[Above: The LA wildfires from five months ago.]
It’s tough to believe it has been almost a month since President Donald Trump illegally commandeered thousands of California National Guard troops to help with his nativist assault on Los Angeles. Now, as the state’s wildfire season kicks into high gear, the state has to rely on the whims of the Trump administration to see if it could possibly, just maybe, have its own troops back so that the state doesn’t burn down.
Definitely what the Founding Fathers intended, right?
After first demanding the deployment of 2,000 members of the California National Guard, Trump doubled that to 4,100 in mid-June. Why, pray tell? Well, it’s not all that clear. Sure, Trump had all the generic statements about protecting federal personnel and such, but what it really looks like is that the administration now sees these troops as their own personal force to be deployed wherever they feel like it, for whatever they want. How else to explain the deployment of over 300 National Guard members to the Coachella Valley—more than 100 miles from Los Angeles—to help the Drug Enforcement Agency raid cannabis growers?
