On Sunday, President Donald Trump brazenly defied the Governor of California Gavin Newsom by deploying the national guard against demonstrators in Los Angeles, as they protested against the administration’s immigration raids. Trump’s move marked the first time a president deployed a state’s National Guard without a governor’s request since 1965 – when President Lyndon B. Johnson sent troops to Alabama to protect civil rights protesters.
To help break down the situation in LA, Pulitzer Prize winner, Zeteo contributor, and LA resident Viet Thanh Nguyen joined Mehdi for a town hall Q&A with paid subscribers, where he answered questions from the audience.
During the conversation, Nguyen – who is a refugee himself – explained how Trump has used his anti-migrant rhetoric to justify his drastic move.
“The Trump administration has already set up a narrative that we are in a war of culture and civilization… Depicting this as an invasion of this city by undocumented migrants then allows the Trump Administration to invade the city on its own terms,” Nguyen says to Mehdi.
Nguyen told Mehdi that Trump’s additional deployment of 700 U.S. Marines to Los Angeles on Monday is a part of Trump’s attempt to create a, “spectacle” in the city.
“Trump wants to make Los Angeles Fallujah on the Pacific. That’s the spectacle, that’s the reality show he wants to create. And most people in Los Angeles are not buying this narrative. The danger, however, obviously, is that some portion of the American population will buy into this narrative,” Nguyen tells Mehdi.
Mehdi and Nguyen also discussed the LA protests themselves, with Viet telling Mehdi that any violence from the protests are, “coming first from this militarized police presence in LA.”
Read the article on Zeteo.
Transcript:
Mehdi:
Hello everyone. I know you’re all joining us. Welcome to another Zoom town hall from Zeteo. I know you’re all joining the chat. It’s 2:00 Eastern. I am delighted to say that I’m joined for this Zoom town hall by Pulitzer Prize winner, chair of English and professor of American and English studies at the University of Southern California, award-winning novelist and writer, Viet Thanh Nguyen. But forget all those titles. He’s a Zeteo contributor, so it’s taken too long to get him into a Zeteo town hall. Viet, such a pleasure to see you.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
It’s a delight to be here, Mehdi. Thanks for having me.
Mehdi:
And what a time to be here, and I want to tell, I think there’s a hundred people already in the chat. We arranged this call because we’re wanted to try and find a time where both of our schedules could work. And we arranged this I think about a week ago, two weeks ago, and then, coincidentally, you happen to be living and teaching in LA, and there’s nothing happening in LA right now, right, Viet? Nothing. It’s quiet.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Well, that’s a weird contrast, because obviously everybody here knows what’s happening in LA in terms of downtown, and the infringement of Los Angeles by various kinds of armored and militarized police sent by the Trump administration. But in 99.99% of LA, things are very quiet and normal, as I experienced this weekend with my children.
So I regret not being at the protest when I’m solo parenting, but I’ve been to many protests in LA over the years. They’ve wholly been peaceful, and loving, and joyful, and these are the reports I’m getting from my friends on social media and private communications who are attending these protests, the teargassing, the rubber bullets, the violence, any of that that’s happening has been coming first from this militarized police presence in LA.
Mehdi:
Yeah, you have Stephen Miller, who is from LA, claiming that the entire city, swaths of the city are being burned to the ground. Fox have talked about the entire city being on fire, and they did this of course in 2020 as well, when they claimed that entire cities were burned down by Black Lives Matter, even though studies later found that, I think, 93 or 97% of protests in the summer of 2020 were peaceful. Obviously there has been violence in LA, there is rioting, there is looting, I saw an Apple … But that’s what they want, right? That’s what the Trump administration … They want to focus on these sporadic, isolated acts, when as you say, the majority of the protesters are peacefully protesting against ICE rounding up immigrants at Home Depots. This all began at a Home Depot, and of course you mentioned that you would’ve liked to have gone to the protest.
You are someone who has spoken eloquently, written extensively about the immigrant experience in the United States of America. You are a refugee yourself, and you’ve written for us on that topic. So I urge people to go and check out, on zeteo.com, Viet’s writings for us. This topic itself is an interesting one, because these combine the two big issues that Trumpists and MAGA care about, which is dealing with migrants and crime, this imaginary crime wave that’s taking over America, and LA is now providing … And by the way, they’re in LA. They’re not in Alabama, they’re not in South Dakota, they’re not in all these red states where migrants are working without documentation. They just happen to be in a very blue city.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Let’s be clear what’s happening. The Trump administration has already set up a narrative that we are in a war of culture and civilization, the United States is being threatened by immigrants, documented or undocumented, especially brown immigrants, that are threatening the fabric of the American economy and American culture, and they’re very easy scapegoats and targets for the Trump administration.
And Los Angeles is the city that much of America, or a substantial portion of America, loves to hate for fairly obvious reasons. It is a successful example of a multicultural Pacific Rim global city in which, while we do have our problems, and we have problems, because we’re in the state of California, which is the fourth-largest economy in the world, so if we have problems, they are nation-sized problems, but they’re not problems caused primarily by an invasion of outsiders.
And this is the way that the Trump administration, and Stephen Miller, and Kristi Noem, want to cast this problem. So depicting this as an invasion of this city by undocumented migrants then allows the Trump administration to invade the city on its own terms. We’re in a situation in which the National Guard has been called in, not at the request of the governor, not at the request of the mayor, and now 700 Marines from Camp Pendleton. Trump wants to make Los Angeles Fallujah on the Pacific. That’s the spectacle. That’s the reality show he wants to create, and most people of Los Angeles are not buying this narrative. The danger, however, obviously, is that some portion of the American population will buy into this narrative.
Mehdi:
As they did with the 2020 summer protests. There are a big chunk of the United States population that believes that 2020 BLM burned down half of the eastern seaboard, or whatever it is. It is very easy when you have a propaganda network like Fox, which is going to focus on the violence and ignore the fact that these were peaceful protests to begin with, and that the violence predominantly came from federal agents throwing munitions and gas at protesters. In fact, we saw, I think it was an LAPD officer who fired around at an Australian reporter, shot her in the leg on camera, pointed and shot, aimed at her. So the violence, again, is very similar to 2020 in terms of who’s actually doing the rioting. Is it the public, or is it actually members of the government and police forces?
It’s interesting you mentioned Fallujah. I mean, these people turned up to a Home Depot. I just want to make this clear. They didn’t turn up to fight with a cartel in some kind of Hollywood movie warehouse scene, where there’s guns drawn on all sides. They turned up in this military gear, this war on terror outfitting. And Spencer Ackerman’s written a great piece for us today on the imperial boomerang of the War on Terror in LA.
They turn up at a Home Depot, and there’s reporting from the Wall Street Journal, I’m not sure you’ve seen today, where Stephen Miller was telling them, “Just go to Home Depots. We need to get the numbers up.” Right? “Forget about violent criminals. Go to Home Depot, round people up. I could stop 30 people in the street who were illegal immigrants today,” he claimed, in conversations that were not written down, conveniently. These are the orders that are going out, just round up day laborers, fathers with kids with no criminal records at Home Depot, and not just round them up, round them up in most militarized, as you say, Fallujah-esque way possible. This is spectacle.
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Viet Thanh Nguyen:
It’s also a war of narrative. The Trump administration and Trump himself are very, very good at narrative. Whether or not you agree with the narratives that they’re putting forth, they hit the message. And there’s two things that have to happen here. One, there has to be a strong counter-narrative response, and I think we are seeing that. There are a lot of social media posts, there are a lot of young activists, there are a lot of older activists trying to illuminate what’s actually taking place in Los Angeles, that these have been peaceful protests. This is a city that has turned out in terms of engaging in mutual aid, trying to help fellow residents of this city who are being targeted by the Trump administration.
But the other aspect of the narrative war that’s taking place that gives me a little bit of hope is that I think there’s also an overreach on the part of the Trump administration. It wants to put out this spectacle of crime and punishment, with a president with authoritative powers, and an ICE force with authoritative powers. But a large part of the American public is reacting negatively against the spectacle of families being torn apart, of legal residents coming in and doing what they’re supposed to do in immigration offices, and being forcibly arrested by ICE and other kinds of agencies, by masked police officers who won’t reveal themselves.
So there’s a certain way in which this reality show aspect of authoritarian power that Trump is putting forth, while it could work for a part of the American population, is also actually, I think, turning off a large part of the-
Mehdi:
Yes.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
… American population as well. And we have to seize on that.
Mehdi:
And the polls suggest that people, even with the violent unrest, want that to be dealt with by local and state authorities, not by federal authorities or the military. And just to be clear, for people tuning in, this is the first time since 1965 and LBJ that a president has deployed the National Guard against the consent of the state’s governor. And before that it was Eisenhower. And both Eisenhower and LBJ did it to protect civil rights protesters. They didn’t do it, in fact, to abuse people’s civil rights, which is what Trump is doing right now.
The violent unrest is an issue, though, in terms of spectacle terms, in terms of what people see on their nightly news. Even Omar Jazeera, one of our subscribers, has a question for you, Viet, and if you have questions, I know there’s more than a hundred of you in the chat right now, head to the Q&A section, write down your questions. I’ll try and get through some of them. Omar asks you, Viet, he asks both of us, what is stopping protesters from sitting down on the ground, binding their hands to showcase nonviolence, and pass the time by reading books, playing music, nonviolent stuff? Why is it so difficult to organize [inaudible 00:08:37] do that, it would weed out bad actors and infiltrators. What’s your response to that? It’s a common line from people.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I think there’s a couple of things. I think a lot of the protest is spontaneous, and a lot of the protesters are youthful, and so they’re doing what feels right for them. I’m not saying that’s necessarily the right thing from a strategic or media narrative point of view. So yes, I think that would be great if there was more discipline, more organization, but I’m not out there on the street, so it’s hard for me to say that.
But the second thing I’ll say is, even if they were peaceful, there would still be a violent response. And I can speak to this person-
Mehdi:
I agree with that.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
… because I’m a professor at USC, there was an encampment at USC, a hundred students, they did everything they were supposed to do. They were peaceful, they had sit-ins, they had teach-ins, they had yoga sessions, all this kind of thing. Did not prevent the administration from bringing in as many armored police and a helicopter as there were students on the ground and forcibly breaking up that encampment. So I understand the point of the critique, but I also think that even if the protesters were doing exactly as Omar said, the LAPD still would’ve tear-gassed them and shot rubber bullets at them.
Mehdi:
And Oz Huck has a similar line to Omar. He’s saying, “Is this the time to confront Trump this way? Because it looks like the Democrats are once again supporting something unpopular in most of the country, anarchy.” Why not wait for prices to go up? Why not wait for his whole TACO performance to cause problems, is Oz’s point.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Well, I think it’s arguable about whether this is an unpopular move. We still have to wait and see how all of the polling results play out and so on. But it is a war over images, and we’ve had one set of images where the Trump administration has done things like arrest and attempt to deport various kinds of people for various kinds of reasons that has helped to mobilize his base.
But I do think that a forceful, assertive display of counter protest where people are taking to the streets and demonstrating that they’re not just going to accept what the Trump administration is going to do, that’s also inspiring for a certain part of the population as well. And I don’t think we should give up on this notion that we actually need to have some visible counter response that’s not simply know Democratic politicians saying, “We don’t agree.”
We need to actually see people on the streets. And of course, every protest is going to generate a negative reaction. Let’s go back to the Vietnam War. The majority of the American population supported the Vietnam War. A lot of Americans did not like what student protesters were doing during that time. Did that mean that the student protests were wrong or ineffective? I think that’s not true. So the visibility of counter protests at this point is going to produce, obviously, some negative reaction for some part of the American population, but I think it’s also going to generate a lot of, it’s going to give a boost of morale to people who want to see something being done to stop what the Trump administration is doing.
Mehdi:
People often say, “Why can’t you be like MLK and be nonviolent?” forgetting that MLK was super unpopular when he died, and people didn’t support the Freedom Riders or the sit-ins at counters. They were unpopular at the time amongst white liberals, even. And by the way, you’re a hundred percent right that the reaction would still be the same even if this was a nonviolent protest, and the encampments are a very good example of that.
And I also think we shouldn’t, just to respond to Oz, we shouldn’t really assume the polling on this stuff. I was told that Democrats were on the wrong side of an 80/20 issue with Kilmar Abrego-Garcia. In fact, the polling shows that the American public judged Trump’s performance on Abrego-Garcia as one of his worst issues. And by the way, that pressure worked. Abrego-Garcia is now coming back to get the due process that some of us insisted is his right.
Aisha Husseini asked Viet, “What’s stopping other Democratic governors from speaking up along with Gavin Newsom, who’s been very vocal with this administration?” Is this Gavin Newsom’s moment? You are in LA. Those of us on the East Coast can never keep track of, is Newsom popular, not popular? People in California say, “No, we don’t like him,” but then he wins elections. Last year he was seen as a favorite to succeed Biden, until Biden made it impossible for anyone but Kamala Harris. Then he did this podcast with Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon, and suddenly the base hated him. Now he’s beloved again because he said, “Tom Homan, come arrest me,” he said yesterday.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Who knows? I mean, he’s a politician. He’s obviously a pretty good politician to get as far as he’s come. I mean, I give him credit, right? I mean, it’s kind of a cynical move to say what he said, but at least he said it, and he said it at the right moment.
And in fact, we do need at least some kind of politicians who are willing to say things, even for their own benefit, if it asserts a resistance and if it punctures the narrative of the Trump administration. We have many other hopeful examples out there, obviously, throughout the country, of young politicians who are willing to do even more than that. But let’s give Gavin Newsom some credit at the moment, given all of his various hypocrisies in the past, and his sort of weather vane politics, I get it, but I appreciate what he has [inaudible 00:13:26]-
Mehdi:
In the moment.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
… at this moment.
Mehdi:
And I do want to come back to the Democrats in one second, but just while we’ve got you, you’re in California, it’s now an LA issue, but it’s not just an LA issue. There are protests against ICE across the country, in New York, in Boston. Trump himself has said, “I’m going to put the military everywhere,” he said this week, his words. Where does this end, Viet, where does it go next, in your view? As someone who’s been following, especially, the protests against the treatment of migrants, this issue of ICE and deportations, we knew it was going to be the big domestic issue of the Trump second presidency, and it is. Where does it go next?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I think it’s unpredictable where it goes next. I’m glad that there is a proliferation of protests, but if Trump follows through and decides to send national guard units to every state, wherever these protests are happening, and then to militarize, and send even more contingents of the US Army or the Marines, on the one hand, things can obviously get very, very bad.
But on the other, but the flip side of it is that it also indicates that Trump is losing control. What kind of president needs to put the Army or the Marines into American streets in order to quell protests? And I think a substantial portion of the American population is smart enough to figure that out, that we have not had to do this in a very, very long time, at least since the 1960s, and the results of that were disastrous in the past, with many deaths as well.
So if Trump decides to go that far, number one, I think there’s negative damage for his own narrative, but of course the real danger is violence on the part of the state. People could get shot, people could get killed, and Trump could decide to go even further, and we’ll have an even greater stress test on our judicial system and our capacity to restrain an authoritarian president.
Mehdi:
What do you say to people who say, “Oh, they’re carrying Mexican flags, they should be carrying American flags.” As someone who’s spoken very eloquently about hyphenated identities and multiculturalism, what does it mean to you when you see people on the streets carrying flags, they might be American citizens, by the way, this assumption that they’re all immigrants, but a lot of them feel that their identity is under attack. What’s your response to that?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Well, I think we do have to have a better narrative war out there as well. The isolated images of flags like this is going to have a negative effect, I think, on certain parts of the American population. So we have to respond not by saying people shouldn’t fly the Mexican flag or other kinds of flags like that, but to offer up counterexamples. You can fly the Israeli flag without consequence in this country. You can fly the Confederate flag and put it out there at the US capital, and somehow you can get pardoned for doing that.
Again, part of what happens with an authoritarian narrative is it puts out a certain kind of claim, and then it tries to make that claim a fact, “It’s wrong to fly a Mexican flag.” And so we have to respond not by taking a battle on that, like, “Oh no, we shouldn’t fly the Mexican flag.” We should say, “Well, what about all the other flags that you find legitimate, that you are supporting?”
Mehdi:
Yeah, I mentioned that on Twitter this week that most of the hallways in Congress, those of us who have been to do interviews with senators and House members, see that multiple members of Congress on both sides of the aisle have Israeli flags outside their offices without any kind of question of, “Well, what’s their loyalty to America? Why do they have Israeli flags?” But okay, the double standards are there.
I do want to come to Gaza and Israel in a moment, just on this issue of the Democrats. Is there a problem here for Democrats, in that they want to kind of be the resistance now again to Trump in term two, especially on the issue of now ICE deportations, lawlessness, anti-constitutional activity by Trump. But again, they laid the groundwork for a lot of this. Joe Biden did a lot of deporting. Barack Obama famously was nicknamed by activists the deporter-in-chief. When you see people like Mahmoud Khalil, the green card holder in New York at Columbia who was arrested and detained, of course, we saw what happened to student encampments, as you just said, at USC under a Democratic governor and a Democratic president. So did they lay the groundwork for a lot of this authoritarianism and anti-speech activity by the Trump administration?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Well, I think that’s undoubtedly the case. I mean, we can go back, dial it back even further. I mean, the question of the imperial boomerang that you mentioned earlier. I mean, we wouldn’t have militarized police on the streets looking the way that they do full body armor, combat uniforms, M4 weapons, armored cars, and all of that kind of thing, if it hadn’t been for both a Democratic and Republican effort to militarize the police, and a Democratic and Republican consensus that we should, as a country, be waging forever wars, after 9/11 and even before 9/11.
So this is, in fact, has always been a bipartisan consensus, or since at least World War II, that the United States should be a global hegemony. It should have an unstoppable military power, and what that has led to is a return of that global imperial military power to the streets of the United States, through a very armored and militarized set of police departments and police forces throughout the country.
So that has been something that a large part of the American population has been willing to accept. And honestly, in terms of the Democratic administrations engaging in large numbers of deportations through the Biden and Obama administrations, a large number of Democrats were okay with that, too. So from a gross political strategic point of view, the question of deportation has not really hampered the Democratic administrations, even though it has helped us set up the legal possibilities for what the Trump administration is doing. It’s the cruelty and the spectacular elements of the Trump administration’s deportation policies that sets them apart from what Biden and Obama have done.
Mehdi:
Agreed. Pam Wesolowski says, :With Trump saying that even peaceful protests will be met with force on the 14th,” he’s doing this big parade, military parade on his birthday, but apparently it’s for the US Army. It’s not really for his birthday. Okay. She says, “With Trump saying that even these peaceful protests that we met with force on the 14th, is that a tipping point for us? In your opinion, are we actually on the verge of a full autocratic takeover?”
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I hope not. Obviously, we do not want to see gunfire in the streets and dead protesters in the streets, which would provide the opportunity for something even worse from the Trump administration. That’s a question that’s impossible to answer at this point, because we just do not know how far Trump and Miller are going to go. The rhetoric has gone very far, obviously.
Mehdi:
On that note, Kathy Bremer asks, “What do you believe the likelihood for Trump to cause a Kent State or a Tienanmen Square?” Then we’re really talking about killings in the street.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I don’t think he has to create anything. I think the conditions simply need to be present on the streets. Now, when we talk about the Kent State massacre, we should remember that there was also a Jackson State massacre that gets totally overlooked, where two Black students were killed by the police at around the same time as well. But with Kent State, this was Ohio National Guardsmen shooting Kent State students. They were white on both sides, and so we have the potential for having that happen in this country. We have a multicultural military at this point, multicultural National Guard. Some people have been saying maybe because there are people of color in these ranks that would prevent them from engaging in violence.
Mehdi:
I’m skeptical of that.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I’m very pessimistic. We have Black cops killing Black people. We have Latino cops killing Latino people. So the fact that we have a multicultural military is not a cause for great hope at this point. So there was already the condition for violence to take place. It just requires somebody who gets very paranoid and very scared to fire the first round.
Mehdi:
And I would just remind people that Donald Trump praised China’s response to the Tienanmen Square massacre in an interview with Playboy magazine in 1990, a few months after the massacre. So we know his mindset. You mentioned multiculturalism. Philip Martin asks about the multiracial composition of the protests. He says also, “How do you think the Latino vote, albeit not a majority for Trump in 2024, is impacting the protests, the participation, and the ability to divide and conquer?”
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Well, I think it’s a complicated situation. The Latino population, like the Asian American population, like other populations, were divided in terms of how they distributed their votes. But when you see direct assaults on your people rendered in such a highly visible fashion, whether it’s people being taken out of immigration offices, or sent across the border, or even in the case of Asian immigrants as well, being deported to various kinds of places, I think that strikes home, that strikes across partisan boundaries.
So even if there is support for the Trump administration from Latinos, for example, around certain kinds of economic, and cultural, and religious, and gender issues and so on, the spectacle of almost wholly brown people being humiliated, being arrested in the streets, being sent back without due process, I think that is actually going to overcome some of that support for Donald Trump.
Mehdi:
Including US citizens with cancer, children who have been expelled from this country under the pretense of deportation. I want to pivot to Gaza, but just a few comments from our subscribers. Rebecca Arovizu says, “I’m from Paramount and Compton, wrong towns to around and find out with,” which made me smile.
One anonymous attendee says, “Not a question, but audience on this chat, please resist the urge to police the protesters. They are over policed enough.” Janice Morota says, sorry, Janice Morota, apologies, says, “We need a good solid path for immigration reform, for immigrants to become full citizens. I understand the Republicans have blocked that legislation in Congress in the past.” Oh, yes, they have.
Let us talk about Gaza, because you mentioned in passing there a moment ago about Israel flags, and also we talked about Democratic Party failures. Gaza was the biggest Democratic Party failure of our lifetimes, I think it’s fair to say, certainly of the Biden presidency, played a role in Kamala Harris’s defeat. A lot of people, you and I know these people, Viet, who said, “Well, you know what? Good. We need to punish the Democrats, and so what if Trump wins? That’s the punishment the Democrats need, and Trump won’t be as bad as Biden. No one can be as bad as Biden.” What do you make of where we are with Gaza, where we are six months, nearly six months into the Trump presidency?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Oh, I think it’s terrible. We have gone from a situation from, in the beginning of this genocide, where we saw mass bombing, and that was what started to incite or encourage this very strong critique of Israel and what it was carrying out. And now we’ve moved to an issue where those bombings are still taking place, obviously, but now there’s this mass starvation campaign taking place as well.
In many ways, of course, Israel has lost control of the public relations narrative. There’s been huge pushback from Palestinians, obviously, but also from their supporters. And so I take some heart from that, but at the same time, the Palestinian population of Gaza is undergoing this medieval siege, except that it’s being transmitted with 21st century social media.
What was happening at the same time as this federal invasion of Los Angeles was that there was the Freedom Flotilla heading towards Gaza with a dozen activists, including Greta Thunberg as well, and I was thinking about the fact that these two movements cannot be separated. The Freedom Flotilla going to try to help the people of Gaza, and of course these protesters in the streets of LA trying to help their fellow residents of LA as well. These are both movements of mutual aid and solidarity. People recognize that-
Mehdi:
Well-said.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
… injustices are being carried out, and it’s up to the people to try to do something about it, because clearly the governments are not doing enough, and the politicians are not doing enough at the same time. So I think the situation in Gaza is extremely dire, and there’s great room for pessimism, and so we really do need to seize on these moments of hope that are being offered by activists.
Mehdi:
Did you ever buy the idea that, well, Trump is not a hardcore Zionist in the same way that Joe Biden is? He sent his deal-maker Witkoff abroad. He got that kind of temporary ceasefire during his inauguration, conveniently timed, and yet here we are, starvation worse than in 2024, massacres ongoing. We saw a doctor lose nine of her 10 children in one Israeli [inaudible 00:25:26] strike recently. We have the ethnic cleansing plan for Gaza, the riviera that he wants to build, and he openly says, “Palestinians will not be allowed to come back.” The Israeli government is saying, “Well, our hands are free now. We can do whatever we want, because Trump lets us,” says Smotrich and Ben-Gvir. Again, sorry to do the kind of crystal balling, but where does this go next? Surely this only ends in a bad way for the Gazans in the short to medium term, because if the Israelis have Trump’s green light to do the ethnic cleansing they’ve always wanted to do, then who’s to stop them?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Yes. I mean, what we’re witnessing is this continuing bipartisan effort to force Palestinians to submit. This has been going on for several decades at this point, Democrats and Republicans. They have their different strategies in this regard, but in the end, even the Democrats have always defaulted to the side of supporting Israel.
With Biden, the strange thing was that he seemed to be in this sort of ideologically blinkered mode where nothing would’ve distracted him from supporting Israel and Netanyahu no matter what they were doing. Obviously under Trump, things are very, very terrible. I think the one glimmer of hope here is that Trump is purely transactional, purely selfish. I don’t know if he’s very ideological in regards to his attitudes towards Israel and Zionism. Everything is filtered, in the end, towards what kind of profit he can extract from a situation? Personal profit, but also profit for his network of cronies as well.
So that might be the one possibility, that if Netanyahu and Israel become more of a liability than an asset for Donald Trump, he might do something that could surprise us. But otherwise, yes, the situation is pessimistic.
Mehdi:
I guess I half agree with you on Trump. The problem is the administration is not just Trump, right? It’s the people around him are ideologues. He sent Mike Huckabee to be his ambassador to Israel. Huckabee does not recognize the existence of Palestine or the Palestinian people. There’s reporting this week that he’s been helping to prop up the Netanyahu government, basically joining, improperly, domestic Israeli political negotiations around that government. He’s got Marco Rubio as his Secretary of State, who’s a longstanding pro-Israel hawk, people like Hegseth and others who are Christian Zionists. Yeah, it’s not great.
Here’s my question to you, though. Let’s revert back to the Democratic Party, which is now in opposition, which has an opportunity to stake out a different spot on this, and yet the Chuck Schumers and Hakeem Jeffries are still in charge of the party, and still have those hardcore pro-Israel views, and you’ve got the Fettermans.
What do you make of a Democratic Party that even now, even coming up to two years of this genocide, coming up to six months of Trump exacerbating things, an election defeat that, I’ve interviewed so many members of Congress since November, and none of them will admit the role that Gaza played in their defeat. Very few of them, some on the left, but most of the mainstream ones will not. What do you think? Is that ideology, is that fear of AIPAC, is that cowardice, is that conventional wisdom? Why are they so myopic on this? Why are they so insistent on sticking their heads in the sand on this issue?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Well, I think it’s all those things that you mentioned, but I would also say that Democrats and Republicans have their own contradictions. Each party has its particular set of ideologies, and each one is undercut in various ways by contradictions. So for example, the Republican Party said, “We support the Second Amendment and we believe in states’ rights.” They’re invalidating that exactly here in Los Angeles, in terms of stomping over a state’s autonomy and putting an authoritarian image into the streets that we’re supposed to resist as Americans.
And Democrats have the obvious contradictions that you’ve just mentioned. And so I think here the issue is which party is going to implode first, which party will unravel which first, which party’s contradictions will overwhelm them first? For the Democratic Party, we’ve already seen that happen, actually. I mean, I do think that the Democratic silence on Gaza and the refusal to confront the issue of Gaza did demoralize a substantial portion of the people who would’ve otherwise voted for the Democratic Party.
There are elements of the Democratic Party that would like to save the Democratic Party from itself. They tend to be younger, they tend to be more left, they tend to be more of color in different kinds of ways. Can they make themselves be heard? Can they win enough elections to gather enough clout in order to reform the Democratic Party from the inside? Again, these are the issues. I just don’t know what the outcome of that is to be.
Mehdi:
The contradictions of the GOP side also include aid, right? Where they’re shutting down foreign aid, but they’re still sending money to Israel. Mark Rennie, one of our subscribers says in the chat, “The Trump administration has just announced that it will cut all USAID overseas roles, obviously part of the America First agenda that his MAGA base so loves. At what point does his base start turning against the billions being sent to Israel, or does facilitating a genocide fit into America First ideology?”
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
The USAID example is really interesting, obviously, because there are real human consequences to cutting aid to USAID. We’ve seen this. There are people dying because they’re not getting certain kinds of assistance. And yet at the same time, USAID, as many on the left have pointed out, is also an element of American imperial power as well. It’s a part of the soft power narrative.
And this gets to the issue of how the Democratic Party can reimagine itself. If Trump is pushing certain kinds of agendas, is the proper Democratic Party response simply to say, “We’re going to push back on exactly that same issue,” or should the Democratic Party try to re-envision what it is that it stands for?
And so the USAID example is a prime example of that. We should, as a country, be helping other countries, but should we be doing that in the service of American imperial global power? This is, then, the perfect opportunity for the Democratic Party to say something different about this kind of issue.
Yes, as the commenter pointed out, we should not be sending billions in aid to Israel if we can’t send billions in aid to our own country, or to other kinds of countries that are really in need. But also, we should simply not be a country in which that aid is tied to the expansion of US military power. Other countries are doing things differently. China is winning the PR battle in a lot of ways on the global stage because, yes, its aid is tied to its own interest as a global power, but not in terms of its military influence in different places.
Mehdi:
It’s interesting you talk about re-envisioning what’s being done, rather than just defending the status quo. Matt Duss, former foreign policy advisor to Bernie Sanders, has a piece out this week making the point about Iran, for example, that when Trump is trying to reach a deal with Iran, he may not, it may be based on bad faith, he may revert to bombing Iran. He’s talked about bombing Iran more than ever before. But the idea that the Democratic response should just be, “No, we don’t support any of this,” or Chuck Schumer actually coming out from the right and saying, “We should not be talking in secret with the terrorist regime in Iran,” and sounding like he wants a war with Iran. That’s a ludicrous response.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Right. I mean, I think the most effective politicians in American history have always been the ones willing to steal ideas from the other side. Whether or not we agree with them-
Mehdi:
If they’re good ones. Or half decent ones.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
… [inaudible 00:32:22] moving to the center, for example, or Reagan appropriating hope and optimism, things like that. So I think the Democrats have to be smart enough to recognize that there are certain things that Donald Trump and his rhetoric are tapping into that a large part of the American population is responding to. But there are some ways in which his ideas are right. Okay, so here’s another hypocrisy and contradiction of the Republican Party. Donald Trump says he’s going to be the president of no more war, and yet he is inflicting war upon certain parts of the American population. Okay? That’s a terrible contradiction.
Mehdi:
As well as Yemen, and other places around the world.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Yeah, and that. But the strategy that the United States should not be engaging in more war, that’s the right strategy. That is absolutely the right strategy. And so for the Democratic Party to come back and say, “No, we just need to continue drone strikes and putting our military at 800 military bases around the world,” that is not the right response. So this is an opportunity for the Democratic Party to appropriate ideas that could be beneficial, both for them, but also of course for the health and wealth of the United States as a whole.
Mehdi:
Whether the Democrats will listen is another issue completely. They haven’t proved to be a party that listens after they lose elections. I actually said this to a lot of people last year when they said, “Well, we’re going to punish the Democrats, and then they’ll learn their lesson.” I said, “I don’t think they’ll learn that lesson. I don’t think they’ll wake up the morning after election and say, ‘Ah, yes, we should have been more like Bernie or AOC. We should listen to Rashida Tlaib.’ That hasn’t been my experience with this party.” Viet, before I let you go, a lot of people watching this, what gives you hope right now in these dark times?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
What gives me hope are the students and the young. I mean, honestly, this is what gives me hope. I’m a university professor. I’ve been a professor for nearly 30 years. It’s been enormously dispiriting to see university administrations, university leaderships collapse around the contradictions of Gaza and free speech, and all these kinds of questions around genocide, and academic freedom, and truth, and so on. But also obviously collapse in the face of GOP assault, as well.
And so what has given me hope is the fact that the students were the ones who turned out, they believed in the right thing, they did the right thing. They sacrificed careers and possibilities for standing up for Gaza, for building these encampments. The young people are the ones on the barricades at the present moment. That gives me hope, and I think that’s not something to be overlooked, that these are young people with passions and ideals, and we should be listening to what they say.
Mehdi:
Well-said. Viet Thanh Nguyen, appreciate you taking time out for us. If all of you at home watching, I hope, first of all, get all your friends and family to become Zeteo subscribers so we can carry an expanding. Check out Viet’s pieces for us at zeteo.com and check out his most recent book, To Save and to Destroy, which is a collection of his lectures at Harvard that he gave last year. And thank you so much again for your time. Thank you for writing for us. Thank you for giving us some hope, and we hope to do this again soon. Stay safe in LA, I believe it’s being burned to the ground right now.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Oh, yeah. It’s terrible. I spent my weekend in Malibu and looking at the Hollywood sign, but otherwise it’s terrible. Thanks so much, Mehdi.
Mehdi:
It’s terrible.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
[inaudible 00:35:22]-
Mehdi:
Terrible. Thank you everyone for watching. Goodbye. See you soon. Thank you, Viet.
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