President Trump called out the California National Guard, the first time since 1965 that any president has done so without a request from a state’s governor. It’s hard to see what other choice he had.

As ICE agents served a warrant to search a local business for suspected illegal immigrants, a crowd gathered. It quickly escalated from protest to riot, with cars burning, bricks thrown, and all of the typical hallmarks of an anarchic response to federal law enforcement. The rioting continued into the next day and ICE agents were assaulted and outnumbered.

At this point, there are few options. They could give up, go home, and forget about doing their job and enforcing federal law. That was the situation that prevailed for four years under Joe Biden, when millions were permitted to enter the country illegally and without consequence. America’s frustration with that state of affairs is a large part of what led to Trump’s reelection. Inaction on illegal immigration by this administration would mean betraying the voters on an issue Trump cares about.

Having determined to enforce federal law, ICE could ask for help from local police and sheriffs, but the state is not required to comply. That’s the nature of a federal system: the federal government cannot commandeer state employees or resources. Normally, local officials would be interested in enforcing their own laws — at the very least — in the face of rioters. But California Governor Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass decided to sit on their hands.

This was not the first time they let a section of Los Angeles burn, and they can’t even blame the weather this time.

As the riots spread, Newsom and Bass insisted the local cops needed no help. Trump didn’t believe them, and sent in the National Guard. Clearly, he learned from the Minneapolis riots in his first term that Democrats would rather see a neighbourhood go up in flames than ask for Trump’s help. And cry as they might about it, it is good for the people living there that Trump did not give them the option.

Newsom can’t decide if he’s the new, moderate Democrat for 2028 or the resistance warrior for 2020. So he’s doing both and failing at each. After spending the last few months rebranding himself as a centrist, he’s back to his progressive roots, standing with violent rioters who wave foreign flags and against the federal government and its attempt to enforce longstanding federal law. He’s even threatened to cut off Californians’ federal tax payments, though it’s not clear how he would do so (federal income tax is paid by individuals, it does not pass through the state government.)

Clearly, the state government would be of no help. Trump made the only choice any self-respecting president could make, just as Lyndon Johnson did in Alabama in 1965 and Dwight Eisenhower did in Arkansas in 1957. Democrats will squirm at the comparison, but they are defying federal authority and national consensus in pursuit of narrow, home-state political priorities, just as those other Democrats did in the Fifties and Sixties.

When state officials deny the supremacy of federal law in an area of law — immigration — that is beyond a doubt one of federal concern, they are tiptoeing to the edge of insurrection. Newsom wants to be President of the United States; he does not want to be the man who touched off civil war to protect unrestricted illegal immigration. Now that Trump has called his bluff, he’ll have to back down or go down in infamy.