CNN
—
America seems headed to an angry and ugly place.
Inflammatory incidents, rhetoric and dissent unleashed by President Donald Trump’s tough immigration crackdown are inexorably building political pressure as a polarized nation barrels into the heat of summer.
Stunning scenes in Los Angeles on Thursday, when Democratic Sen. Alex Padilla was manhandled out of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s news conference and handcuffed, epitomized a dark turn taken this week in California.
But there’s no sign yet of a path back from the brink before cascading confrontations and protests turn violent or even tragic.
If anything, the crisis is deepening.
The administration, led by a president determined to use every instrument of power — including a tamed Justice Department and the military — to enforce his will, is vowing to go harder, stronger and faster to target undocumented migrants. Even those here legally are not immune. The White House on Thursday told half a million Venezuelans, Haitians, Cubans and Nicaraguans here on humanitarian parole they must return to their unstable, poverty-stricken home countries.
Trump’s extremism is now stirring a counter-reaction ahead of a weekend that will see hundreds of “No Kings” demonstrations in cities and towns, and after he warned against protests at a US Army 250th anniversary parade Saturday that will bolster his dictator’s schtick on his 79th birthday. A president who pledged to use the military on “the enemy from within” said this week he wants troops “everywhere.”
The political battle is also finally being joined by Democrats, stung into finding a voice and cause after their so far desultory efforts to rebuild after their 2024 election fiasco.
California was already on edge after Trump defied Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom and ordered National Guard troops to the city amid protests and then added a contingent of active-duty US Marines. But the television pictures of government security agents restraining Padilla and pushing him to the ground on Thursday afternoon created an instantly iconic snapshot of the national moment.
Some caveats should be noted. Any time a Cabinet official is in public, especially amid heightened political feeling, there is a concern for their safety. The horrific scenes after Trump survived his first assassination attempt last year remain a fresh national trauma. In the light of such experience, security details often act first and without waiting to establish the full context of a situation. It’s perfectly possible Noem’s agents didn’t immediately recognize Padilla, even though he’s one of the state’s senators.
“I was there peacefully,” Padilla said later amid fierce dispute over his conduct. “At one point I had a question, and so I began to ask a question. I was almost immediately forcibly removed from the room. I was forced to the ground, and I was handcuffed. I was not arrested. I was not detained.”
Initially, Noem seemed to realize the incident could become a political liability. She explained that the Secret Service had feared Padilla could be an attacker, so they pushed him away. She said his behavior was “not appropriate” but said they’d spoken afterward in what sounded like a civil conversation, even swapping phone numbers.
But the Trump White House never admits fault and always seeks political vengeance. Noem toughened here message when she headed onto Fox News. “This man burst into a room, started advancing towards the podium … he … continued to lunge towards the podium,” she said.
The Homeland Security secretary’s comments were quickly backed up by House Speaker Mike Johnson as the GOP launched a full court-press. “When they storm cabinet secretaries in a press conference, I think it’s wildly inappropriate behavior, and I think it sends a terrible message in tone for the rest of the country,” said a speaker who helped Trump expunge the record of the January 6, 2021, assault by MAGA supporters on the US Capitol.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, who has this week accused Democrats of supporting criminals and rioters and demonized undocumented migrants as pedophiles, wrote on X that Padilla should be “ashamed of his childish behavior.”
In a less fraught time, Padilla might have acted with more discretion and the White House would have worked to mitigate the incident’s impact on America’s fragile psyche. But this is 2025, five months into Trump’s second term.
Whatever precipitated the incident in Los Angeles, Padilla’s treatment — after he identified himself, when he was shoved out of the room as he tried to ask a question and then shoved face-first to the ground and handcuffed — was unheard-of.
The racial overtones of California’s first Latino senator being put under such duress will become a metaphor for Trump’s ruthless deportation policy.
“They use words like ‘lunge’ and ‘charge.’ He is not an animal; he’s a US senator,” California’s Attorney General Rob Bonta told CNN’s Kasie Hunt.
In Washington, Democratic senators rushed to the chamber to exploit the moment. Hawaii Sen. Brian Schatz warned that his colleague’s removal from Noem’s briefing was “the stuff of dictatorships.”
Rhode Island Sen. Jack Reed, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, who has condemned Trump’s use of the military in California, warned in a statement: “This is America. Dissent should not be met with violence.”
Across the Capitol, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Padilla suffered an “assault.” She added, “It’s a federal offense to attack a member of Congress. … It shouldn’t be anybody in our country to be treated this way.”
Padilla was the latest official to face harsh action for perceived dissent. Trump administration prosecutors have already indicted a Wisconsin judge and a New Jersey Democratic congresswoman in cases arising from the immigration blitz. But the fact his roughing-up was on camera means it could be a powerful political launching pad for Democrats as they step up resistance to the president.
In the initial reaction to Padilla’s manhandling, there was just a hint that Democratic senators — part of an always self-reverential body — were most offended that the collective dignity of their august chamber had been affronted.
But the quick and unified effort to frame the incident as an example of an encroaching Trump dictatorship suggests that the party might have found an opening at last.
In some ways, the spectacle was not that different from the kind of on-camera stunt with viral social media potential that Trump has made a signature and that now dominates the populist Republican Party. A televised speech by Newsom this week finally satisfied the cravings of some Democrats for someone, anyone to take the fight to the president. His Senate colleague will never now be forgotten by Democrats after he introduced himself to the rest of the nation with the Thursday afternoon debacle that lit up cable news.
But making a splash is only one of the Democrats’ problems.
Padilla’s show of force does not necessarily point a way out of the conundrum Trump has set for them, namely that their public condemnations of his deportation plan allow the White House to portray them as soft on securing the border. Perhaps more evidence of administration thuggery could hurt Trump — and convince voters he is overreaching and inhumane. But the White House is still sure it’s got the winning political hand on immigration.
Democrats are also no nearer to producing a coherent policy and electoral position that addresses the public’s desire to stem illegal immigration while reconciling liberal constituencies within their own political base. The Biden administration’s obliviousness to a long-building crisis and public sentiment has given Trump plenty of political cover.
But Thursday’s drama poses an even more profound question: Do most Americans — notwithstanding their stark ideological divides — really want to live in a country plagued by ever-worsening conflict and disharmony?
If not, Trump could be vulnerable and his iron-fist approach to immigration could end up serving as a microcosm of a destructive presidency.
For sure, Trump’s base responds to his outlandish rhetoric and strongman vibe. But no one would describe the White House’s approach as a modulated effort to solve an immigration issue that has been haunting the nation for years. The crisis has confounded every president since at least Ronald Reagan. But while some commanders in chief have tried to solve it, Trump has been deliberately escalating the confrontation at every opportunity, seemingly to incite maximum discord and political stress.
The president and his team argue with some justification that voters chose Trump last November because they were despairing over Biden’s negligence at the border. The White House insists that protests cannot be allowed to stop deportations that are needed to keep Americans safe and to deter new waves of migrants that could strain the country’s resources, unity and character.
But they are also using the language of tyrants and demagogues as they seek to use the deportations to grab more and more power, to repress their political adversaries and even to threaten the choices of Democratic voters.
During the news conference that was interrupted by Padilla, Noem warned that the federal government was not “going away” from Los Angeles. “We are staying here to liberate this city from the socialist and burdensome leadership that this Governor Newsom and this mayor placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into this city.”
Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass are the democratically elected representatives chosen by Californians and the citizens of Los Angeles. Noem’s comments only reinforced an impression that Trump and his team view Democratic leaders as illegitimate and blue states as enemies within the US.
Trump’s top domestic policy adviser Stephen Miller has spent the week portraying his boss’s political opponents as supporting invasions and rebellions by forces outside the United States. “America voted for mass deportations,” Miller wrote in one X post this week. “Violent insurrectionists, and the politicians who enable them, are trying to overthrow the results of the election.”
The country needs no reminder that incitement and extreme political language can provoke violence and threaten the rule of law and the foundational democratic principles of the republic. It happened at the end of Trump’s first term.
Historically, presidents have felt a moral imperative to cool political agitation when it threatens to splinter the nation and to heal such estrangements before they provoke strife and threaten life.
Trump’s entire political method seems designed to do the opposite.
