forty-eight hours later (12. 524)

Following his messy and public falling-out with Elon Musk and the consequent stalling of his Big Beautiful Bill in the senate, Trump is manufacturing headlines more aligned with campaign promises with first reimposing a travel ban and stoking fears of mass-deportations, disappearances with US immigration and customs enforcement (ICE, which is a high-speed train in Germany) raids on Los Angeles, eager to have this fight as a pretext for invoking martial law. Mobilising the state’s national guard against protesters against the will of the governor for the first time since 1965 when Lyndon Johnson called up Alabama troops as protective escorts for civil rights activists marching from Selma to Montgomery, countermanding the refusal of arch-segregationist George Wallace—for completely opposite reasons, Trump is obviously yearning for a spectacle—which so far is being denied him by the rallies, most violence coming from ICE agents. The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 restricts military service members from being used for civilian law enforcement within the United States but does allow them to protect other federal agents and property and ensure that the execution of their duties is not impeded. Only with the declaration of insurrection, something not authorised by Trump during the January Sixth attack on the Capitol, can troops be used to make arrests. Although George HW Bush sent in the California National Guard under this law in 1992 to quell the uprising following the acquittal of the police officers involved in the brutal beating of Rodney King, it was done with the consent of the state government. For his part, Governor Gavin Newsom, frequent target of Trump, is threatening to withhold remittance of federal taxes, in response to both funding cuts to the state’s university system and to defund the country’s clear decent into dictatorship, to which the administration is levying charges of criminal tax evasion.