How Trump Should Handle the L.A. Riots

As rioters take to the streets of Los Angeles to vandalize property, light cars on fire, and assault police officers as a way to “protest” Trump’s deportation agenda, the president will need to be strategic in his response.

“The language of politics is visual—and therefore emotional, which means that a single mistake can reverse the flow of opinion and imperil the president’s immigration agenda,” Christopher F. Rufo writes. “Left-wing tacticians have trained their foot soldiers to bait law enforcement into confrontation and to play victim for the press, to great effect.”

Trump should hold off on sending in more troops, Rufo argues, and instead “pressure local leaders to buy in to the task of quelling the riots.” This way, he isn’t the only player with skin in the game.

Read Rufo’s suggestions for the president here.

In collaboration with the Sun Valley Policy Forum (SVPF), several luminaries from the Manhattan Institute will speak at this year’s SVPF Summer Institute, on July 1st and 2nd. This two-day conference retreat will be held in the premier mountain town of Sun Valley, Idaho. Reihan Salam (Manhattan Institute President), Jesse Arm (Manhattan Institute Executive Director of External Affairs & Chief of Staff), Heather Mac Donald (Thomas W. Smith Fellow and Contributing Editor of City Journal), and Senior Fellows Jason Riley and Abigail Shrier will be featured in the programming, along with other notable thought leaders. As a benefit to City Journal readers, Reserve ticket bundle registrations will be upgraded to the Bronze pass level, which includes access to a private cocktail party. For more information on the program, go here; to register with MI benefits, go here.

New York City has more than 8,000 seriously mentally ill homeless people. To ease the crisis, police officers will have to get involved, Stephen Eide maintains. But for too long, cops have received mixed messages on how—and when—to take action.

In the 2010s, the city instructed officers to handle mental-health cases with an approach stressing “de-escalation.” But since becoming mayor in 2022, Eric Adams has called for officers to take into custody those who are failing to meet their basic living needs. The sooner the cops are able to intervene, the better, the thinking goes.

Enough with the mixed messaging, Eide argues. “To make recent state reforms effective, officers need a clear message: the public and city government want them to take a more preventative approach to mental illness-related disorder,” he writes.

Read his take here.

The University of Florida decided not to confirm Santa Ono as president. Good, argues Hollis Robbins. She observes that Ono, “A consistent voice of the higher education establishment’s monoculture,” had been pro-DEI until it wasn’t convenient anymore. Ono’s rejection, she hopes, signals that Florida is on a path to rejecting conformity and embracing new ideas and intellectual vibrancy.

A new academic working paper finds that corporate America’s shift to the left was in response to pressure and financial incentives—not broader political developments—even though the move tended to hurt company stock prices. The paper’s authors, Robert VerBruggen writes, “propose a theoretical model in which Democrats’ ESG push forced corporations to pick sides, necessarily alienating investors of one political persuasion or the other.”

Read more about the study here.

“In any case, while blanket-man stumbles out the back door, the bus driver shepherds me and the elderly woman through the front door. Before the man can even wipe the dribble of bile off his mouth, we’re peeling down the street at breakneck speed.”

That’s Sanjana Friedman in our Spring issue, writing about a recent experience on a weekday morning in San Francisco. Read it here.

Charles Fain Lehman, Nicole Gelinas, John Ketcham, and Rafael Mangual discuss the violent protests in Los Angeles, the New York City Democratic mayoral primary, and the best Broadway musicals.

“What is the meaning of ‘progress’? From a liberal point of view, at the political level, it usually means passing more legislation and increasing the government’s control of even private life.

For many reasons, more legislation has seemed like a good idea in the past, but we’ve had enough of it now.”

Photo credits: Carlin Stiehl / Contributor / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images