Trump is spoiling for a violent fight on American soil.

President Donald Trump is spoiling for a violent fight on American soil. In response to protests in Los Angeles against his mass deportation regime — a small number of which have turned violent — Trump deployed thousands of National Guard members and roughly 700 Marines. He’s been pining to invoke the Insurrection Act for years, and now that his administration is filled with sycophants, he just might do it. As Trump flails for a justification to turn the force of the most powerful military in the world on its own citizenry, a tiny but disproportionately destructive element of the L.A. protests is essentially acting in service of Trump’s ambitions to crush dissent. Watch Trump closely because he is not behaving as someone who values the First Amendment in many ways, especially in this escalatory and provocative fashion that reeks of authoritarianism.