Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass celebrated on social media Tuesday after President Donald Trump withdrew thousands of California National Guard troops, who had been federalized to suppress anti-ICE riots there.
Bass portrayed the withdrawal of 2,000 troops — which she described as a “retreat” — as a “major victory” for the unity of Los Angeles. “They are leaving! They are retreating! We stood strong! We peacefully protested!”
Others noted that the soldiers were being redeployed because they had been successful in ending the riots.
Notably, 2,000 soldiers will remain in Los Angeles, where they have been since so-called “peaceful” protests led to riots against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers as well as local law enforcement.
Local news outlet KTLA reported:
Federal officials at the Pentagon confirmed that half of the 4,000 federalized members of the California National Guard deployed in Los Angeles are being released, though 2,000 guardsmen, along with 700 active-duty Marines remain in the city.
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Once they arrived, the troops were tasked with guarding federal buildings and protecting federal immigration agents during enforcement operations.
The state took the Trump administration to court where a federal judge ruled that the president acted illegally when he federalized the National Guard without a request from Governor Gavin Newsom. That decision, however, was later overturned by an appeals court, which returned control of the troops back to Trump while the case remains ongoing.
Bass had claimed that the violence in the city would continue as long as ICE raids continued, and demanded the raids be stopped. There has been no change in federal policy, and the Trump administration is appealing a temporary restraining order against ICE raids. It is considered likely to overturn the lower court order.
The practice of celebrating defeats as victories has a long history in radical, and communist, history. While she denies she is a communist, Bass has visited and volunteered in communist Cuba many times, and called the late dictator Fidel Castro the “Comandante en Jefe” (commander in chief) when he died in 2016.
Bass’s poll numbers have collapsed, and national polls indicated that the majority of registered U.S. voters approved of Trump’s use of the National Guard to quell the riots, lest they spread in and beyond the city.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of Trump 2.0: The Most Dramatic ‘First 100 Days’ in Presidential History, available for Amazon Kindle. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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