While the California National Guard troops he commandeered from that state’s governor were guarding the federal detention center in Los Angeles, pockmarked with “fuck Trump” graffiti, our would-be emperor was taking in a musical.

Emperor Donald Trump and his royal consort Melania arrived at the Kennedy Center in Washington, alongside Republican members of congress and whoever left in Washington isn’t boycotting the Trumpified venue (whose ticket sales are down by more than a third) to take in Les Mis. Trump is a longtime fan of the musical, and has, rather ironically, used one of the principal songs: “Do you hear the people sing” as walk-on music. One wonders if he has paid attention to what the play is even about, or anything about the author, Victor Hugo, who lived in Napoleonic France during Trump’s favorite century: the 19th. His biography, and his shift from typical monarchist to full-own liberal republican might be considered ironic, if would-be King Donald actually thought about it:

Hugo emerged as a true Romantic, however, with the publication in 1827 of his verse drama Cromwell. The subject of this play, with its near-contemporary overtones, is that of a national leader risen from the people who seeks to be crowned king.

Also this:

The defense of freedom and the cult of an idealized Napoleon in such poems as the ode “À la Colonne” and “Lui” brought Hugo into touch with the liberal group of writers on the newspaper Le Globe, and his move toward liberalism was strengthened by the French king Charles X’s restrictions on the liberty of the press as well as by the censor’s prohibiting the stage performance of his play Marion de Lorme (1829), which portrays the character of Louis XIII unfavorably. …

… With the Revolution of 1848, Hugo was elected a deputy for Paris in the Constituent Assembly and later in the Legislative Assembly. He supported the successful candidacy of Prince Louis-Napoléon for the presidency that year. The more the president evolved toward an authoritarianism of the right, however, the more Hugo moved toward the assembly’s left. When in December 1851 a coup d’état took place, which eventually resulted in the Second Empire under Napoleon III, Hugo made one attempt at resistance and then fled to Brussels.

Les Misérables was published during Hugo’s exile, and is a dramatic rumination on good and evil, wealth and poverty, and crime and punishment — all themes that seem to elude a guy who probably just likes how the songs sound and the fact that the story is European… It’s also interesting that it was written one year into the U.S. civil war…

After the publication of three long books of poetry, Hugo returned to prose and took up his abandoned novel, Les Misérables. Its extraordinary success with readers of every type when it was published in 1862 brought him instant popularity in his own country, and its speedy translation into many languages won him fame abroad. The novel’s name means “the wretched,” or “the outcasts,” but English translations generally carry the French title. The story centers on the convict Jean Valjean, a victim of society who has been imprisoned for 19 years for stealing a loaf of bread. A hardened and astute criminal upon his release, he eventually softens and reforms, becoming a successful industrialist and mayor of a northern town. Yet he is stalked obsessively by the detective Javert for an impulsive, regretted former crime, and Jean Valjean eventually sacrifices himself for the sake of his adopted daughter, Cosette, and her husband, Marius.

The Trumps and their Republican friends arrived to the scene of drag queens protesting outside the Kennedy Center. Inside,e they received a mixture of boos and cheers inside the half-empty theater, where he went to bask in the glory of also seeking to be crowned king.

Donald Trump has not yet made it illegal to boo him.

But he has turned the federal government into an instrument for his personal enrichment (while making everyone else poorer) and a giant, expensive tool to bolster his fragile ego by making the government itself constant flatter him. That includes his “cabinet” who are little more than professional kiss-asses. And he views the rest of the world as nothing more than vassal states whom he believes should fall in line under his boot, as this brilliant Canadian politician, former New Democratic Party MP Charlie Angus pointed out in declaring Trump to be nothing but a sexual predator and a gangster.

And to that point, Trump has made it essentially illegal to protest his evil regime’s policy of pop up deportations, designed to terrify brown people before kidnapping members of their community. The anti-DEI regime, which opposes recruiting or hiring nonwhite people, women, or gay or trans people, fully believes in quotas — their in-house ghoul, Stephen Miller, has imposed a 3,000 brown person a day quota on the state police who are called ICE. And they are executing their dirty work at various prime locations to find nonwhite people, to include, according to sources I spoke with in Los Angeles while we were there:

• Home Depot locations (their favorite)

• Warehouses where mainly Latinos line up for day work

• High school and even elementary school graduations

• Courthouses where people are showing up for their lawful immigration hearings

• Mexican food restaurants

• City parks in places like Inglewood

• Meat packing plants, and believe it or not…

• The bus and carpool parking lot at Disneyland (because you know that’s where all the gangbangers hang out)

To put down the protests, he has seized control of the California National Guard and deployed them against their own neighbors, friends and family, though so far, their deployment has been limited to defending the federal detention center in Los Angeles, which has faced no actual threats, but which is completely covered in “fuck Trump,” “fuck ICE” tags, which I’m sure infuriates the peevesh, portly fascist in chief.

And when the protests inevitably happen, both the feds and local police do what you’re used to them doing. Sometimes using horses…

Now I will note that on the evening that happened — night one of the L.A. curfew, I was less than a mile away for an event at the Soho House in the Warehouse District that was shut down before it even began because of the curfew, and the scene looked like this:

But in the few, limited blocks near the civic center in L.A. and other pockets of Los Angeles and cities around the country where protesters are clashing with Trump ‘s state police, those protests are being put down violently.

Because that’s what autocrats do.

At this point, Trump’s descent into fascism is so complete, union leaders, veteran community activists and even Democratic elected officials are being arrested and charged with crimes against the state almost as a matter of routine. These include:

Democratic congresswoman LaMonica McIver, charged with battering a police officer when she herself was shoved by ICE officials in front of a private prison ICE detention center in New Jersey.

SEIU union leader David Huerta, thrown to the ground and injured, yet charged with conspiracy to impede an officer for resisting the kidnapping of migrant workers in front of a warehouse in Los Angeles last week.

The latest being California Senator Alex Padilla, who was just tossed out of a Krist Noem press conference, manhandled, and arrested:

All of this while Trump is threatening to go full Tiananmen Square on anyone who protests his Kim Jong Un birthday parade on Saturday.

In one of his first acts of his second term as president, Donald Trumppardoned hundreds of people who attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to try to keep him in office, including those who beat police officers.

On Monday, Trump posted a warning on social media to those demonstrating in Los Angeles against his immigration crackdown and confronting police and members of the National Guard he had deployed: “IF THEY SPIT, WE WILL HIT, and I promise you they will be hit harder than they have ever been hit before. Such disrespect will not be tolerated!”

The discrepancy of Trump’s response to the two disturbances — pardoning rioters who beat police on Jan. 6, which he called “a beautiful day,” while condemning violence against law enforcement in Los Angeles — illustrates how the president expects his enemies to be held to different standards than his supporters.

When does he start requiring school children to throw their arm in the air, Elon style and yell “Hail Trump!” … or else…?