Writer Viet Thanh Nguyen, the son of Vietnamese refugees, lives in Los Angeles, California. The same place the American president sent the National Guard and Marines to "quell" protests against anti-immigrant raids. Yet another episode of Trump's reality show.
This article is an op-ed, written by an author outside the newspaper and whose point of view does not reflect the editorial staff's views.
I was on a beach in Malibu the weekend of June 8th when the news broke. The weather was perfect, the sky azure blue, the kind of moment so perfect it seems to embody the California dream, the one that has drawn tourists, gold prospectors, and pioneer settlers to Los Angeles for decades. My 5-year-old daughter was building a sandcastle, my son was running on the beach, and around us were families of all stripes: white, Black, Latino, Asian…
In short, a nightmare vision for Donald Trump , who abhors California and everything it stands for: basically, that's why he sent an entire army of ICE ( Immigration and Customs Enforcement ), FBI, in bulletproof vests, in armored cars to descend on LA's Fashion District, the area where the clothing companies are concentrated, repeating that good old American habit: invading a city full of non-white people. And now we also learned that the border police had conducted a raid on a Home Depot store [of home equipment] in the suburb of Paramount, which is predominantly Latino.
Trump wants to "liberate" LA from the "migrant invasion" from Mexico, El Salvador, Venezuela, etc., etc. I wondered if I, a refugee from Vietnam, who arrived in this country at the age of 4, was part of this migratory invasion. I suppose so. I know that Asians are often used as tools, we are made to wear the "good immigrant" costume. Asians are thus very visible in this Trump administration, whether it is Kash Patel at the FBI, or Usha Vance, the wife of the vice president [of Indian origin, editor's note] . But the facade should not make us forget that Asians were also expelled en masse, when their presence was perceived as an economic threat.
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Vietnamese people are very present in the Los Angeles metropolis. For example, in Orange County, renamed "Little Saigon." Los Angeles is a mille-feuille. In Los Angeles County, San Gabriel Valley is predominantly Asian, just to the south, there's Little India. In the city of Los Angeles, you'll find Little Tokyo, Koreatown, Little Ethiopia, Little Bangladesh, Chinatown. In Glendale [a city in Los Angeles County] , 40% of the population is Armenian. And in Westwood, an LA neighborhood is even called... "Tehrangeles": this is where Iranian refugees and their descendants have settled. All of this has created a very specific culture, a hybrid and energizing mix of languages, cuisines, ideas, from all these diasporas, arriving on this piece of land because of wars and devastation, often caused by the United States.
Trump, comic book villains, and Shakespeare
This is why Los Angeles, and all of California, is a bête noire for Trump and his sidekick Stephen Miller[Deputy White House Chief of Staff] . Miller is also an LA County native, he comes from Santa Monica, he is a representative of the conservative minority. He has gone on a crusade against diversity, especially in LA, his homeland. I suppose we should take him seriously, but it is difficult because he is so much like the villains in comic books , a bit like his master Trump. Miller and Trump, we cannot imagine them as the heroes of a Shakespearean tragedy. Unlike their predecessors, the Californian Richard Nixon and his adviser Henry Kissinger. Kissinger, at least, was an intellectual, his worldview was brutal, yes, but we could learn from it, even if in the end it all led to the massive bombing of Cambodia that led to the Khmer genocide. As for Nixon, he seemed to possess some notion of dignity: he chose to resign rather than face impeachment.
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Trump, on the other hand, is beyond all that. He feels no shame, no guilt; he is brutal, rude, and unfiltered. He couldn't be the hero of a Shakespearean tragedy, or else his role would be at most that of an Iago, who brings about the hero's downfall. And the hero dragged down in the downfall, in this tragedy, would be our country, the United States. A divided country, torn apart by its history, by its moral conscience, resembling Richard III and other kings in Shakespeare's tragedies, kings always terribly vulnerable, on the verge of being swept away by their illusions, the most basic illusion being their stubborn belief in their innocence. But that's the United States. This long history of violence, and this stubborn propensity to forget this violence. This explains why each time, we are left stunned. What, again? Has America, once again, provoked a war? Occupied a territory? We should be used to it by now!
In February, I went to El Salvador, at exactly the same time as Secretary of State Marco Rubio (a son of Cuban refugees born in 1971 like me, American thanks to the same right of birth that Trump wants to revoke). During this official visit, Rubio signed an agreement with his president, Nayib Bukele, to use a prison in El Salvador and send there all the alleged criminals that the United States wanted to deport. Between Bukele and Trump, it's the honeymoon period. And it reminds me of that speech by Reagan, forty years ago, at the height of the Cold War. He explained that El Salvador was in the crosshairs of communist enemies. The famous domino theory, tested throughout the former Indochina, which would lead to the disastrous Vietnam War? It would also extend to Central America. Once chaos had been sown in Southeast Asia, after the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975, and the American rout, another playground had to be found. This would be Central America. Reagan repeated: "We have a common heritage, we worship the same God." It was already this notion of a "Great America," extending beyond borders, the very one that Trump invokes today when he speaks of annexing Canada, Greenland, and Panama . Conquer and destroy? It is the DNA of our country. But the United States suffers from this sin of innocence: it is this that leads us to always provoke tragedy in others, it is also what makes us ripe for the fall... The tragic fall of the American Empire.
With all his cynicism, all his virulence in professing his innocence (including for crimes for which he has already been convicted), Trump is the best instrument to accelerate this fall. He hates the face of the United States that LA and California represent, this people of immigrants, this multicultural elite. He wants to eradicate it. Replace it with the MAGA version, an America populated by so-called "real" Americans. But separating one from the other is like trying to separate Siamese twins. Cut one, you kill the other. Without LA and California, America dies.
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Trump is not a Shakespearean hero. He belongs more in a reality TV show. Or in a superhero movie, with Miller, his totally cartoonish sidekick, who is already establishing, through interjections and invective, a dialogue of comic book bubbles. Their official line? We only deport criminals! But Miller couldn't help but tell the truth, in this meeting with ICE officers, whom he "eviscerated" because they hadn't deported enough people. According to one of the witnesses. "Stephen Miller wants us to arrest everyone. He asked us: Why aren't you at Home Depot? Why aren't you at 7-Eleven [a convenience store] ?" Arresting "everyone" means anyone who looks like an undocumented immigrant, in short, a person of color, Latino, Black, or Asian. Again, there is no protected community: a father from Little Saigon arrested by ICE was transferred and has just been deported to Vietnam, without any trial.
A crisis manufactured by Trump
From a distance, it might seem like the city is in chaos. It's not. LA was generally very calm, although there were occasional disturbances. [That weekend of June 14, Downtown was still under curfew.] But LA is a city of 3.9 million people; Los Angeles County has 9.7 million! So it was strange to see these civil war-like images on my phone screen, with LAPD officers tear-gassing protesters, as if the whole city was in riot gear.
Yes, there is a crisis in LA right now. But it wasn't those protesting against immigrant deportations who caused it! This crisis was manufactured by the Trump administration itself, which is calling the protesters "rioters," even though, according to several accounts, these demonstrations were peaceful. But there you have it. For Miller, this is an "organized insurrection" against the rule of law. This is all Orwellian. Because if there is indeed a real insurrection against the rule of law, it was not in LA, but on January 6 [2021] , during the attack on the Capitol, that it took place... "The Party told you to reject the testimony of your eyes and ears. That was its final and most essential command," Orwell wrote in "1984." That's exactly what we, the people of LA, felt with our eyes and ears when we heard the lies of Kristi Noem, Secretary of Homeland Security, who said of Los Angeles: "This is not a city of immigrants, this is a city of criminals." And the Republican Party, which usually defends the right of states to self-determination, rushed to applaud the violation of a state by the federal government and the deployment of armed forces against ordinary citizens.
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To be fair, Democrats also bear some responsibility. Mass expulsions of immigrants didn't start with Trump. Under Obama, 3 million immigrants were deported; under Biden, it was more than 4 million. That's actually more than Trump did during his first term! But the difference is that Trump is determined to make the deportation of migrants a spectacle. A cruel spectacle. And even, for some, entertainment.
The Democratic Party never really protested these mass deportations. Neither did LA and Hollywood. After all, this is the heart of the entertainment and soft power industry. Which has always served war propaganda. LA invented reality TV, LA invented a show like "The Apprentice," and created this modern monster, Trump, who, although a New Yorker by birth and Floridian by choice, is ultimately typically Angeleno by temperament. That of an influencer, who enjoys navigating the empty and polluted waters of social media.
Society of the spectacle
The legendary "Hollywood" sign overlooks the city. It reminds me that in LA, we constantly live under the auspices of this society of the spectacle. It was there, on that Sunday when the National Guard arrived in the city , that I took my children for a walk. I felt a little guilty about not being at the protests. I've taken my children to protest before, but I was afraid of violence. Not the violence of the protesters, but the violence of the police.
At that moment, I felt that sense of dissociation again. A bit like when I see those horrific images on social media in Gaza, a massacre perpetrated with the blessing of the United States, Israel's main arms supplier. Sometimes it's hard to just enjoy your children without thinking about those other children, the ones being bombed and starved in Gaza, or the ones being ripped from the arms of their immigrant parents by Trump, the same immigrants Trump calls "animals."
Trump calls it an "invasion." This is what allows him to send 4,000 National Guardsmen and 700 Marines to LA to quell a migrant invasion that simply doesn't exist. He's making a spectacle of it. The City of Angels has become "Fallujah-on-the-Pacific," with the US military deployed to fight the enemy from within. But this show of force may be yet another manifestation of the Empire's hubris. Hubris is what has always led to the downfall of the American Empire in its wars, whether in Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan.
“We had to destroy the city to save it.” That’s what a senior American officer said in Ben Tre, a city in Vietnam razed after the Tet Offensive in 1968. Destroy to save? That could be Trump’s motto. If any other country did what the Trump administration is doing (kidnapping people in the street, deporting them without trial, trying to take over universities , sending in the military), it would be considered dictatorial by the United States.
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The Trumpian spectacle never ends. That's why this weekend's military parade was organized—to impress MAGA supporters and intimidate, even threaten, opponents.
The threats and violence sometimes become very/too real: witness the murder of Melissa Hortman , Democratic representative from Minnesota, and her husband, a few hours before the parade.
But I refuse to lose hope. I think of the "Madleen" flotilla that tried to go to Gaza to deliver aid, where these activists were intercepted and arrested by Israel, under specious pretexts; all over Los Angeles, people came out to defend their immigrant neighbors. They were there this weekend, en masse, at the "No Kings" demonstrations, in Los Angeles, but all over our country as well.
In both cases, these are people who have entered into resistance. Who believe in solidarity. Solidarity: that's what authoritarian regimes fear most. An authoritarian regime will always try to divide and rule. If anything emerges from the fog of Los Angeles, our famous smog , it's this: we need more solidarity. To survive. To survive this tragic, life-size reality show that Trump is imposing on us.
Translation by Doan Bui.
BIO EXPRESS
Viet Thanh Nguyen is a writer. His novel "The Sympathizer" (2017) won the Pulitzer Prize and was adapted into an HBO series by South Korean director Park Chan-wook. His other novels and essays, "The Devoted" (2021) and "Nothing Ever Dies" (2019), are published by Belfond. His autobiography, "The Man with Two Faces," will be released in September, also by Belfond.
