By Michael Woyton

President Donald J. Felon hates California and its governor Gavin Newsom.

The grifter-in-chief desperately wants to prove his leadership by ordering the military to shoot at protesters, no matter what those protesters are doing and sees, in Los Angeles, the chance that that might come to fruition.

With the footage of an Australian news reporter being shot with a rubber bullet, we might be closer than we think in Los Angeles because the so-called commander in chief has gone over the heads of Newsom and LA Mayor Karen Bass to deploy the National Guard.

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He even posted on his social media site — at 2:41 a.m. Sunday — that the guard was doing a great job in Los Angeles. The problem there was the guardsmen and -women hadn’t even arrived yet.

Note: On Monday, California sued the administration over the deployment, saying that the president overstepped his authority to do so.

Putting National Guard boots — and weapons — on the ground show how much the president wants to see an escalation of violence against people who are just protesting the kidnapping and detention of their neighbors by masked, unidentifiable gangs who say they are representatives of the government.

Even his hench-sycophants — ICE Director Tom Homan and Defense Secretary Pete “WhiskyLeaks” Hegseth — are throwing gasoline on the flames by threatening to arrest Newsom and Bass and send Marines to the LA city streets, respectively.

This administration — and particularly the man who believes that $45 million is worth wasting on a military parade on the streets of the nation’s capital because it’s his birthday — is content and willing to ignore or bend the law to forge ahead and make the point that he and only he is in control.

Question: Will that military equipment and the personnel leave the District of Columbia after the parade? Or is this part of a broader deployment?

Liza Goitein, the senior director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, explained in a must-read Bluesky thread that this is the first time since 1965 that a president has sent the National Guard into a state without a formal request from that state.

As if that’s not bad enough, she said that the president has also authorized the deployment of troops anywhere in the United States where ICE is being protested or where they might at some future time be the subject of a protest.

“That is unprecedented and clear abuse of the law,” Goitein said.

She explained that it would be a mistake to focus on whichever statue the president is using or abusing to get his way though.

“What matters is that Trump is federalizing the Guard for the purpose of policing Americans’ protest activity,” Goitein said. “That’s dangerous for both public safety and democracy.”

I actually shuddered when I read what she then wrote, because it really boils down to something very simple: “Civil unrest should be handled by civilian law enforcement except in the most extreme situations. Soldiers are trained to fight and destroy an enemy; they aren’t trained to safely handle and deescalate civil unrest situations.”

And the adjudicated rapist is setting the groundwork for further escalation by continuing to describe the people peacefully protesting as “insurrectionists.”

Besides shooting at them, President TACO wants use the Insurrection Act to allow him to send military in wherever he wants.

Remember that he refused to call up the National Guard on Jan. 6, 2021, as thousands of his supporters stormed into and defiled the Capitol Building, delaying the certification of the election of Joe Biden. 

Those people were insurrectionists — not the people peacefully protesting Los Angeles.

Even Los Angeles Police Department Chief Jim McDonnell said the people causing the problems are “people who do this all the time” and “many come in from other places just to hurt people and cause havoc.”

He called the violence “disgusting,” but also made it clear that federal agents did not brief him or his department about their plans for the clandestine raids which sparked the protests.

Still, out of a population of about 4 million, the LAPD made only 29 arrests Saturday and about 10 on Sunday. The California Highway Patrol arrested 17 people Sunday on the blocked 101 freeway.

The golfer-in-chief has his sights set on using military force on the American public.

He sees in California an opportunity to quash a political rival in a state that didn’t vote for him.

Democratic Senator Alex Padilla of California called the president and his aides “masters of misinformation and disinformation.”

He said the administration created this crisis, which is complete with theatrics and cruelty through immigration enforcement.

“They should not be surprised in a community like Los Angeles they will be met by demonstrators who are very passionate about standing up for fundamental rights and due process,” Padilla said.

The rest of us will have opportunities to show how passionate we are about our rights in our communities on Saturday through the nationwide No Kings protests.

We need to show up and peacefully say “This is not America.”

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Lead art: Screen grab from CNN.com