The MAGA Military, Nuestra Señora la Reina de Los Angeles, and the noisome bedwetters

Uniformed soldiers applaud a vicious speech by Trump and much more.

June 11, 2025

By Marc Cooper

Uniformed troops cheering a vicious speech by Trump at Fort Bragg / The Atlantic

I’m writing this late Tuesday night, a couple of hours after a curfew has been declared by Mayor Bass over a piece of downtown Los Angeles and there are still some small groups of totally peaceful protesters surrounded by and peacefully surrendering to a very large contingent of LAPD.

I’ll get into the ICE drama in a few moments.

But first, however, a truly chilling sidebar that I consider to be the most consequential story of the day.

President Trump spewed out one of his usual rambling, incoherent and vengeful, highly partisan rants to an audience of uniformed U.S. soldiers at Fort Bragg... the primary training center for the elite Green Berets. Thanks to former War College Professor turned journalist Tom Nichols for providing the most detailed report on this ominous event.

Ominous not because Trump broke all norms by making a political rant to active duty military. Ominous because the uniformed troops cheered and jeered as if on cue violating a host of armed forces regulations that bar active military in uniform from participating in political events of any partisan nature.

Trump kicked off the speech to the tune of the hackneyed MAGA anthem God Bless The USA and then proceeded to denounce the “fake news.” Nichols continues:

“He mocked former President Joe Biden and attacked various other political rivals. He elicited cheers from the crowd by announcing that he would rename U.S. bases (or re-rename them) after Confederate traitors. He repeated his hallucinatory narrative about the invasion of America by foreign criminals and lunatics. He referred to 2024 as the “election of a president who loves you,” to a scatter of cheers and applause. And then he attacked the governor of California and the mayor of Los Angeles, again presiding over jeers at elected officials of the United States.”

“He led soldiers, in other words, in a display of unseemly behavior that ran contrary to everything the founder of the U.S. Army, George Washington, strove to imbue in the American armed forces.”

“The president also encouraged a violation of regulations. Trump, himself a convicted felon, doesn’t care about rules and laws, but active-duty military members are not allowed to attend political rallies in uniform. They are not allowed to express partisan views while on duty, or to show disrespect for American elected officials. Trump may not know these rules and regulations, but the officers who lead these men and women know them well. It is part of their oath, their credo, and their identity as officers to remain apart from such displays. Young soldiers will make mistakes. But if senior officers remain silent, what lesson will those young men and women take from what happened today?”

… Trump’s supporters and his party will excuse his behavior at Fort Bragg the way they always have, the same way that indulgent parents shrug helplessly at their delinquent children. But senior officers of the United States military have an obligation to speak up and be leaders. Where is the Army chief of staff, General Randy George? Will he speak truth to the commander in chief and put a stop to the assault on the integrity of his troops? Where is the commander of the airborne troops, Lieutenant General Gregory Anderson, or even Colonel Chad Mixon, the base commander?”

So here we are. One more step toward disassembly of democracy. I’ve been saying since Trump’s inauguration this year and the capitulations of Congress, law firms, media and universities, the one dog yet to bark is the U.S. military. Well, with the deployments in L.A. and this abominable behavior by both the president and the troops, the doggie is waking up and it ain’t pretty…

Back to the “insurrection” in L.A. where, note, the Marines have yet to be seen as they are holed up in some warehouse wondering what they’re supposed to do.

Tonight’s curfew covers the very spot where this city was founded in 1781 by the-then Spanish Governor with 44 settlers from what was then Sonora and today is known as New Mexico. Most of the settlers were Black or Indigenous but all living under Spanish rule.

The fledgling town was shortly afterward named
El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de Los Angeles. Its current name came into existence only in 1848 after the United States forcefully annexed much of the southwest from Mexico including California.

These are bothersome historical details that you can bet Stephen Miller doesn’t know and one wonders if Boss Trump can even find California on a map.

The other detail that Miller and the other head cases in the National Security apparatus didn’t know is that the current sweep of ICE in L.A. that began Thursday morning targeted a Home Depot and a Korean-owned clothing factory – the former located in so-called Westlake on the edge of downtown – a downscale neighborhood known locally as Little Central America, and populated not only by Salvadorans, Guatemalans and their neighbors but also by Mexicans – including a high percentage of the undocumented. This neighborhood has been Latin American since the founding of El Pueblo. How you are going to roll into a more or less beloved part of Mexican Los Angeles with armored carriers and masked ICE agents fully battle-kitted without provoking a major conflagration is stupid and reckless and highly ptovocative.

These first raids by the masked ICE platoons netted a grand total of 46 detainees. They were either folks hanging around Home Depot looking for honest hard daily labor, or people toiling in front of sewing machines 8 hrs a day, presumably for minimum wage.

This was not an accident per se. As Trump’s “mass deportation” of “the worst of the worst” was producing little results, we now know that Miller lambasted the ICE leadership a few weeks ago and told them to get out there and just arrest any illegal can find. He precisely orderd them to comb Home Depots and 7-11’s where day laborers also congregate looking for work —or await secret ofers from the comandantes of the migrant occupation.

But apparently nobody warned the Trump geniused they were striking in the very heart of a 200-year-old Latino community. So those “foreign flags” seen in the protests – the Mexican tricolor—that Miller claims is proof of a foreign invasion is ass-backwards. It’s the stars and stripes that are the foreign flags. The flag of occupation.

Nevertheless, the L.A. Mexican community is a patriotic crew but also brims with pride on how much they have influenced the entirety of L.A. culture and it’s common to see these flags on cars and decals any day of the week on the local streets. The Spanish language TV and radio have the highest ratings in the city. Most of the largest boulevards have Spanish names. Mexican restaurants exist in the hundreds and some of them are very high-end. The L.A. Dodgers have an enormous Mexican fan base and the stadium sells a special Doyer Dog, using the street Mexican term for the Dodgers and regularly hosts “Latino nights.” Indeed, Dodger Stadium was built on the bulldozed wreckage of Chavez Ravine, an historic Mexican settlement.

That in now way means their love of America includes the LAPD. It’s a force that has undergone much positive reform in the last 20 years but its reputation as a brutal occupying army in Latino L.A. jas not much faded.

Yes, Trump wanted a confrontation. But I don’t think he intended to step on a land mine. He and his advisors are too stupid to have thought this out. Maybe this will help explain the relatively minor counter-violence that continues to erupt. I am not about to rehearse my analysis of this violence. You can read my earlier post on it here.

And it’s not just L.A. proper that enjoys this palpable ethnic pride. There are 82 cities in Los Angeles County and nearly all of them are Latino from top to bottom, including their city halls.

Even once rock-ribbed Republican Orange County, 35 miles southeast of L.A. —home to Disneyland—has become Latinized. That’s why as I write this late Tuesday night, some one thousand protesters are still in the streets of Santa Ana late at night. As they were last night when they were barraged with gas and rubber bullets by the Orange County Sheriffs – a notoriously corrupt law enforcement agency that has long harbored in its ranks veritable white supremacist gangs. They are hated by the locals for their reputation of lawlessness and brutality.

As I write this, protesters are gathering in numbers in volatile downtown Portland. Several other protests took place today (Tuesday) in a bundle of American cities including Seattle, Chicago, Austin, Dallas, Boston, San Francisco, Washington D.C., and New York City.

Trump and his calling out the troops have done what the opposition has been struggling for months to construct, a nationwide network of resistance.

Meanwhile, the liberal bedwetters are back in the pulpit warning that the counter-violence is only helping Trump. Really? Trump has been dehumanizing and belittling migrants since his first candidate press conference ten years ago. Anybody who has been swayed toward Trump because some of the protesters have thrown rocks, bottles, and fireworks at the massive law enforcement presence has been living under a landslide for a decade. Trump’s electoral promise was to deport ALL undocumented that he now claims baselessly are 21 million (about twice the real number) and has now set his goal for one million in his first year, and is running way behind schedule and trying frenetically to catch up. That’s why ICE is literally arresting migrants as they exit immigration courts, fulfilling legal requirements to obtain legal status. I find that truly diabolical.

In the meantime, Trump has branded them all as criminals. He has dehumanized them and scorns their self-pride. He now claims the migrants have “occupied” L.A., reading history backward. Trump’s rhetoric about L.A. has been apocalyptic. “A once great American City, Los Angeles, has been invaded and occupied by Illegal Aliens and Criminals,” he wrote on his personal social media website on Sunday, “Now violent, insurrectionist mobs are swarming and attacking our Federal Agents to try and stop our deportation operations—But these lawless riots only strengthen our resolve.”

His wretched nitwit cronies like Ice Barbie have now branded L.A. a “city of criminals.” She has joined Miller in falsely charging that the “mobs” are “paid instigators,” a direct echo of the Jim Crow racist southern Sheriffs who claimed the civil rights movement protesting American Apartheid was nothing but “outside agitators.”

Trump’s base, of course, ignorant and malicious racists among them, bought into this Big Lie years ago and need no persuasion to remain loyal. They already assumed all Latinos are criminals. The sporadic vandalism is merely confirmation bias for them. The great majority of local and national bedwetters in the blue states lecturing the protesters to remain peaceful as to not do so will help Trump, probably don’t know a single undocumented Latino worker except for maybe Jose and Maria who cut their lawns and change their baby’s diapers for cash payment off the books. Many have certainly used the day laborers for yard work or minor construction picked up at a Home Depot, but they know nothing of the surrounding neighborhood and wouldn’t dare go there at night as they look upon it as foreign territory.

Trump did not need any inflammatory video of half-eaten felines when he whipped up the frenzy that Haitians in Ohio were eating “our pets.” And I think the hand-wringers have forgotten that he is currently using the 230-year-old Alien Sedition Act to carry out the deportations as he claims with zero “riot footage” that we have already been invaded. Sorry, I never saw the landing craft.

Any political capital he gains from the vandalism was spent months and years ago. And I would go so far to say that the moral bloviating about vandalism could potentially help Trump if he decides to start saying that the violence is so ungodly that even a “few good Democrats” are condemning it. Trump needs no help from anybody to keep his folks in line. He makes up whatever the hell lie he wants and then the media makes the whole country debate it. And MAGA accepts it as The Word.

What the bedwetters should be more tightly focused on this week is how much closer he is in bringing the country to open dictatorship. I hope I do not have to stop to list what steps he has taken in the last week to move us closer to a police state. If you can’t figure that out by now, forget about it.

The biggest perpetrators of political violence, the real supporters and inciters of insurrection and subversion currently occupy the Oval Office, the West Wing, the FBI, DOJ and DHS headquarters, the cabinet room, and half the Congress. They are the ones fueling this entire debacle. And Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill is nothing but an attempt to legalize grand larceny and vandalism of the U.S. safety net.

WHAT WE ARE MISSING

While the media narrowcasts one burning car on an endless loop, they are ignoring the ongoing ICE raids, including on Tuesday, in California’s Central Valley where migrants harvest our food in triple digit weather. Not much good TV in that, unless the workers start stuffing cherry bombs into artichokes and grapes.

And what about the rest of Trumpworld? What happened to coverage of the Big Beautiful Bundle of Bullshit that will strip 15 million Americans of health care, several million from food stamps and will facilitate the largest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in human history. Ask a TV news director to choose between a rowdy “mob” of Mexican teenagers throwing shit at the police or a bunch of old men sitting in committee meetings figuring out a way to make average Americans swallow the shit the GOP is spoon-feeding them. And you know what the answer is.

And by the way, if Trump is gaining so much strength because of the vandalism, why is his BBB still stalled in the Republican-controlled committee? Might it be that those Republican votes are still not there yet? He hasn’t even swayed them with his military show of force.

Nor have I seen any TV coverage of RFK Jr’s insane mass firing of his own vaccine advisory council. These are not deep state bureaucrats but independent medical experts whose credibility is so high that the insurance companies rely on them for advice on accepting claims. And again, making for really boring TV. Germs are hard to film and don’t sit still.

And as we slip ever deeper into dictatorial rule, I am hoping the pearl-clutching pundits and towers of moderate political morality will give us the green light to start pushing back, to start fighting back, to start trying to counter the fascist onslaught. As many have said before fascism will not come to America in jackboots and the gestapo but rather wrapped in an American flag carrying a cross. That’s where we are now. But I would hate to be a premature anti-fascist. So please, bedwetters, let the rest of us know when it’s ok to fight back.

Meanwhile, we need to make this Saturday’s 1500 NO KINGS rallies planned months ago as big as humanly possible. TV cameras will, however, be focused that same day on the Trump Military Porn Parade. So we’ve got to make these peaceful rallies humungous to balance out coverage of the shiny tanks and the marching troops. And to demonstrate to the Trump cabal WE ARE NOT AFRAID. +++