This Is How ‘Authoritarianism’ Ends: With a Whimper

By Noah Rothman

Monday, July 21, 2025

 

Few will note the quiet demobilization of the roughly 700 active-duty Marines who were dispatched to Los Angeles last month for service in a supporting role as police struggled to contain an outbreak of rioting and lawlessness. The news came from the Pentagon on Monday following last week’s announcement that the 2,000 California National Guard troops who had served in a similar role had been released from duty.

 

It is, however, worth dwelling on the restoration of order to the parts of L.A. that erupted in violence last month because this was not how any of this was supposed to end.

 

Every single Senate Democrat put his or her name to an open letter last month demanding the immediate withdrawal of military personnel from Los Angeles. They alleged that the federalization of the Guards and the deployment of the Marines were, at best, improper or, at worst, unconstitutional. They might have had a point if active-duty personnel were doing police work or taking a proactive role in protecting anything other than federal facilities. Of course, that was not the mission. Nevertheless, Democrats insisted that Trump’s motives were despotic.

 

Senator Patty Murray accused the president of “sending the Marines not after foreign threats, but after American protesters.” Indeed, she added, “Threatening to use our own troops on our own citizens at such scale is unprecedented, it is unconstitutional, and it is downright un-American.”

 

The deployments were a “dangerous escalation meant to provoke chaos,” former Vice President Kamala Harris presumed. “The administration’s actions are not about public safety – they’re about stoking fear. Fear of a community demanding dignity and due process.”

 

California Governor Gavin Newsom chewed the scenery. “This is about all of us. This is about you. California may be first, but it clearly will not end here. Other states are next. Democracy is next,” he insisted. “Democracy is under assault before our eyes. This moment we have feared has arrived.”

 

New York Times columnist Michele Goldberg somehow upped the ante on Newsom. “Since Donald Trump was elected again, I’ve feared one scenario above all others,” she wrote, “that he’d call out the military against people protesting his mass deportations, putting America on the road to martial law.” That moment arrived in June 2025 on the streets of L.A. In fact, “safeguarding the city was never the point.” The maneuver was all and only ever an effort to seize power from democratic mechanisms and vest it in Trump. What was happening in California is “what autocracy looks like.”

 

Obviously, the authoritarian’s playbook should proscribe devolving power back to municipal authorities and quietly withdrawing forces after their lawful mission supporting local law enforcement was completed. Maybe Trump didn’t get the memo.