- Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck;
- Trump calls out the National Guard (what’s next? Martial Law?);
- Louisiana bans chemtrails;
- Trump’s big bill prioritizes the religious right (of course)
First of all. We watched the live stream of George Clooney’s Broadway play “Good Night, and Good Luck” yesterday afternoon (it began at 4pm West Coast time), on CNN. We’d seen the 2005 film starring David Strathairn. The Broadway version stars George Clooney as Edward R. Murrow. I think Strathairn might have been the better impersonation, but Clooney is the more powerful actor. I was impressed by the stage settings: the multiple sets on one stage that the lighting kept redirecting among; the occasional overlapping scenes in different places. But I’ve seen a couple Broadway shows ever; perhaps such stage-work legerdemain is routine. Clooney is very good, though he couldn’t keep his own self from sometimes seeping through — there’s a line half way through about Americans leaving for Europe, and Clooney couldn’t help a self-deprecating smirk.
But most important is the play’s theme of course, and how it’s become even more relevant to current events even since work on this play began a year or two ago. Conservatives in the early 1950s were frightened by Communists and demonized anyone suspected, ruining their careers; today conservatives are frightened by non-whites and ‘woke’ people and cut legal corners to expel them from the country, or at least ruin their lives, as Trump has done by firing so many non-whites from careers they achieved through merit. A concept Trump does not actually understand. He values only loyalty. The play ends with a montage of film clips about history since the 1950s, ending with Musk’s Nazi salute, as Clooney stands in front, ending with a final speech. And a range of emotions on his face.
Clooney’s final speech is worth quoting, but I couldn’t find a source to quote from; the several sources I found quote something slightly different. I liked the passage with four i-words: ignorance, indifference, etc., but I don’t remember it exactly, nor can I find it online. Clooney co-wrote the 2005 film, so of course he’s entitled to tweak his wording onstage… perhaps every single time.
(Most of this posted on Facebook, last night.)
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So this is the weekend that Trump has called out the National Guard against people in Los Angeles protesting the administration’s Gestapo ICE agents from rounding up brown people at a Home Depot. (Remember ICE has targets to hit –3000 arrests *a day* — and aren’t too careful about due process. If they’re brown, assume guilt and fix later if exposed by the media.)
With an unfolding story like this, newspaper and CNN headlines are changing regularly. Here’s an overview from a magazine that doesn’t update quite so frequently.
The Atlantic, David Frum, 8 Jun 2025: For Trump, This Is a Dress Rehearsal, subtitled “Ordering the National Guard to deploy in Los Angeles is a warning of what to expect when his hold on power is threatened.”
Yesterday, President Donald Trump ordered the National Guard to quell disorderly protests against immigration-enforcement personnel in Los Angeles. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth declared his readiness to obey Trump by mobilizing the U.S. Marines as well. These threats look theatrical and pointless. The state, counties, and cities of California employ more than 75,000 uniformed law-enforcement personnel with arrest powers. The Los Angeles Police Department alone numbers nearly 9,000 uniformed officers. They can surely handle some dozens of agitators throwing rocks, shooting fireworks, and impeding vehicular traffic.
If and when those 75,000 uniformed personnel feel overmatched by the agitators, California can request federal help of its own volition. When California has asked for needed federal help—during the wildfires earlier this year, for example—Trump has begrudged that help and played politics with it. Trump is now forcing help that the city and state do not need and do not want, not to restore law but to assert his personal dominance over the normal procedures to enforce the law.
Note how when California needs help, Trump plays politics. When it doesn’t need help but Trump wants to make a point, he imposes ‘help’ upon them. This is likely to escalate.
But if the Trump-Hegseth threats have little purpose as law enforcement, they signify great purpose as political strategy. Since Trump’s reelection, close observers of his presidency have feared a specific sequence of events that could play out ahead of midterm voting in 2026:
Step 1: Use federal powers in ways to provoke some kind of made-for-TV disturbance—flames, smoke, loud noises, waving of foreign flags.
Step 2: Invoke the disturbance to declare a state of emergency and deploy federal troops.
Step 3: Seize control of local operations of government—policing in June 2025; voting in November 2026.
They’ve been contemplating these tactics for some time.
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The Atlantic, Tom Nichols, 8 Jul 2025: Trump Is Using the National Guard as Bait, subtitled “Don’t give him the pretext he wants.”
President Donald Trump is about to launch yet another assault on democracy, the Constitution, and American traditions of civil-military relations, this time in Los Angeles. Under a dubious legal rationale, he is activating 2,000 members of the National Guard to confront protests against actions by ICE, the immigration police who have used thuggish tactics against citizens and foreigners alike in the United States.
By militarizing the situation in L.A., Trump is goading Americans more generally to take him on in the streets of their own cities, thus enabling his attacks on their constitutional freedoms. As I’ve listened to him and his advisers over the past several days, they seem almost eager for public violence that would justify the use of armed force against Americans.
The president and the men and women around him are acting with great ambition in this moment, and they are likely hoping to achieve three goals in one dramatic action.
First, they will turn America’s attention away from Trump’s many failures and inane feuds, and reestablish his campaign persona as a strongman who will brush aside the law if that’s what it takes to keep order in the streets. Perhaps nothing would please Trump more than to replace weird stories about Elon Musk with video of masked protesters burning cars as lines of helmeted police and soldiers march over them and impose draconian silence in one of the nation’s largest and most diverse cities.
Second, as my colleague David Frum warned this morning, Trump is establishing that he is willing to use the military any way he pleases, perhaps as a proof of concept for suppressing free elections in 2026 or 2028. Trump sees the U.S. military as his personal honor guard and his private muscle. Those are his toy soldiers, and he’s going to get a show from his honor guard in a birthday parade next weekend. In the meantime, he’s going to flex that muscle, and prove that the officers and service members who will do whatever he orders are the real military. The rest are suckers and losers.
…
Third, Trump may be hoping to radicalize the citizen-soldiers drawn from the community who serve in the National Guard. (Seizing the California Guard is also a convenient way to humiliate California Governor Gavin Newsom and L.A. Mayor Karen Bass, with the president’s often-used narrative that liberals can’t control their own cities.) Trump has the right to “federalize” Guard forces, which is how they were deployed overseas in America’s various conflicts. He has never respected the traditions of American civil-military relations, which regard the domestic deployment of the military as an extreme measure to be avoided whenever possible. Using the Guard could be a devious tactic: He may be hoping to set neighbor against neighbor, so that the people called to duty return to their home and workplace with stories of violence and injuries.
And so on. Nichols ends:
So far, even the Los Angeles Police Department—not exactly a bastion of squishy suburban book-club liberals—has emphasized that the protests have been mostly peaceful. Trump is apparently trying to change that. Sending in the National Guard is meant to provoke, not pacify, and his power will only grow if he succeeds in tempting Americans to intemperate reactions that give him the authoritarian opening he’s seeking.
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Short items.
NOLA.com, 2 Jun 2025: Louisiana Republicans pass bill ‘banning’ chemtrails, which are not a real thing (via)
The Louisiana Legislature has passed a new bill to outlaw “chemtrails,” a made-up and very fake thing that conspiracy theorists and other assorted fringe people believe in.
Because of course.
(What could be next? GOP votes to prohibit alien spacecraft from landing on the White House lawn?)
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Of course it is.
Right Wing Watch, Peter Montgomery, 6 Jun 2025: Trump’s Big Bill Packed With Religious-Right Priorities
It wasn’t long ago that congressional Republicans railed against voting for “omnibus” budget legislation, but that was before President Donald Trump demanded support for what he calls the “One Big Beautiful Bill.” As Trump rants about judges upholding the law and interfering with his efforts to rule like a king, the Republicans’ bill would even limit judges’ ability to enforce their orders.
Republican leaders have stuffed the legislation—passed by the House and now before the Senate—with provisions to please Trump and every corner of the right-wing base. Trump’s Christian nationalist allies are portraying support for the package as a way to push their anti-abortion and anti-equality social agenda under cover of the budget process, along with Trump’s priority tax cuts for billionaires and cuts to social safety net programs.
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Listening to movie score music by Carter Burwell, and Michael Danna, recently…
