Donald Trump and maga Republicans cannot win peace when they spew hate and launch weapons of war

Echo opinion letter to the editor: Such conflicting visions featured on the front page of the Los Angeles Times regarding Pope Leo XIV about peace versus Donald Trump’s manic threat (“Pope Leo issues antiwar message in his first Easter Mass,” “After daring rescue inside Iran, bellowing threats from Trump,” April 5).

As Leo blessed the world at Easter Mass with his prayer — “Let those who have weapons lay them down!” — Trump issued his threat of destruction, blaspheming Allah (❗on Easter Sunday😔) . 

Meanwhile, the Pope prayed, “Let those who have the power to unleash wars choose peace❗ Not a peace imposed by force, but through dialogue❗”

It is tragic that Trump’s strategy is to win with the illegal use of force, ignoring the viability of dialogue. Evil Trump's threats do not pave the way to peace; he knows only brutal force and killing the perceived enemy. He paves the way to war crimes and deaths of innocent victims.

This is more abuse of power. Absent the skills of dialogue and limited to winning by massive deadly weapons, Trump fails to promote peace as he wields the weapons of war.

From Lenore Navarro Dowling, in Los Angeles

Donald Trump and maga Republicans support fascist military takeover of Washington DC but on January 6 Trump watched TV did nothing

Crime data doesn’t justify Trump’s extreme action in Washington

Echo opinion published in the Virginian-Pilot newspaper Editorial

The District of Columbia depicted on the news in recent days bears little resemblance to the city a few hours up the road from Hampton Roads. To hear Donald Trump and members of his administration describe it, Washington ranks among the most dangerous places in the United States, if not the world.

Nothing could be further from the truth. While the District has its share of big-city problems, violent crime reached a 30-year low in 2024 — progress that should be celebrated, especially by the federal officials who live and work there.

Instead, Trump convinced himself of a fiction, wholly detached from reality, that the city must be brought to heel in the interest of public safety. His move to federalize local police and deploy the National Guard is a solution in search of a problem and another dangerous overreach from this administration.

For someone who has lived five of the last nine years in the nation’s capital, Trump is arguably the District’s most dissatisfied resident. He has repeatedly used the city as a punching bag, portraying it as a crime-infested hellhole rather than the magnificent, if flawed, community that residents and visitors know it to be.

Those attacks accelerated last week after a staffer from the Department of Government Efficiency was the victim of violence in an attempted carjacking Aug. 3. The 19-year-old software engineer was beaten by a group of assailants, prompting Trump to claim Washington “has become one of the most dangerous cities anywhere in the world.”

In doing so, Trump made a generalization based on personal experience rather than anything grounded in hard data. Incidents of violent crime are tragic and victims deserve sympathy and support, but the simple fact is that D.C. is safer than it has been in years.

Not that Trump cares. Over the weekend, the Department of Justice — which in January trumpeted that violent crime in Washington was the lowest in 30 years — mobilized patrols of FBI agents and other federal law enforcement. And on Monday, Trump put the Metropolitan Police under federal authority and ordered the deployment of 800 National Guard troops to the capital.

This comes only months after the president ordered 4,000 National Guard troops and 700 U.S. Marines to Los Angeles in the face of mild protests against his inhumane and imprecise immigrant deportation scheme. Those actions have been challenged in federal court, with a three-day trial that began on Monday.

Closer to home, Governor Glenn Youngkin, who presumably has been to the federal district just across the Potomac and can read crime statistics, cheered Trump on. Following Trump's announcement, Virginia’s chief executive posted on social media that “it’s a bad day for criminals in D.C.” and celebrated Trump “taking action to protect people in our nation’s capital.”

Again, Washington is the safest it’s been for years — which is good news for Virginia❗And Youngkin apparently has no reservations about a massive show of federal power under the president’s fictitious guise of necessity.

There was a time for Trump to deploy the National Guard to the federal city: January 6. 2021. As the president’s supporters rampaged through the U.S. Capitol, attacking police officers and threatening to kill members of Congress, Trump sat idly in the White House watching events unfold on his television.

He did not act. He did not decry the brutal assaults against law enforcement. Worse, he pardoned hundreds of those violent rioters once he returned to office. His arguments that Washington now needs his help, years after he turned his back on the lawlessness right in front of him, couldn’t ring more hollow.

If Trump is truly concerned about public safety in Washington DC, he should urge his fellow Republicans in Congress to fix the $1.1 billion hole they blew in the city’s budget with their stopgap spending bill in March. That would make a real difference in Washington. Naturally, Trump couldn’t care less.

Donald Trump and Republicans creating terror among innocent immigrants but humanitarian activists are resiting ICE raids

Elizabeth Castillo wasn’t an activist until Immigration and Customs Enforcement started taking away her neighbors.

Echo essay published in The New York Times by Michelle Goldberg

Elizabeth Castillo -They Saw Their Neighbors Taken Away by ICE. Then They Made a Plan.

It all began in June, after Donald Trump directed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to sweep Los Angeles, then used scattered violence at protests of ICE’s tactics as a pretext to send in the military. Castillo felt her working-class neighborhood in Pasadena, just outside Los Angeles, was under siege. Six people, she said, were seized at a Winchell’s doughnut shop. Two people were taken when ICE raided her apartment complex.

“It was just chaos,” she said. “And you can see, you can hear, you could feel the fear, the intimidation. You could feel the terror.”

A small woman with long dark hair, Castillo, the American-born daughter of Mexican immigrants, looks younger than her 38 years. She has five children, two of them grown but three still at home. Before the ICE crackdown she’d followed the news and always voted, but her kids and her job in health care administration took up most of her time. “You know, it’s practices here, practices there,” she said. “‘Mom, pick me up.’ ‘Mom, drop me off.’”

But she’s someone who knows firsthand what deportation can do to families. In 2012, she said, when her kids were all under 10, her husband, who was born in Mexico but grew up in the United States, was thrown out of the country. She’d been a full-time student; he was the family’s sole provider. Castillo had to drop out of college and explain to her children why their father could no longer live with them. “I can relate to what it does to a family,” she said. So this summer, when ICE started grabbing people from her community off the streets, she felt she had to act.

At first, Castillo was on her own with a megaphone. When she saw ICE vehicles in the streets she followed them in her car, honking and shouting to warn people that they were coming. 

She started getting up before dawn to patrol her apartment complex. Then she contacted the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, which runs a nearby job center. Through them, she was plugged into a citywide network of people who are constantly tracking ICE’s activities.

Among those doing amateur anti-ICE reconnaissance in Los Angeles are people from established nonprofits that work closely with the mayor’s office. Then there are more militant groups that, beyond simply documenting ICE’s operations, try to actively disrupt them.

Ready to warn about ICE raids

“We have people patrolling all over the city starting at 5:30 in the morning,” said Ron Gochez, a high school teacher and spokesman for one of the more radical organizations, Unión del Barrio. When they find agents, he told me, “We get on the megaphone. We denounce the terrorists for being there, and then we inform the community in the immediate area that they are present. And then we say to the people, ‘If you are documented, come out. Come outside. Join us. Help us to defend your neighbor.’”

The widespread raids that have upended life in Los Angeles may soon spread to other cities, especially now that Republicans in

Congress have increased ICE’s budget to $27.7 billion, up from about $8 billion. (That’s more than that of most militaries. 😟😠) “We are a petri dish,” Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles told me. “They’re experimenting with us. If they come and make this stand in Los Angeles, then they can scare all the other cities, just like the universities have been scared, just like the legal firms have been scared.”

Yet if Los Angeles is a testing ground for mass deportation, it’s also a place to see how the resistance is evolving. Though there have been some big anti-Trump marches this year, many of those most horrified by this administration are looking for more immediate, tangible ways to thwart it. The movement against ICE in Los Angeles — one that is starting to take root, in different forms, in cities like New York — is part of a growing shift from symbolic protest to direct action.

It may be no match for the Trumpian leviathan. But it can protect a few people who might otherwise get swept into the black hole of the administration’s deportation machine. And in the most optimistic scenario, it could be a foundation for a new, nationwide opposition movement.

“We have been abandoned by the courts, by the business community,” and, with few exceptions, “by the political class in Washington, D.C.,” said Pablo Alvarado, co-founder of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network. “All we have are our friends, our allies and ourselves.” One of his group’s slogans is, “Solo el pueblo salva al pueblo.” It means, “Only the people can save the people.”

These days, when Castillo isn’t working, she’s usually in the parking lot of a small, run-down shopping plaza on Orange Grove Boulevard and Garfield Avenue. There, with N.D.L.O.N.’s help, she and a few others who live nearby have set up a sort of command post that they call the community defense corner. They have a canopy tent and literature tables. Each day, volunteers meet there from 6:30 a.m. until around 10 at night. Some of them are new to activism. Others have been protesting Trump since he was first inaugurated. They half-jokingly call Castillo their C.E.O. It stands, she says, for “controllo everything over here.”

The volunteers distribute know-your-rights fliers and pictures of ICE agents and vehicles that have been spotted in the area, along with the number of a hotline to report sightings. “Meet the Clown Squad fascists in your hood,” says one handout. There’s a pile of orange whistles to blow if you see something suspicious, and beaded friendship bracelets with the phone numbers of local immigrant rights groups.

When the volunteers get word of a raid, they rush over to make a commotion. Wearing a custom black “Grupo Auto Defensa” T-shirt, Jesus Simental, a middle-aged man who works delivering industrial equipment, told me, “They don’t want noise, and we bring the thunder.”

In the first Trump presidency, the resistance announced itself with the Women’s March, a gargantuan display of feminist fury at Trump’s improbable victory. No similar spectacle greeted his return. For those who abhor him, Trump’s re-election was devastating, but it wasn’t shocking. He’d won the popular vote, giving him a democratic legitimacy he didn’t have the first time around. The dominant mood in many blue precincts was despair rather than outrage. Organized opposition to Trump seemed, at least to some observers, to be dormant. A Politico headline shortly after the election announced, “The Resistance Is Not Coming to Save You. It’s Tuning Out.”

While the exhaustion was real, it wasn’t the whole story. Anti-Trump forces may have been quieter than they were before, but they never stopped meeting and planning. As the administration exceeds many of its opponents’ worst fears, they’re becoming more visible.

Resistance in the second Trump term, however, looks a bit different than it did in the first. There’s less focus on big marches and rallies, and more on trying to make a concrete difference, often close to home. Think of the doctors sending abortion medication into states with prohibitions, or the protests in front of Tesla dealerships that helped push down the company’s stock price. “Resistance 2.0 is much more locally grounded and community embedded,” said Dana Fisher, an American University sociologist who studies protest movements.

The shift in tactics derives, in part, from a changing understanding of the crisis we face. During Trump’s first term, the resistance often put its trust in existing institutions. Indivisible, founded by two former Hill staffers, organized people by congressional district and taught them how to lobby their representatives. Some liberals made heroes of establishment figures like Robert Mueller, the special counsel who led the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, and Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Newly awakened citizens showered the Democratic Party and big nonprofits like the A.C.L.U. and Planned Parenthood with donations.

The assumption underlying the resistance then, said Fisher, was “that Trump was a blip,” elected by a freakish confluence of unlucky circumstances. His victory was seen as a mistake that future elections could fix. The resistance, she said, “was all about getting us to 2018, and all about trying to create the capacity to push back using the political system.”

This is, of course, a generalization; there was plenty of civil disobedience and left-wing radicalism during Trump’s first term, especially in the febrile summer of 2020. But looking back from the bleak vantage of 2025, it’s striking how optimistic many people were that some established power in American life — be it Congress, law enforcement, government bureaucrats or the media — could stop Trump from doing his worst.

As such faith has withered, the character of the resistance has changed. “We recognize that in a period of authoritarian breakthrough where there is a very rapid sprint to consolidate power, you cannot focus purely on the formal political avenues of representation,” said Leah Greenberg, one of Indivisible’s founders. “Getting out of this is going to require a symphony of defiance.”

Indivisible is running a campaign called “One Million Rising” aimed at training a million people in strategies of protest, noncooperation and civil disobedience, especially around mass deportation. The emphasis on ICE is in part simply a response to the sheer cruelty of Trump’s immigration regime. Far from prioritizing criminals, ICE, under pressure from Trump’s fanatical deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, seems desperate to round up as many people as possible. That includes people with American spouses and children who’ve been here for decades, those who’ve followed all the rules in seeking asylum, and even those with green cards.

In recent months viral videos have shown ICE agents breaking car windows, throwing people to the ground, and ripping parents away from their kids. Human Rights Watch has reported on the degrading treatment of immigrants in federal detention; at one Florida facility, men described being forced to eat “like dogs” with their hands shackled behind their backs. Venezuelan migrants sent by the United States to a megaprison in El Salvador have reportedly faced even worse conditions; Andry Hernández Romero, a gay makeup artist later freed as part of a prisoner exchange, described being tortured and sexually assaulted by guards.

Yet the campaign against ICE isn’t only about immigrants, because to many on the left, the agency is understood as the tip of the authoritarian spear. Trump and those close to him, after all, are openly fantasizing about stripping Americans of citizenship or sending them to the same El Salvador gulag that held Hernández Romero. Americans are being forced to acclimate to the once-unthinkable sight of masked men, wearing civilian clothes and refusing to show identification, grabbing people off the streets and throwing them in the back of vehicles. There have been reports of ICE assaulting and detaining U.S. citizens. 

At a Home Depot in Hollywood last month, agents reportedly tackled an American photographer who was recording a raid; he was held for more than 24 hours. (He’s now seeking $1 million in damages.)

“They have made a calculation that they can get away with a bunch of things as long as it’s framed as immigration enforcement,” said Greenberg. “That will then allow them to ratchet up authoritarian conditions for the rest of us.”

With ICE increasingly seen as the front line of a growing police state, people all over the country are looking for ways to stand up to it. In New York, ICE arrests seem to be concentrated in immigration courts, where agents have been snatching people after their asylum hearings, even when judges ask them to come back for further proceedings. Activists, in turn, are showing up at the courts to try to provide whatever support to immigrants they can. They hand out fliers — languages include Spanish, French, Urdu, Punjabi and Mandarin — informing immigrants of the few rights they have. They collect emergency contacts and immigration ID numbers so that when people are arrested, someone can inform their loved ones and track them through the detention system.

When the hearings are over, the volunteers try, often in vain, to escort the immigrants past intimidating groups of masked, armed ICE agents to the elevators and onto the street. That’s what New York City’s comptroller, Brad Lander, was doing when he was arrested in June.

A week after that arrest, Lander was back in immigration court with his wife and daughter. After shouting ICE agents took the husband of a very pregnant woman from Ecuador, Lander’s wife, Meg Barnette, spent an hour consoling her, then connected her to an immigrant rights nonprofit. When a woman from Liberia collapsed, panicked and sobbing, after hours of watching other immigrants being dragged away, Lander’s daughter held her baby girl.

The Liberian woman said she had a lawyer, but he didn’t show up, so Lander found one in the building to accompany her to her hearing. It’s hard to say if that’s the reason the woman was able to walk out of the court freely; at least to outsiders, there’s very little rhyme or reason as to who gets detained. “It’s like an awful game of roulette,” said Lander.

At a news conference later that day, Lander confessed to feeling he hadn’t done enough, and called on other New Yorkers to come to the courts, bear witness, and maybe engage in nonviolent civil disobedience. “We have to find ways to gum up the works of this hideous system,” he said.

Because ICE’s efforts in New York have largely revolved around the courts, that hideous system has been hidden from much of the public. It’s more conspicuous in Los Angeles, where Trump has treated the entire city like a hostile colony to be subdued.

This month, armed ICE agents backed by National Guard troops, some on horseback or in armored vehicles, stormed into the city’s MacArthur Park, forcing kids at a nearby summer camp to shelter inside. Bass was livid, but the administration made clear that she had little authority. “I don’t work for Karen Bass,” the Border Patrol chief, Gregory Bovino, told Fox News. “Better get used to us now, because this is going to be normal very soon. We will go anywhere, anytime we want in Los Angeles.”

Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar, told Fox News that roving ICE patrols had the right to stop people because of what they look like. “They don’t need probable cause to walk up to somebody, briefly detain them, and question them,” he said, based on “their location, their occupation, their physical appearance.” On July 11, a judge issued a temporary restraining order enjoining such racial profiling, but a widespread sense of dread and anxiety remained, especially in immigrant strongholds. With frightened people staying inside, several Angelenos told me that the eerie emptiness in their neighborhoods reminded them of the pandemic.

One thing Los Angeles has going for it, however, is a deep, established immigrant rights ecosystem. These groups, said Bass, “have prepared for this type of stuff in the past, though not as massive, not as egregious as this.” Indeed, she told me her office relies on activist networks to keep abreast of ICE activity in the city. “That’s how I learn about where raids are happening,” she said. “It’s not like we’re notified of anything.”

It’s a jarring statement about the relative impotence of city government, but also a testament to what an important role the activists are playing.

Since Castillo and her neighbors started their community defense corner, a few others have popped up around Pasadena, including outside a Home Depot on East Walnut Street. The stores have become a central site in the battle over mass deportations; day laborers often gather there to look for work, making Home Depots a common target for ICE. In response, groups of activists have, as they put it, “adopted” Home Depot locations, showing up in shifts to look out for immigration agents. On East Walnut Street, several of the day laborers told me they feel safer with the activists around. “There’s fear, but now we feel protected,” said one, knowing there will at least be a warning if ICE arrives.

While the community defense corner on East Walnut Street operates every day, extra people show up on Wednesdays, part of a weekly demonstration organized by a local librarian. Several of the protesters, mostly middle-aged and older women, told me they were part of local Indivisible chapters.

Alvarado, from the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, was grateful for their presence. “The way we view it is that you stop fascism, you stop authoritarianism by protecting those that are at the end of the whip,” he said. “If you want to protect democracy, you protect the most vulnerable. That’s what we want people from all walks of life to understand. That’s why it’s beautiful to see the soccer moms, the teachers, getting it.”

Recently, said Alvarado, a woman from Van Nuys, a neighborhood about a half-hour away, visited the community defense corner on East Walnut Street, with plans to start something similar in her own area. He expects the model to spread further. In late October or early November, N.D.L.O.N. is planning a conference in Los Angeles to train people from all over the country in its strategies.

“Los Angeles was used as an experiment, and we want to share the things that we’ve done right, the things that we’ve done wrong,” he said. With ICE’s new cash infusion, said Alvarado, he expects similar crackdowns all over the country. People “need to know what to do, how to resist, how to fight back,” he said. “Peacefully, lawfully, orderly, but resist.”

There is, of course, only so much such resistance can accomplish in the face of a heavily armed, spectacularly well-funded and politically powerful deportation machine. More than 2,000 immigrants have been arrested in Los Angeles over the past month. Gochez, from Unión del Barrio, believes many more would have been taken without the work of groups like his, but there’s no way to quantify it.

Clearly, however, it matters that people are watching what ICE is doing. As Alvarado points out, a major reason public opinion is turning against Trump’s mass deportation campaign is the viral videos showing what it looks like in practice. Activist groups train people to record ICE activities wherever they see them, helping to capture both arrests and agents’ aggression toward civilian observers. “Men in masks, wearing civilian clothes, pulling guns against people who are exercising their rights while filming, that’s exactly what Americans don’t like to see,” he said.

Alvarado is a citizen now, but he grew up in El Salvador, fleeing the civil war with his brother when he was 22. The sight of masked men taking people away to sites unknown feels to him familiar. “This is a word I don’t take lightly, but people talk about disappearances,” he said of the situation in Los Angeles. “For now, it’s a stretch, I will say, but that’s how it starts. No right to due process. People just snatch you and put you in the vans. It’s something I’ve seen, and I know where that leads.”

To fight what’s coming, he believes, people will have to depend on each other. “Not by being violent and responding with more violence, but by building community and understanding,” he said.

If nothing else, neighbors banding together to weather an emergency is an antidote to helplessness and isolation. The three people volunteering at Orange Grove and Garfield when I was there — Castillo, Simental and Karen Skelly, who works as a personal and administrative assistant — hadn’t known one another before June. Now, said Simental, they’re intertwined like shoelaces: “We just all tied up together.” As we spoke, people kept walking up to take signs, fliers or bracelets, or just to say thank you. Passing drivers honked in appreciation. Simental told me about a local man who checks with him to make sure the coast is clear before he goes to the laundromat or the market.

“Everyone is protecting each other right now, and we can see it, we can feel it,” said Castillo. “I don’t know — we feel like the sheriffs in town.”

Donald Trump must be removed from office because he is beyond being scary as executive orders are driven by his obsession with fascism

A Show of Force by Fintan O’Toole*

Published in the New York Review of Books

Maine Writer prologue:  "Scary" has become normalized by Trumpian autocratic behavior. Thankfully, journalists like Fintan O'Toole is not letting Trump get away with fascist behavior without calling it what it is- "dangerous".  ⚠️

A man protesting against raids conducted by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement while National Guard troops stand outside the Metropolitan Detention Center, Los Angeles, June 8, 2025

What Trump was trying to demonstrate in Los Angeles is that he can project his armed power into every American community at any time.

Donald Trump’s desire to militarize American politics and politicize the American military is unfinished business. Militarizing American politics means defining all those who do not conform to his version of normality as mortal enemies to be confronted as though they were hostile foreign nations. Politicizing the military means dismantling its self-image as an institution that transcends partisan divisions, is broadly representative of the US population, and owes its primary loyalty not to the president but to the Constitution. These aims are intertwined, but the first cannot be consummated until the second has been accomplished. Trump failed to do this in his first term, but he is determined not to be thwarted again.

In late May 2020, as hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets of American cities to protest the killing of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis, Trump held a meeting of his advisers in the Oval Office. According to Bob Woodward and Robert Costa in their book Peril (2021), Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s most extreme anti-immigrant policies, advised: “Mr. President, they are burning America down. Antifa, Black Lives Matter, they’re burning it down. You have an insurrection on your hands. Barbarians are at the gate.” The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, responded, “Shut the fuck up, Steve.”

Citing the daily Domestic Unrest National Overview produced for him by his staff, Milley told the commander-in-chief, “They used spray paint, Mr. President. That’s not insurrection.” He pointed to a portrait of Abraham Lincoln: “That guy up there, Lincoln, had an insurrection.” Milley insisted that the BLM protests were “not an issue for the United States military to deploy forces on the streets of America, Mr. President.” Along with other real soldiers, Milley was able to resist Trump’s demand that the 82nd Airborne Division be sent to Washington. But that was then. Now there is no one in the Oval Office to tell Miller to shut the fuck up or to explain to Trump what an insurrection is.

On June 6 federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents targeted what US district judge Charles Breyer cited as “several locations in downtown LA and its immediate surroundings” that were “known to have significant migrant populations and labor-intensive industries.” They arrested forty-four working people, including some day laborers gathered outside two Home Depot stores, and employees of an Ambiance Apparel warehouse in the Fashion District.

On June 7, by which time only around a dozen arrests had been made at protests against these roundups, Trump issued a memorandum to the secretary of defense, attorney general, and secretary of homeland security declaring that these demonstrations “constitute a form of rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States.” He authorized his secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, to take federal control of the California National Guard and to “employ any other members of the regular Armed Forces as necessary.” By June 9, around 1,700 National Guard soldiers and seven hundred US Marines had been deployed to Los Angeles, even though both the Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department had made clear that they did not require additional resources to manage the protests or suppress the outbreaks of looting and vandalism that occurred on their margins. As Breyer emphasized in his ruling that Trump’s federalization of the National Guard was “dangerous” and illegal, “There can be no debate that most protesters demonstrated peacefully.”

Trump’s deployment of troops in Los Angeles thus had no military purpose. It can best be thought of as a counterdemonstration. For Trump, those who protest against him are “paid troublemakers, agitators, and insurrectionists.” He cannot imagine large-scale dissent as anything other than a professionally organized conspiracy. The US Army, by this logic, is his own professionally organized crowd. It must be seen on the streets to demonstrate his personal power. That military presence in turn redefines peaceful protesters as enemies of the United States. They cease to be citizens exercising constitutionally protected rights to free speech and assembly and become outlaws and aliens.

Moreover, Trump’s lawyers pleaded in court that protesters need not engage in rebellion to be rebels. Breyer noted in his ruling (which was overturned on appeal) that “in a short paragraph, Defendants suggest that even if there was no rebellion that would justify federalizing the National Guard, there was still a ‘danger of a rebellion.’” The intent could hardly be clearer. So long as Trump has political opponents, their dissent alone makes the danger of rebellion timeless and ubiquitous. What Trump was trying to demonstrate in Los Angeles is that he can project his armed power into every American community at any time. This is a form of wish fulfillment that has deep roots in his psyche.

Everything in Trumpworld happens twice—the first time as performance and the second as reality. In The Art of the Deal (1987), the best seller that formed his personal creation myth, Trump, who dodged the draft for the Vietnam War because of “bone spurs,” included three photographs of himself in military uniform. The attire is that of a dashing officer in some Ruritanian operetta rather than of a soldier in the US Army. In the first two pictures, taken in 1964, to mark his high school graduation from the New York Military Academy, he is the Student Prince. We see him gloriously arrayed in a tall parade hat with a feather plume and a chin strap, a waist-length jacket with rows of brass buttons crossed by a white shoulder belt and adorned with elaborate epaulets and decals, white gloves, and a ceremonial saber. He is a toy soldier in a make-believe army.

But in the third photo he is leading a detachment of armed and uniformed young men on the streets of an American city. Trump is at the head of his prep school’s contingent, marching up Fifth Avenue in New York’s Columbus Day Parade of 1963, a year in which there were already over 16,000 US troops in Vietnam. (Remarkably, his bone spurs do not seem to have inhibited his ability to march in step.) His own caption for the photo is bizarre: “This was my first real glimpse of prime Fifth Avenue property.” He seems at once to be occupying New York and eyeing opportunities in the conquered territory.

Yet Trump came to believe that this playacting made him a real soldier. Michael D’Antonio, in his biography Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success (2015), reported that Trump
insisted that he had actually known military life.

In a separate conversation he said, “I always thought I was in the military.” He said that in prep school he received more military training than most actual soldiers did, and he had been required to live under the command of men…who had been real officers and soldiers. “I felt like I was in the military in a true sense.”

Francisco Franco (1892-1975)-Francoist dictatorship

Here we may perhaps discern the origins of Trump’s extraordinary ability to eliminate the difference between performance and reality. The archetypal twentieth-century dictators—Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, Francisco Franco, Augusto Pinochet—had been or remained soldiers. Trump was a soldier “in a true sense,” by which he means presumably that a simulacrum of military masculinity is purer than the dirty reality of combat—war without tears.

Until, that is, the spectacle becomes the reality. Trump’s jokes become deadly serious, his provocative rhetoric becomes violent provocation—and his Ruritanian fantasy becomes America’s nightmare. This is what happened on January 6, 2021. Trump’s speech to his supporters before the invasion of the Capitol was that of a general firing his troops up for battle: “And we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” But Trump did not then actually lead his storm troopers anywhere, and according to his apologists, “fight like hell” was not supposed to be taken literally. Trump’s fascistic militarism retained its performative quality and remained suspended between the playacting war games of his youth and the actual violence he frequently threatens, as commander-in-chief of the world’s most potent army, to unleash. It is thus entirely apt that his big moves toward military dictatorship in recent weeks have been a compound of show business and terror.

Trump’s grand triumphal-march-cum-birthday-party in Washington on June 14 was as much a pageant as a parade: a thousand of the participating troops were dressed in costumes rented from the Motion Picture Costume Company, which describes itself as “a leading supplier of civilian, military, and police wardrobe to the motion picture industry.” The versions of history being played out by the troops depended on the availability of suitable outfits. According to USA Today, “The Army eliminated the War of 1812 and Spanish-American War from the parade after running into trouble with the costuming process.”

The Washington jamboree was thus a show of force in which the show was at least as salient as the force. But the phrase had a parallel and much darker meaning on the streets of Los Angeles. That was a very different kind of costume drama: the dressing up of peaceful protest and some vandalism as a war so that, in Trump’s words, his soldiers could “liberate Los Angeles from the Migrant Invasion.” This too was make-believe, and it too was a performance. 

As California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, put it, “The federal government is taking over the California National Guard and deploying 2,000 soldiers in Los Angeles—not because there is a shortage of law enforcement, but because they want a spectacle.” This spectacle, though, was not meant to entertain. It was a war movie with real guns.

Trump’s militarism remains at the meta stage, which is to say it is still primarily about language and form. The word game he is playing is one in which “rebellion” and “insurrection” are stripped of all their past meanings so that they can be forced into any garb he chooses. This is a further aspect of the drive toward absolute power. As Humpty Dumpty replies when Alice objects to his claim that a word means “just what I choose it to mean,” “The question is, which is to be master—that’s all.” Milley’s rebuke of May 2020—pointing out that Lincoln was the president who faced a real insurrection—was a challenge to Trump’s position as master of meanings. In the second term, there is no place for such insolence.

On June 10, just after he sent the troops into Los Angeles, Trump boasted of rehabilitating the official memory of leaders of that insurrection. Addressing what was in effect a political rally at Fort Bragg, he told uniformed soldiers not only that he had given the base back its original name (it once honored the Confederate general Braxton Bragg, then was renamed Fort Liberty, and under the new dispensation is named after the World War II paratrooper Roland Bragg) but that “we are also going to be restoring the names to Fort Pickett, Fort Hood, Fort Gordon, Fort Rucker, Fort Polk, Fort A.P. Hill, and Fort Robert E. Lee.” It is another word game: officially the military heroes being honored with the latest renamings just happen to have the same surnames as famous Confederate insurrectionists. The refurbished titles of these bases are thus elaborate puns. In this linguistic burlesque it is not only names that mean whatever Trump wants them to mean. It is also the actual history of rebellion against the United States. He has dropped it into a never-never land where it is both remembered as heroic and forgotten as unspeakable—much, of course, like January 6.

Meanwhile, restoring these Confederate designations obliterates the names that replaced them in 2023, the names of women and people of color: Charity Adams, Mary Edwards Walker, Richard Cavazos, William Henry Johnson. This too has purpose. For now at least, the primary goal of Trump’s deployment of troops on the streets of Los Angeles is not the violent suppression of dissent. It is the remaking of the army itself. Trump is instructing the troops on how they must think of themselves and of the nature of the country they are pledged to defend.

Hegseth writes in his best seller The War on Warriors (2024) that he “didn’t want this Army anymore.” This army is the one that actually exists: of its 1.3 million active-duty troops, 230,000 are women, and more than 350,000 are Black. Trump appointed Hegseth to make many of these soldiers invisible. The War on Warriors is subtitled Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free. It offers “to recover a true vision of the value of strong men.” These are “red-blooded American men,” men who “respect other strong, skilled, dedicated men” and not “men who are pretending to be women, or vice versa.” It follows that women and Black men who have risen up the ranks of the army are the good soldier’s nemesis: “A black or female soldier who gets promoted, primarily because of the color of their skin or the genitalia between their legs—gets people killed.”

While Hegseth pays lip service to racial equality in the army (“There is no black and white in our ranks. We are all green”), elsewhere in his book he falsely implies that Joe Biden’s appointment of the air force general Charles Q. Brown Jr. to succeed Milley as chairman of the Joint Chiefs was a diversity hire: “Was it because of his skin color? Or his skill? We’ll never know, but always doubt.” This hardly qualifies as racist dog-whistling—the pitch is too low and too brazenly loud. Trump duly fired Brown, an unmistakable overture to the much larger project.

The Trumpian reimagining of the US Army has nothing to do with fighting foreign wars. It is all about reasserting the innately white and male nature of America. According to Hegseth, the military’s “key constituency is normal men”: “Normal dudes have always fought, and won, our wars.” His vision, as he explains it, is to restore not just the value of strong men but also “the importance of normality.” The military is to be reborn as its true self: the embodiment of a nation of red-blooded American men. 

What that means for abnormal Americans of impure blood, does not have to be spelled out.

In this regard, putting troops on the streets of Los Angeles is a training exercise for the army, a form of reorientation. Soldiers are being retrained or loyalty to the president rather than the Constitution. They are meanwhile becoming accustomed to confronting that deviant and anomalous America. In Trump's (staged for television) Fort Bragg speech, Trump invited the troops to see protesters in Los Angeles as invaders: “We will not allow an American city to be invaded and conquered by a foreign enemy, and that’s what they are.” But what was happening in LA was, he claimed, even worse than an armed incursion:

Not only are these service members defending the honest citizens of California, they’re also defending our republic itself, and they are heroes, they’re in there, they’re heroes. They’re fighting for us, they’re stopping an invasion just like you’d stop an invasion. The big difference is most of the time when you stop an invasion, they’re wearing a uniform. In many ways, it’s tougher when they’re not wearing a uniform because you don’t know exactly who they are.

If the army doesn’t know exactly who “they” are, it has to be told. Trump reminded the troops that their purpose is to spread fear: “For our adversaries, there is no greater fear than the United States Army.” Its job now is to spread that fear to an ununiformed and thus unknowable mass of internal enemies. Just as Trump transforms actual rebellion into the vague but omnipresent “danger of a rebellion,” he makes the invading army invisible, amorphous, and fluid. Traditional military doctrine demands a clear understanding of the nature of the threat and the shape of the opposing forces. Contrariwise, in the Trump doctrine the threat must be as nebulous as possible, and the opposing forces must be formless. Thus only the commander-in-chief can say at any given time what they are. The enemy the army must learn to face is one that he, and he alone, can conjure.

In this Trump is offering soldiers what fascist leaders have always offered their followers: a peculiar amalgam of the thrill of transgression and the submissive surrender to absolute obedience. New lieutenants and sergeants are (for now at least) issued a document called The Army: A Primer to Our Profession of Arms. Its prohibition on any appearance of partisanship is emphatic:

The Army as an institution must be nonpartisan and appear so too. Being nonpartisan means not favoring any specific political party or group. Nonpartisanship assures the public that our Army will always serve the Constitution and our people loyally and responsively. When representing the Army or wearing the uniform, you must behave in a nonpartisan way too.

At Fort Bragg, Trump incited the uniformed soldiers arrayed behind him to boo the press and laugh at his political opponents, thus disobeying those prohibitions, while a pop-up shop on the base sold MAGA-branded clothing and jewelry and faux credit cards labeled “WHITE PRIVILEGE CARD: TRUMPS EVERYTHING.” This organized insubordination had an obvious point: soldiers must transfer their obedience from the army and the Constitution to Trump himself.

The manual makes clear to soldiers that they should not obey illegal orders:

When you believe you are being given an illegal order, you should take further action—do your homework, seek counsel, and approach your leaders for clarification. If this fails or you know that what you are being asked to do is unlawful, then it becomes your duty to disobey and to follow the law, no matter how resolute your superiors’ stance.

In this light, it actually suits Trump’s purposes if his federalization of the National Guard is understood to be illegal. His deployment of troops in Los Angeles is intended to dissolve boundaries—between domestic disputes and foreign wars, between reality and performance, and above all between a law-bound democracy and arbitrary rule. Getting soldiers used to following illegal orders and to disregarding their “duty to disobey” is a big step toward autocracy.

As his dithering over whether to bomb Iran showed, Trump has a problem: fascism bends inexorably toward war, but much of his appeal lies in his promise to end America’s foreign conflicts. Part of the solution is to mount one-off spectaculars: B-2 stealth bombers dropping 30,000-pound bunker busters. The other part is to repatriate the idea of boots on the ground. Like iPhones and pharmaceuticals, that kind of war will no longer be made abroad. It will be manufactured all over America.

Fintan O’Toole is the Advising Editor at The New York Review and a columnist for The Irish Times. His book Shakespeare Is Hard, But So Is Life was reissued last year. (July 2025)

Donald Trump and the Republicans owe the truth to Americans instead Trump invents one crises after another

Echo opinion letter published in The News-Gazette an Illinois newspaper: "distractions and distortions" and now we can add the unprovoked attack in Iran to this dangerously growing category. 

Question❓  Are Americans any safer today because of what Donald Trump and the Republicans are doing to destroy our democracy❓

Answer- Of course not. Americans are all less safe, regardless of where we are in the world, even while living in our own nation as legal citizens.

Trump's misuse of troops is just a ploy: What Donald Trump is busy creating in Los Angeles was so predictable. In fact, Kamila Harris predicted it during her 2024 campaign. 

Trump is aving a terrible time. A former ally (Elon Musk) attacked him and his policies, a loud clamor for the release of the Epstein files was heard, a bad series of economic reports was not released, Republican senators balked at his “big, beautiful bill,” and the Ukrainians kept fighting on.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump played the proverbial big guy card by calling on the U.S military to launch a devastating bombing on the soverign nation of Iran, without provocation to cause this aggressive attack. 

Faced with all these negative events, the Trump playbook calls for one approach — go on the offensive with distraction and distortion. In spite of the fact that the Los Angeles police thanked protesters for practicing their First Amendment rights in an overall orderly and peaceful manner, and Governor Gavin Newsom saw no pressing need to take additional steps, Trump decided to send in the National Guar

What better way to distract people from all the negative stories Trump doesn’t want the voters to focus on. It’s too bad he didn’t make the unilateral decision to send in the National Guard on January 6, when a truly violent protest took place at our nation's Capitol.

From Scott Davis in Champaign Illinois

Donald Trump abuses the US military because the Marines are young men who are not trained to arrest civilians

....and the American people do not approve of how Donald Trump uses the military and the National Guard to be his private Nazi style SS troops. 

Donald Trump’s response to the Los Angeles protests demonstrates his weakness, not his strength. Echo opinion published in The New York Times by James Bouie

When I argued this point, there was some polling, but not a whole lot. Now, at the end of the week, we have a lot more data, and — (White House '3-D Printer Barbie- Karoline Leavitt) spin notwithstanding — the politics of this action looks terrible for the Donald Trump.  (In fact, regardless of the ambiguous decisions made by the confused court systems, the American people can see Donald Trump's incompetence for what it is. Sheer cruelty created in a failed attempt to look like a strong dictator.) 

Writing for his Strength in Numbers newsletter, G. Elliott Morris put together a useful chart of this week’s polling as it relates to the L.A. protests, Trump and immigration. When asked if they approved of the way the president is handling immigration, majorities of Americans in polls from The Associated Press, Quinnipiac University and The Washington Post said no. Trump received a positive rating of 49 percent approval in a survey conducted by YouGov for The Economist. His average net approval on immigration is around -7 points.

On the question of deportations, both YouGov and Quinnipiac find negative ratings for the president, for an average net approval of roughly -14 points. More Americans disapprove than approve of Trump’s decision to send troops to Los Angeles, for an average net approval of nearly -8 points, and a solid majority of Americans, 56 percent according to YouGov, say that state and local officials should take the lead on responding to protests in Los Angeles, as opposed to the 25 percent who say it should be a federal responsibility.

As for the protests themselves, more Americans disapprove than approve, for an average net approval rating of -5 points.

What these numbers tell me is that with a more measured approach, Trump might have been able to win this confrontation and bring Americans around to his position. As it stands, a draconian use of force against largely peaceful protesters — in service of a brutal campaign of deportations — has turned the public against him, even as it dislikes the protests themselves. And I expect that the manhandling and handcuffing of Senator Alex Padilla of California during a news conference held by Kristi Noem, secretary of homeland security — a stunning abuse of power — will worsen the president’s position with most Americans.

Today, in cities and towns across the country, some number of Americans — maybe even you — will be protesting against the administration and in opposition to the White House’s monarchical pretensions. As I write this, there is no way to know the scale of these Los Angeles demonstrations. But something tells me that the events of this week have activated many Americans in a way that will prove detrimental to Donald Trump's authoritarian goals.
What I wrote (,,,in fact, on "No Kings" June 14  demonstrations, an estimated 20,000 people peacefully demonstrated in downtown Los Angeles.) I argued that deploying the military in reaction to a modest protest of federal agents’ actions was a fundamental demonstration of weakness and of the brittleness of Trump's attempt to grab authoritarian control.

Power, real power, rests on legitimacy and consent. A regime that has to deploy force at the first sign of dissent is a regime that does not actually believe it can wield power short of coercion and open threats of violence.

Donald Trump swore an oath to uphold the Constitution two times but says he "doesn't know" if it applies to him? OMG!

Trump’s comments on due process ‘cannot be considered acceptable’

Echo opinion letters published in the Los Angeles Times:

To the editor: For anyone in any public office to say he doesn’t know whether he’s required to uphold the Constitution cannot be considered acceptable (“Trump, in a new interview, says he doesn’t know if he backs due process rights,” May 4). For the sitting president, that answer is incompatible with the very office. One of the jobs of the presidency is to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed,” as stated by Article II of the Constitution.

Article II does not empower the president to do whatever he wants; it specifies his responsibilities. 

It is unfortunate that we don’t require a presidential candidate to pass a simple civics test, as we require for an immigrant to become a citizen.

From Bill Seckler, in Riverside

To the editor: Was Donald Trump not paying attention (or did he have his fingers crossed?) when he recited these words at his two inaugurations❓ “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of president of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

From Jeff Freedman, in Los Angeles

Protect the Constitution and shred Trumpziism

The Pathogen that is Trump

Donald Trump took an oath to protect and defend the US Constitution but now he wants to shred it for the purpose of declaring the 2020, election to be illegal.
Frankly, it is Trumpziism that must be shredded.

A Trilogy of echo opinions published in Yahoo Finance

Echo to the editor: The former president's desperate and unhinged antics continue. Trump's latest abomination, apparently stated seriously, is his suggestion that the Constitution should be terminated so that he may be restored to the presidency.

Trump is indeed relevant because he audaciously announced another bid for the presidency, and he continues to command tens of millions of loyalists, many of whom are armed.

His suggestion that the protections for the people that are offered within the Constitution should be nullified is a clear demonstration of the grave danger a second Trump presidency would pose. If granted that power, he would surely pull all the stops to become an autocratic leader for life.

I have to believe that the American people are more sensible than to allow that to happen.  

From Oren Spiegler, Peters Township, in Washington County Pennsylvania

And another echo to the editor: How big of a cliff is this? Trump wrote the following this weekend on his social media platform:

"A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution. Our great 'Founders' did not want, and would not condone, False & Fraudulent Elections!"

The founders deliberately divided government for checks and balances. The courts are an important part of that equation. They have ruled decisively against Trump's baseless claims — including from Trump's own appointments.

Trump's vision is no less than fascism. Now if he can just get enough brain-dead voters to go along, or use violence when ballots fail him, he can be emperor.

Ed Walcek, Placentia in Orange County California

Third echo opinion to the editor: Former Republican Party consultant Rick Wilson has commented, "Everything Trump touches dies."

The largely muted response to Trump's call to upend our Constitution shows how thoroughly our national "frog" has gotten used to its place in Trump's cauldron of water heating to a boil. It's as if we're saying, "Oh, that's just Trump spouting off."

HELLO?  This former guy wants to be our president again!

Years ago, I heard a survivor of the Nazi era explain why Germany's pre-Nazi government dissolved. The person said they couldn't tell if it was 10 minutes to midnight or 10 minutes past.

Buckle up — we've got work to do.

Ken Levy in Los Angeles

Representative Liz Cheney speaks truth to power and reveals "The Big Lie"

(I doubt the ventriloquist Edgar Bergen ever thought that his dummy Charlie McCarthy would ever come alive!)

Opinion letter echo published in Bakersfield.com a California newspaper. 

Edar Bergen was the ventriloquist who spoke for the famous dummy he named Charlie McCarthy. Obviously, Edger Bergen's dummy has come alive in the person of  the Republican Kevin McCarthy.

Rep. Kevin McCarthy stated in a speech that former President Trump was responsible for the January 6 insurrectionist attack on the US Capitol. At that time, McCarthy was right, and I applauded his standing up for truth and for our country.

Nevertheless, McCarthy (wrongmindedly) perceived, soon after January 6th, that Trump is still the head of the GOP in the eyes of many and back-pedaled. 

McCarthy and many other Republican leaders buy into "The Big Lie" about the 2020 election outcome as somehow not being legitimate, Moreover, McCarthy shamefully voted to overturn the results of the election in the House.

Now, Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., the powerful GOP minority member in the House of Representatives, is speaking "truth to power" about Trump's role in the January 6, seditious attempt, and about his perpetuating The Big Lie about the election. Cheney's truth makes Rep. McCarthy uncomfortable,

Maybe, in part, it is because he looks like the non-truth-teller that he is, that McCarthy wants her out of her leadership position.

Rep. List Cheney is a patriot, and she is telling the truth. When did those attributes become a liability? I was born in Bakersfield California and grew up in Kern County. I wish I could vote against McCarthy (but live in Los Angeles). 

People of Bakersfield, you can vote McCarthy out of office! .

— Linda Randolph, Los Angeles (Calling on the people of Bakersfield to vote against Rep. Kevin McCarthy!)

Republicans should take polygraph tests before voting to impeach Donald Trump

It's impossible to understnd how Republicans can ignore the evidence about the urgency to impeach Donald Trump. 

In my opinion, all Republicans should be required to take a polygraph before voting on the articles of impeachment!  Those who blindly screech about protecting Donald Trump from impeachment cannot possibly be telling the truth!

These two echo opinion letters were published in Los Angeles Times both published in the same edition:

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2019-12-14/democrats-impeach-trump-beginning-of-presidency

This political cartoon was published in Mississippi Today

The following two opinion echo letters were published in Los Angeles Times:

To the editor: Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee were truthful about one thing during the hearings on articles of impeachment: Some Democratic members of Congress called for impeachment from the beginning of Donald Trump’s presidency. They did this not out of hatred, but because Trump had already committed impeachable acts.

There was the hush money payment to adult film actress Stormy Daniels in violation of campaign finance law. Later, Trump fired FBI Director James B. Comey to try to stop the investigation of possible collusion between his campaign and the Russian government. He attempted to fire Justice Department special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, instructed White House counsel Don McGahn to lie about it, and attempted to intimidate and influence witnesses. In violation of the U.S. Constitution’s emoluments clause, he has retained ownership of his businesses, therefore receiving money from foreign governments that spend at his hotels.

Now, with impeachment underway, it’s worth remembering that in 2018, he said people would revolt if he was impeached. So yes, Democrats have been calling for Trump’s impeachment since the beginning of his presidency, and with very good reason.

Joe McLaughlin, Los Angeles

To the editor: Russia and Ukraine? Forget them both. Forget the infamous July 25, phone call (bribery!) with Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky. Forget high crimes and misdemeanors that may or not have occurred.

Let’s look instead at other evidence in support of reasons why Trump should be impeached.
Trump’s personal “style” of hostility, bigotry, misogyny, despotic swaggering and total lack of ethics are proof enough that he should be removed. Would the owner of any private company, from a mom-and-pop hardware store to a major corporation, consider hiring anyone with Trump’s obvious flaws?

Until now I thought "no". But after the recent hearings, I see that Trump’s illegal behavior is held in the highest regard by irresponsible Republicans!

Philip DiGiacomo, Pacific Palisades, California

Feeding the homeless by supporting Robin Hood restaurants

Reported in FastCompanyNews

The Latest Trend In Restaurants Is Serving The Homeless

A new Spanish restaurant called Robin Hood is the latest: Paying customers at breakfast and lunch foot the bill for three-course dinners for those who can’t afford to pay.

By Ellie Anzilotti*

Through the door of a small brick building in Madrid, customers sit down to dinner at tables covered in white cloth. Drinks are poured into crystal glasses, and a three-course meal of mushroom consommé, roast turkey and potatoes, and vanilla pudding fills the plates. The restaurant welcomes around 100 guests a night, but none of them pay. They are homeless, and crowds who dine at the Robin Hood restaurant for breakfast and lunch foot the bill so dinner guests can eat free of charge. For paying customers, shelling out a little extra for basic ham, croquetas, and juice earlier in the day is kind of the point: They’re drawn to the restaurant knowing that their meal will help to feed the hungry.

In early December, 80-year-old Catholic priest Ángel García Rodríguez opened the Robin Hood restaurant with the idea that homeless people should be able to eat “with the same dignity as any other customer,” Rodriguez told NPR. 

García Rodríguez founded the charity Mensajeros de la Paz (Messengers of Peace), of which the Robin Hood restaurant is a part, 54 years ago; his organization, like many others, has worked to accommodate a need exacerbated by the Spanish recession, which, though ended, has left overall unemployment hovering around 20%.

Many of the customers at the Robin Hood restaurant are those who stumbled upon hard times during the financial crisis. NPR (National Public Radio) spoke to one man, Luis Gallardo, who lost his home after his accounting firm went bankrupt. Since then, he’s been on the streets, but said that meals at the Robin Hood restaurant remind him of Christmases in easier times.

The Robin Hood restaurant is part of a trend that’s been transforming access to good and healthy food in a number of cities. In October, the EAT Café in West Philadelphia opened with a similar philosophy: that everyone should be entitled to a full-service, sit-down dinner in the neighborhood, regardless of whether they can afford the bill. Diners can choose to pay $15 for a full-course meal, donate a little extra, pay whatever they want, or eat for free. Though still operating as a nonprofit, the EAT Café (which stands for “Everyone at the Table”) aims to become self-sustaining over the next several years, with 80% of its customer base paying full-price; it’s already adding a much-needed dining option in an area of the city where non fast-food options are scarce.

Los Angeles’s Everytable takes a slightly different approach: At the café, which opened last summer, guests pay fast-food prices for healthy food like kale salads or Jamaican jerk chicken. Everytable scales its prices to local incomes, so that they will cost $8 in downtown L.A. location (opening this year), but only $4 in less affluent South L.A. The restaurant aims to make good food available in any neighborhood; so far, its South L.A. location has drawn people who may not have time to cook but can’t afford to shell out $12 for a nutritious meal. The founders hope to add more than 10 locations in L.A., then expand to other cities.

In Madrid, García Rodríguez hopes that the Robin Hood restaurant, still in the early phases, will be successful enough to remain open as a permanent fixture. That depends, of course, on its popularity, but for now, that doesn’t seem to be an issue: García Rodríguez is working on getting celebrity chefs to come in and cook dinner once a week, and NPR reported that breakfast and lunch reservations—for paying customers—are completely booked up through March.

*Eillie Anzilotti is an assistant editor for Fast Company's Ideas section, covering sustainability, social good, and alternative economies.