Trump's Manufactured Crisis and the Urgency of Strategic Nonviolence

First, Trump launched raids meant to terrorize immigrant families. While the scale of these raids was not historically unprecedented — smaller, in fact, than operations under previous administrations — the symbolic violence was staggering. Trump made clear that this was not about immigration enforcement. It was a staged performance of state power, timed to incite maximum fear and provoke confrontation.

He targeted a city — Los Angeles — that represents the beating heart of the immigrant rights movement. A place where nearly one in ten residents is undocumented and where immigrant families, unions, and community organizations have built powerful networks of resistance. An estimated 20% of children in Los Angeles are in households where at least one family member is undocumented.

The initial response to these raids was swift. Local immigrant defense networks mobilized within hours. At this point the protests were mostly peaceful and relatively modest in size. 

Second, the federal government responded with the startling deployment of 2,000 National Guard troops — without the consent of the city or the state. This was a constitutional breach, an act of aggression not only against protestors, but against the very principle of local democratic governance. This has only been attempted a few times in U.S. history.

Why would Trump escalate so wildly beyond the scale of the protests? Why stage what amounts to a military occupation of a city already provoked by the initial sweeps?

Because Trump is not responding to a crisis — he is manufacturing one. This is classic ​“wag the dog” politics: Provoke chaos to distract from scandal; replace headlines about corruption or collapse with images of flames and clashes with police; capitalize on fear to expand power and destroy the opposition.

There’s a reason why repressive governments have historically sent agent provocateurs — planted by police or federal agencies — to infiltrate movements, and why they have used them to instigate actions designed to alienate the public. We have seen it so many times in the past — from COINTELPRO to Occupy Wall Street — across the world, and even in our fictional worlds, like in the massacre orchestrated by the Empire in the most recent season of the Star Wars series Andor. 

It’s not a new tactic, but it’s one that this administration has embraced with an almost theatrical brazenness.

This approach is another part of Steve Bannon’s strategy of ​“flooding the zone with shit” — overwhelming the media ecosystem with so much noise, confusion and spectacle that meaningful scrutiny becomes almost impossible. It is disorientation as governance, distraction as power.

And it makes perfect sense that they would reach for this playbook now, in the midst of one of the deepest internal crises of Trump’s political life. The alliance between Trump, Elon Musk and the hard-right technocratic wing of the GOP is fracturing in public view. Their supposed policy triumph — a bill that either balloons the deficit by trillions or strips healthcare from millions — is facing mounting opposition, not just from Democrats, but from some Republicans as well. The administration is becoming mired in scandal and controversy. And the image of cohesion within its ranks is crumbling.

By sending troops into Los Angeles, Trump is trying to bait the opposition into confirming the story he needs the media to tell in order to distract from his failures: that the country is on fire, that the streets are ungovernable, and that only he can restore order. He’s counting not just on outrage, but on specific images of disorder that advance his agenda.

The timeline in Los Angeles matters. The first wave of protests was overwhelmingly nonviolent. The escalation — burning cars, rocks thrown — came only after police or federal agents fired tear gas and rubber bullets into the crowd. That government aggression provoked understandable anger. If Trump’s provocations are to be exposed for what they are — desperate, authoritarian power grabs — we must respond in a way that sharpens public contrast between popular movements and the government forces that are the clear drivers in unleashing violence.

When street battles with riot police escalate, the state seizes its opportunity. It invokes law and order, justifies repression, and tries to fracture the movement by presenting it as a threat to public safety. But there is a flip side: When repression is seen as disproportionate or unconstitutional — like calling in troops in clear violation of public and political will, or when those troops attack nonviolent protesters — it can spark a powerful backlash. 

This backlash can polarize wide swaths of the public in favor of movements that are resisting. It can compel even moderate politicians to align with people in the streets. And it can mobilize broad swaths of civil society to join in protest: churches, unions, immigrant rights groups, community organizations.

The good news is that many of these groups are already responding. Labor unions, churches and immigrant rights organizations have moved quickly to reclaim the narrative. Mass vigils, led by Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice (CLUE) and LA Voice and endorsed by the Catholic Archdiocese — an anchor institution in L.A.’s Latino community — were planned outside ICE facilities. And David Huerta, a respected labor leader, has emerged as a powerful moral voice in this moment: a symbol of principled resistance and courage. A large coalition of labor unions have rallied in the thousands outside city hall.

At the same time, provocations by authorities have at least partially succeeded. When people have been baited into street fighting, it has discouraged wider participation and derailed some of the most promising of the movement’s mass actions.There are hundreds of ways to escalate our resistance without playing into the hands of our opposition. We need to be creative about deploying tactics that build our strength while delegitimizing the forces of repression. The aim of the Civil Rights Movement in promoting disciplined, strategic nonviolence was not simply moral purity — it was power: the power to reveal the brutality of the system, to widen the base of support, to mobilize civil society and resist.

The urgent need at this moment is for a movement that channels justified popular anger into a disciplined and strategic response that can once again make clear the overwhelming injustice being imposed from above — and that can build the power from below to bring this injustice to an end.