Why Trump is losing the Battle of LA

You may not have heard, but Trump is losing the Battle of Los Angeles.

You won't hear it on TV. You definitely won't find the truth easily on Elon's Twitter. And you probably won't get news at all if you don't read G. Elliott Morris' Strength in Numbers.

Here are his two big takeaways on this week's polls from G. Elliott's expert squint:

Americans split about protesters, but oppose Trump's response more

Trump's approval ratings on immigration and deportations slide into the negative

Like Trump's shameful Oval Office mocking of a 9-0 Supreme Court decision to return Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the United States with the dictator of El Salvador, Trump's stunt—engineered by his current Shadow President Stephen Miller—seems to have backfired.

That doesn't mean the danger is over or that it can't get worse. The right has figured out that the easiest way to turn people against protesters is to make them seem violent, often by celebrating any incident of violence they can find. That's what's happening on Fox and X right now. But that narrative isn't sticking so far.

That could have something to do with how the protests across LA and America "have been extraordinarily peaceful," according to Waging Nonviolence's Erica Chenoweth, Soha Hammam, Jeremy Pressman, and Christopher Wiley Shay.

This is true, despite these protests "dwarfing" the protests against Trump that garnered much more news in 2017.

But this obviously doesn't mean we're winning in general.

As vast and principled as the protests have been so far, we haven't yet stopped the worst of what the Trump regime is intent on doing. The wasteful, horrific persecution of our undocumented neighbors continues—unless you happen to work for one of Trump's big donors—only limited by the regime's malicious incompetence.

However, it does mean that the people of Los Angeles are winning the battle that matters most for generating the mass mobilization we know is needed to confront the kind of authoritarianism we're facing —the battle of public opinion.

In the latest Next Comes What, Andrea Pitzer explains how and why the people succeeded.

They succeeded in both rousing Gavin Newsom out of his late-onset podcasting coma and also in changing the narrative about the raids and detentions that have been designed to impoverish a great city.

Andrea connects the brave opposition in Los Angeles to the extraordinary stand we saw on Monday, as exemplified by the Bethesda Declaration. Scientists working in all 27 of our National Institutes of Health dissented to the ridiculous assault on the Institutes and their partner Universities.

These targeted attacks on science are designed to create an "extinction-level threat" to America's leadership in research and the world.

Andrea spoke to one of the signatories of the Declaration about how he decided to stand up and risk his job. And he makes the case for those who can—like him—putting more on the line as all of us do what we can.

Before you go, I'd like to take a moment to sing some praises of my hometown.

I love LA

I grew up in Chatsworth, the northwest corner of the San Fernando Valley, known for its use as a location for shooting Westerns and, later, as a home to the Manson Family. After college in Santa Barbara, I moved to East LA to teach high school for six years at the turn of the Millennium.

So I feel compelled to convey my pride in my everything-all-at-once city and the way Angelinos are standing up to fascism. And how that doesn't surprise me at all.

LA is the most American city. LA, through Hollywood, created America. It's the reason most of the world loves this country. It's how we've won the hearts and minds of much of the world even as we've committed mindless atrocities.

And Hollywood is just one jewel in that Oasis. It's the immigrants who have always made and remade Los Angeles into the place everyone dreams of going. They bring their imagination of a better life to the desert nestled between the mountains and the sea. And they do the brutal work that makes all of our dreaming possible.

LA is everything Trump will never be: big-hearted, decent, and inspired.

The war to restore and rebuild American freedom will be long, maybe endless. But I know that if the people of LA get their chance to make a fair stand, Trump and Miller have picked the wrong battle.

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