California asks court to block use of military to enforce law; Trump says army parade protests would trigger ‘very heavy force’

At one point in Trump’s recently completed speech to soldiers at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, during which he repeatedly attacked Democratic political rivals in a way that used to be off-limits for the commander-in-chief of the avowedly non-partisan US military, the president told soldiers that he was giving them all a raise.

He mockingly suggested that they could, as patriots, say that would not accept the additional pay and ask that it be given back to the federal government instead.

“Now, you don’t have to take this if you don’t want” Trump said. Then he imagined the soldiers using his own crude nickname for California’s Democratic governor. “You could be great patriots, say, ‘I don’t want a raise, I will not accept it, let it go back into our country. Let’s give it to Gavin Newscum, so he can waste it in Los Angeles’”.

Donald Trump just wrapped up his deeply partisan, political speech to the avowedly non-partisan US army and leaves to the campaign staple “YMCA’.

During his remarks to troops at Fort Bragg, Trump also spread a wild conspiracy theory that should not be overlooked, claiming something for which there is no evidence at all: that California’s Democratic elected officials have paid protesters to attack federal officers.

“In Los Angeles, the governor of California, the mayor of Los Angeles, they’re incompetent and they paid troublemakers, agitators and insurrectionists. They’re engaged in this willful attempt to nullify federal law, and aid the occupation of the city by criminal invaders”, the president said without reference to reality.

The president also called Los Angeles “a trash heap” and claimed, falsely, that “entire neighborhoods under control” of criminals.

“We will liberate Los Angeles and make it free, clean, and safe again,” Trump said.

After repeating a series of deeply partisan claims about his 2024 election victory, Donald Trump turned to the announced subject of the speech, the founding of the US army 250 years ago.

Trump then went on to narrate highlights of the US army’s history, including its role in defeating the British in the war of 1812.

Trump told the tale of Francis Scott Key, whose poem about a battle in that war was later transformed into the current US national anthem, The Star-Spangled Banner. Trump then greeted Major Kyle Key, a descendant of the poet. Trump also praised the major’s looks, suggesting that was the result of “great genetics”. (Trump has long held and celebrated eugenicist views.)

The last time Trump attempted to discuss this history, at a Fourth of July speech in Washington in 2019, he memorably struggled to read the rain-streaked teleprompter, and made the improbably claims that the Continental Army was “named after” George Washington in 1775, and that, during the War of 1812, “Our army manned the amperth, ranned the ramparts, it took over the airports, it did everything it had to do”.

As his increasingly partisan speech to the military at Fort Bragg continues, Trump referenced a viral conspiracy theory that pallets of bricks were left out for protesters to hurl at police officers in Los Angeles. “They came in with bricks”, Trump said.

This claim was made repeatedly in 2020, during the Black Lives Matter protests that followed the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer.

In June 2020, the week after Floyd was murdered, the Trump White House boosted the viral conspiracy theory by releasing a compilation of video clips posted on social media by people who believed, wrongly, that piles of bricks they came across had been planted there by “Antifa and professional anarchists” to inspire violence at protests.

Within hours, after reporters showed that those clips showed bricks from construction projects that were in process before the protests started, the White House deleted the video from its official social media accounts, without apology or explanation, but only after it had been viewed more than a million times on Twitter alone.

Our colleague Blake Montgomery has looked more closely at the rampant spread of misinformation about what’s happening in Los Angeles that is spreading on social media platforms controlled by pro-Trump billionaires.

In a deeply partisan speech at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, Donald Trump just made the baseless claim that the protests against immigration raids in Los Angeles are being led by paid “rioters bearing foreign flags with the aim of continuing a foreign invasion”.

Trump goaded the crowd of soldiers listening to his speech at the base to boo and jeer first the former president, Joe Biden, and then the governor of California, Gavin Newsom.

He moved on to recite a series of conspiracy theories he has aired at political rallies, attacking Biden as mentally incompetent, and then boasted about what he called the great success of his fiscal policies.

Trump told the assembled crowd that the leaders of three Gulf monarchies had told him on his recent visit that the United States was “the hottest” country in the world, thanks to his policies – which have caused chaos in the financial markets.

Trump announces that he is not done changing the names of military bases back to honor confederates, saying that the next changes will be to restore the names of: Fort Pickett, Fort Hood, Fort Gordon, Fort Rucker, Fort Polk, Fort A.P. Hill, and Fort Robert E. Lee.

Donald Trump just began his remarks by boasting that he had restored the name Fort Bragg to the military base in North Carolina. When he complained about the base having been renamed Fort Liberty by the Biden administration, to stop honoring a confederate general who fought to preserve slavery in the US civil war, the assembled soldiers behind him jeered the decision of the previous commander-in-chief.

Trump enters, first to the strains of the presidential anthem, Hail to the Chief, and then to his walk-on music at political rallies, the country star Lee Greenwood’s God Bless the USA.

Pete Hegseth, the former Fox pundit now serving as defense secretary, took the stage ahead of Trump’s speech and immediately reminded everyone that he had changed the name of the base in North Carolina back to Fort Bragg in February.

“Good afternoon, Fort Bragg! It is Fort Bragg, isn’t it?”

The base was renamed Fort Liberty in 2023 because its original namesake, General Braxton Bragg, was a Confederate leader from Warrenton, North Carolina, who was known for owning slaves and losing key Civil War battles, contributing to the Confederacy’s downfall.

Hegseth claimed that Hegseth he renamed the base to honor Roland L. Bragg, a private the army said was a World War II hero who earned a Silver Star and Purple Heart for exceptional courage during the Battle of the Bulge.

Donald Trump is about to speak at Fort Bragg, a military base in North Carolina. As the crowd awaits his appearance, the wrestler Hulk Hogan’s theme song, “I am a real American” blares out.

Next up on the playlist, “Macho Man”, the Village People anthem that was memorably played for Trump in a massive stadium in India ahead of his appearance there in 2020.

In response to House speaker Mike Johnson advocating for a brutal form of vigilante justice to be performed on the Democratic California governor, Gavin Newsom, earlier today, saying he should be “tarred and feathered” for his opposition to immigration agents’ enforcement actions in the state, Newsom replied:

Good to know we’re skipping the arrest and going straight for the 1700’s style forms of punishment. A fitting threat given the [Republicans] want to bring our country back to the 18th century,” when what is now the US was ruled by a monarch.

This came after Johnson declined to say if Newsom and other California officials should be arrested – as Donald Trump and his “border czar”, Tom Homan, have recently floated – for allegedly impeding federal deportations.

Tarring and feathering, in which the recipient is stripped naked and wood tar is applied to the skin followed by feathers, is first recorded as being used in 1189 in orders issued by Richard I of England during the Crusades.

But it became a more common form of vigilante justice for tax evaders, customs officials and others in British colonies in North America and used by Continental forces against the British during the American revolutionary war. It is now most commonly used as a metaphor for the application of public humiliation.

In his comments today, Johnson repeated his position that any decision to arrest Newsom was not his to make, but the governor was “standing in the way of the administration of carrying out federal law”.

He is applauding the bad guys and standing in the way of the good guys. He is a participant, an accomplice.

I’m not going to give you legal analysis on whether Gavin Newsom should be arrested. But he ought to be tarred and feathered, I’ll say that.

And here’s my colleague Lauren Gambino’s take.

California governor Gavin Newsom and attorney general Rob Bonta on Tuesday asked a court to grant an emergency restraining order to stop defense secretary Pete Hegseth from using military forces to accompany federal immigration enforcement officers on raids throughout Los Angeles.

“The President is looking for any pretense to place military forces on American streets to intimidate and quiet those who disagree with him,” Bonta said.

It’s not just immoral — It’s illegal and dangerous.

The suit asks for a ruling immediately by 1pm PST.

“The federal government is now turning the military against American citizens. Sending trained warfighters onto the streets is unprecedented and threatens the very core of our democracy,” Newsom said.

Donald Trump is behaving like a tyrant, not a President. We ask the court to immediately block these unlawful actions.

The request comes a day after Newsom and Bonta filed a lawsuit challenging as “unlawful” Trump’s deployment of 4,000 national guard troops to Los Angeles, which they said “trampled” state sovereignty.

Last night, hundreds of troops were transferred to Los Angeles, over the objections of Democratic officials and despite concerns from local law enforcement.

CNN has more detail on this, reporting that attorneys for California have asked a federal judge for an emergency order that would temporarily stop the Trump administration from using members of the state’s National Guard to enforce laws in the state, including by assisting federal officials with immigration enforcement.

In comments reported by CNN, attorneys for the state told the court the requested order “will prevent the use of federalized National Guard and active duty Marines for law enforcement purposes on the streets of a civilian city”.

But they noted that they were not seeking to prevent the federalized National Guard members from “protecting the safety of federal buildings or other real property owned or leased by the federal government, or federal personnel on such property”.

Donald Trump and secretary of defense Pete Hegseth – who California sued yesterday – “intend to use unlawfully federalized National Guard troops and Marines to accompany federal immigration enforcement officers on raids throughout Los Angeles,” California attorney general Rob Bonta wrote in court papers. The filing reads:

Federal antagonization, through the presence of soldiers in the streets, has already caused real and irreparable damage to the City of Los Angeles, the people who live there, and the State of California. They must be stopped, immediately.

Earlier today, the case was assigned to senior US district judge Charles R Breyer of the federal trial-level court in San Francisco. Breyer, a Clinton appointee, has not yet responded to the emergency request.

California has asked a federal court for a temporary restraining order blocking the Trump administration’s deployment of both state National Guard forces and US Marines to Los Angeles amid mass protests over sweeping federal immigration enforcement efforts, the LA Times (paywall) reports.

According to the Times report, the request was filed in the same federal lawsuit the state and state governor Gavin Newsom filed yesterday, in which they alleged Donald Trump had exceeded his authority and violated the US Constitution by sending military forces into the city without the request or approval of the state governor or local officials.

Karen Bass pushed back against Donald Trump’s repeated claims that his order to deploy the National Guard is what helped quell the protests in Los Angeles.

We know how to take care of these issues ourselves. When you said things have gotten under control because of the National Guard, I gave you an example where the National Guard wasn’t even here and he was tweeting that out.

She was referring to the fact that Trump was online taking credit for the national guard helping calm down protests, thanking them on Saturday night before the national guard actually arrived on Sunday morning – as Gavin Newsom pointed out at the time.

She went on to say that the national guard was just protecting the federal buildings in the city.

They are stationary at the federal building protecting the building they are not out doing crowd control or anything like that.

So I don’t know how he could say that the National Guard is who saved the day. Who saved the day are our local law enforcement agencies.

Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass said she is “going to put out a call” to Donald Trump today. She told a news conference:

I want to tell him to stop the raids. I want to tell him that this is a city of immigrants. I want to tell him that if you want to devastate the economy of the city of Los Angeles, then attack the immigrant population.

Asked if she has been trying to reach the president, Bass said she has not reached out directly to Trump yet.

My conversations with people either in the administration or close to the administration have been continuing.

Karen Bass has said she will be meeting later today with the chief of LAPD to discuss the possibility of a curfew in response to unrest in downtown LA.

The LA mayor said her focus was on prevention of any further unrest, and she had already had a brief discussion with the chief this morning about the idea of a curfew.

Sources have told CNN that it is still unclear what the marines’ specific task will be once in Los Angeles. As we’ve been reporting, like the National Guard troops they are prohibited from conducting law enforcement activity such as making arrests – unless Trump invokes the Insurrection Act, which he didn’t rule out today.

LA mayor Karen Bass earlier told a news conference she also has “no idea” what the hundreds of marines are going to do when they arrive.

People have asked me, ‘What are the Marines going to do when they get here?’ That’s a good question. I have no idea.

She said the national guard troops that are already in the city “have one assignment”, which is to protect specific federal buildings – which Bass also reiterated was “not needed”, and blasted the Trump administration for deploying the military personnel despite governor Gavin Newsom’s opposition.