WASHINGTON — President Trump said Tuesday that National Guard members will leave Los Angeles “when there’s no danger” — before blasting California Gov. Gavin Newsom repeatedly for allowing violent anti-ICE riots to get out of hand.
“When there’s no danger, they’ll leave,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office.
“You would have had a horrible situation had I not sent them and horrible — you’d be reporting on a lot of death and a lot of destruction that’s not going to take place. I think if you look every night, it got less and less. They were met with very strong force, the bad people, the bad sick people that do what they do.”
Trump said he spoke to Newsom on the phone “a day ago” and told him to “do a better job” with his state.
“He’s doing a bad job, causing a lot of death, a lot of potential death, if we didn’t send out the National Guard, and last time we gave him a little additional help, you would have Los Angeles burning right now,” Trump said of Newsom.
But the governor disputed the call took place, saying on X there was “not even a voicemail.”
“Americans should be alarmed that a President deploying Marines onto our streets doesn’t even know who he’s talking to,” the Democrat added.
Since Saturday, the president has authorized a total of 4,000 National Guard members and 700 Marines to counter the unrest that began Friday in response to immigration raids across America’s second-largest city.
The president said the National Guard “needed a little extra help” so the Marines had been called in as backup.
“From this, a National Guard standpoint, we have a very big military, but the National Guard, they needed a little extra help, and we sent them a little and we did a great job last night.”
While Trump said Los Angeles appeared to have calmed down, he would invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807 to send troops to enforce civil law if he felt it was necessary.
“If there’s an insurrection, I would certainly invoke it. We’ll see,” he said. “But I can tell you, last night was terrible. The night before that was terrible.”
