A note was sent home in October 1995 from my daughter’s Los Angeles preschool. The verdict in the O.J. Simpson trial, which had been going on for more than eight months, was expected the next day, and the school was informing parents that they understood if they wanted to keep their children home. While this might have seemed cryptic someplace other than L.A., everyone who had been in the city in 1992—when Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) officers caught on tape beating Rodney King were declared not guilty—understood how tensions you did not know existed (or were not going to admit existed) could ignite in an instant.
Such tensions have become familiar over the past five years of seemingly nonstop protest. Screaming, fires, pepper spray, and homemade explosive devices are predictable features of street protests and are also easy to exploit and thus profit from. Provoke the other side’s ire hard enough, and they will prove your point for you.
There is little mystery as to why President Donald Trump chose L.A. as the proving ground for his hardline immigration policies. There are more undocumented people in L.A.—an estimated 925,000—than in any other American city. But it was also about the irresistible opportunity to smack down those who oppose the president, who consider his policies despicable and dangerous, and are not quiet about it; from local officials to movie stars to the guy who has made it his mission to get Trump’s star off the Hollywood Walk of Fame, to Trump’s favored whipping boy Gov. Gavin Newsom, with a head of good hair all his own, to L.A. mayor Karen Bass, whose bumbling of the city’s recent devastating wildfires makes her an easy target. Plus, there is no shinier national stage than L.A. on which Trump might exert supremacy. No brighter spotlight, one that, should all hell break loose, could be trained on the constituency turning on each other, and on the city itself.
That Trump et al. thought this plan would work shows a fundamental misunderstanding of what holds Los Angeles together. A place of exaggerated promise and endless disappointment, people come expecting to find their destinies, and when things do not pan out they stay anyway, forming the existential fascia across the sprawling Southland; one elastic enough to admit the next batch of hopefuls, as well as those running from poverty or oppression, people willing to work crappy jobs for low wages for a chance to latch onto the American experiment in the most cosmopolitan city on earth.
With so many people packed into one place, it would seem to be an ample opportunity for tribalism and friction. And yet, as all but a few of Los Angeles County’s ten million residents proved this past weekend, you can always opt to chill out, to hold fast, to recognize the Trump administration’s strongarm tactics as an attempt to provoke chaos, and say, “nah brah.”
This is not to overlook the acts of violence in Los Angeles in the past two weeks. Law enforcement has been attacked, and some Waymo cars were destroyed. But by nearly every measure, the city did not boil over, and its citizens did not turn on one another. Importuning the populace to see their gardener, their babysitter, their manicurist as “illegal” and lawless—the idea that locals would buy Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem’s branding of Los Angeles as “not a city of immigrants” but “a city of criminals”—is ludicrous and insulting. Angelenos may be willing to dream their own hyperbolic dreams, but they are not going to dream yours, and certainly not on command.
Trump supporters have nonetheless done their best to paint Los Angeles as anarchic. They’ve applauded Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents hauling people out of fields, out of cars, away from their kids. But for the party to really get started, they needed the locals to destroy the city; they craved such a spectacle, and if they needed to juke it, to go on social media and brand some teenagers climbing a fence as “open-border insurrectionists,” they would. They wanted a do-over of 2020, when the George Floyd and Black Lives Matter protests in blue cities like Minneapolis, Portland, Kenosha, and Chicago exemplified everything they feel is wrong about America. And this time, Team Trump would win.
It hasn’t worked. The only thing needed to disprove FBI director Kash Patel’s statement that, “L.A. is under siege by criminals and we will restore law and order” is to look out your window. With the exception of a few blocks downtown, L.A. looks as paradisiacal as it always does, especially now that the jacarandas are in bloom.
This is frustrating to people who need the populace to feel intimidated, and whose success depends on instilling fear of their neighbors. Trump’s intention to bend Angelenos to his will was reflected when he deployed 2,000 additional California Army National Guard soldiers on Tuesday. It’s a battle he intends to win.
But in order to win, he needs an adversary willing to step into the ring he has devised. Two weeks into the federal law enforcement presence in the city, L.A. citizens remain unwilling to do so—even last Saturday night, when many people, including yours truly, feared the center might not hold.
The center held. It held through the daytime No Kings protests at a dozen locations around the city, and it held at night, when the rowdier crowds marched through downtown, burned rubber in the intersections, and shouted in the faces of hundreds of LAPD officers. I’ve been in the middle of these scenes many times; I’ve watched protests turn to riots turn to burning buildings turn to murder. None of this happened Saturday night. There were tense moments, as when lines of police officers advanced on the crowds and several people were hit with rubber bullets. And yet the expected mass escalation did not happen. Almost everyone dispersed before the curfew, and for nearly an hour, a group of maybe forty of us stood just up the street from a line of a dozen cops. The two groups just stood staring at each other, and while I commend the cool-headedness of the protesters, I even have to give it to the cops, or at least this batch of cops. It was as though we all knew we were not fighting each other; that we were proxies for some bullshit master plan coming out of D.C., a plan whose power rested on us hating each other, and we were not going to do that because it was not true.
I sent my daughter to school that day in 1995 because I had faith that people were not going to attack a bunch of four-year-olds. That faith was reified this past weekend when the people of Los Angeles did not turn on each other. Will the peace hold? I don’t know. But if the best predictor of the future is the past, let’s hope it’s the recent past.
