for Scene on Radio Season 8. He didn’t reply. I followed up a couple of weeks later — still no answer. I waited, then tried one more time, promising to cease and desist if I didn’t hear back. Finally the professor replied: “I am sorry to have kept you waiting, but I have decided I won't be contributing to ventures in the United States for the present, for reasons that will be all too obvious to you.”

Well then. All right, sir. The reason was and is obvious. I politely challenged the gentleman’s reasoning that it’s somehow noble to eschew dealings with any American “venture” on the grounds that 49.8% of U.S. voters elected a toxic demagogue to the presidency. I pointed out that our podcast is and has been explicitly opposed to everything Trumpism represents.

No answer.

This is plain silly, in my opinion. I’ve imagined the esteemed scholar looking proud at a dinner party as he describes his principled posture and how he put those Yanks in their place.

It’s also, of course, a telling incident. The U.S. has caused grave harm in many parts of the world, earning enemies or at least well-justified skeptics — while also, for many, representing freedom and opportunity. (The American tree is a hybrid.) Now, folks, we’ve gone to a new place. Americans elected a rogue president, and he’s rapidly establishing the U.S. as a rogue state.

How this all turns out will be decided not by Trump or the people enabling him, but by … us. The question is not whether Trump is trying to establish a dictatorial regime. Rather, as Rachel Maddow of MSNBC aptly put it the other day, “the most important story of our time is this one: What is this country going to allow him to do? … The strength of the movement against him is what will determine our fate as a country.”

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