Trump Deploys the Guard, MAGA Deploys the Bullsh*t

On Saturday night, following chaotic protests in Los Angeles sparked by ICE raids and highly aggressive immigration enforcement, Donald Trump ordered the National Guard to the city over the objections of California Governor Gavin Newsom. The move came alongside a flurry of inflammatory far-right media coverage, including from Must Read Alaska's Suzanne Downing, who labeled the events in LA an "insurrection."

This nonsense is the latest coordinated effort by MAGA Republicans and their media surrogates to whitewash the significance of January 6 by slapping the word "insurrection" on any act of civil unrest that doesn't involve someone draped in a Trump flag. They want you to forget what really happened on January 6. They want you to believe that a few angry protests against ICE are morally equivalent to an organized attempt to violently overturn a U.S. presidential election.

They are wrong.

January 6 was not a protest that got out of hand, nor was it a peaceful sightseeing tour. It was a violent, premeditated attack on the peaceful transfer of power. A mob of Trump supporters, fed a steady diet of lies about a "stolen" election, stormed the United States Capitol. They beat police officers. They smeared feces on the walls. They erected gallows and chanted for the execution of the sitting Vice President, and they brought mace and zip ties, you know, for fun. And while all of this unfolded, Donald Trump sat on his hands, refusing to call in the National Guard even as his own staff and party leaders begged him to act. Ultimately, it was Mike Pence who gave the order to deploy the Guard when Trump refused to.

Now, in a grim twist of irony (because current events aren't grim enough), Trump and his allies want credit for acting "decisively" in Los Angeles. They want to be seen as defenders of law and order—heroes sent in to stop a future "insurrection." And they want you to believe that this new unrest proves that Democrats are hypocrites, that the media is biased, and that what happened on January 6 really wasn't so bad after all.

Let's all join hands and vomit.

What's unfolding in LA is serious, but it is not the same. Protesters there were reacting to reports of mass ICE raids and the detention of dozens of immigrants, many of whom had no criminal records. ICE agents equipped with stun grenades and armored vehicles launched military style raids that looked more like a wartime assault than immigration enforcement.

Demonstrations erupted, and yes, some protests escalated into confrontations with police, but let's be clear, these were not radicalized MAGA lunatics scaling the walls of a government building to stop the certification of a free and fair presidential election. There were no gallows. No zip ties. No chants to hang a sitting Vice President. No police officers died.

The far-right media's use of the term "insurrection" here is all about erasure. They are working most diligently to scrub the record of January 6 clean by normalizing it. If what happened on January 6 is just politics as usual, then Trump and his MAGA foot soldiers don't have to be held accountable. Ever.

Here in Alaska, we've seen this before. Must Read Alaska has long served as the Alaska Republican Party's in-house spin team for the state's most extreme elements. But this latest effort to conflate a protest against provocative ICE action with a literal coup attempt is beyond the pale, even for them.

January 6 was an unprecedented attack on American democracy. No amount of rebranding will change that. No amount of "whataboutism" can erase the blood on the Capitol steps. Trump's decision to federalize the National Guard now is nothing more than a calculated provocation using military spectacle to distract from his own failings, inflame public tensions, and blur constitutional norms.

Watch: American Insurrection, Frontline