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White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt got into a heated back and forth with reporters on Wednesday as she held her first briefing since President Donald Trump’ federalized the National Guard in California and sent active-duty Marines to join them in cracking down on protests and unrest over immigration roundups in Los Angeles.
Leavitt condemned the protests as “shameful,” citing what she described as “left-wing radicals waving foreign flags” who she accused of “viciously attacking” Immigrations and Customs Enforcement officers and Border Patrol agents as well as Los Angeles Police Department officers as part of an assault on “American culture and society itself.”
Leavitt also condemned Democratic elected officials in the Golden State, specifically Gov. Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, accusing them of having “shamefully failed to meet their sworn obligations to their citizens” by not ordering a forceful military response to protesters.
She also lauded Trump for ordering the “mob” of protesters to be “stamped out.”
“The criminals responsible will be swiftly brought to justice, and the Trump administration's operations to arrest illegal aliens are continuing unabated,” Leavitt said. She added that Newsom and Bass had sided “with illegal alien criminals in their communities and violent rioters and looters over law enforcement officers who are just doing their jobs.”
But Leavitt’s pugnacious attacks on California leaders did not satisfy reporters, who repeatedly asked her about the extent to which the military service members who’ve been deployed in Los Angeles are authorized to aid in immigration law enforcement, nor did she fully explain how Trump’s threats to use “very big force” against protesters at his planned military parade in D.C. this weekend comport with America’s constitutional guarantees of free speech.
She also aggressively denied that the immigration crackdown that precipitated the protests and violence over the weekend had been ordered up in an effort to change the national conversation from Trump’s messy split with billionaire Elon Musk, the Tesla and SpaceX boss who wrapped up a stint as an unpaid adviser to the administration late last month.
Asked about the possibility that Trump’s crackdown was meant as a distraction to their social media war, Leavitt replied: “That's an incredibly disingenuous attack.”
She said Trump had been moved by “images of border patrol and ICE agents being hailed with rocks and Molotov cocktails” and “vehicles being burned to the ground with illegal aliens flying foreign flags.”
Leavitt’s press briefing came less than a day after Trump threatened to forcibly put down any protests that spoil the military parade he has ordered up for his birthdayon Saturday to coincide with the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army’s founding during the American Revolutionary War.
During a media availability in the Oval Office on Tuesday, the president warned that any protests of the parade would be “met with very big force” on Saturday.
He reiterated the explicit threat a moment later, telling “those people who want to protest” that they would be “met with very big force” once more.
He also opined further that any protest against the parade on Saturday would consist only of “people who hate our country.”
The president has a long history of pushing for the use of state violence against protests, which he considers to be a personal affront and a reflection of weakness on his part. During protests for racial justice in Washington following the May 2020 murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis, Minnesota police officer, he reportedly pushed to have military and law enforcement open fire on other protesters, asking then his then-Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, General Mark Milley, why National Guard troops deployed as a result of the demonstrations could not shoot protesters in the legs.
But Leavitt denied that Trump has any intention of attacking protests against his parade or his policies this weekend.
Seemingly ignorant of the president’s history of urging violence against demonstrations, Leavitt claimed the president “supports the right of Americans to peacefully protest” and “supports the First Amendment” while suggesting that the protests in Los Angeles have consisted entirely of “mobs of violent rioters and agitators assaulting law enforcement officers, assaulting our federal immigration authorities.”
“Thankfully, the President took action and stepped in to protect our federal law enforcement agents, to perfect protect federal buildings, to protect the federal mission of deporting illegal criminals off of our streets, and that mission will continue every day, as far as we're concerned,” she said.
