Remembering
James Robison

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Trump Learned the Bitter Lesson of 2020: Don’t Let the Rioters Win

By John Zmirak Published on June 12, 2025

As gangs of illegal aliens and radical activists attack ICE officers and now local police in the streets of Los Angeles, I’m reminded of the race riots of 2020, and the mistakes most of us made while they were happening. In case you’ve blotted those ugly memories from your mind, let’s review what happened in the aftermath of the botched arrest of career criminal George Floyd:

  1. The police officers involved were immediately pulled from duty, then quickly arrested and charged. The System was working. There was literally nothing to riot about, except the vague and tendentious claim that “systemic racism” was killing black Americans. 
  2. The Marxist group Black Lives Matter used Floyd’s accidental death as a bloody shirt to wave around, demanding (and getting) hundreds of millions of dollars from large corporations to spend however it wished (for instance, on fancy homes and salaries). Conservative pundits and churches adopted that organization’s mantra and offered uncritical support — desperate to establish their “antiracist” bona fides and protect their reputations.
  3. A series of coordinated “protests” erupted across the country, demanding that governments defund the police. Over and over, these protests turned violent, devolving into riots that saw the looting of neighborhoods poor and rich alike. Our media gaslit us with reports that these events were “mostly peaceful,” even as fires lit by arsonists raged on camera in the background.
  4. In blue states like Minnesota and California, Democrat governors who were savagely enforcing COVID lockdowns allowed the rioters to run free — pulling police from the scene and refusing to use their National Guards to protect citizens and their property. This was the starkest example of anarcho-tyranny in U.S. history … until the January 6 fedsurrection, that is. People who sneered when black entrepreneur and former presidential candidate Herman Cain died of COVID after attending a Trump campaign event and insisted that in-person voting was too dangerous to be allowed defended the riots publicly from the charge that they were “superspreader events.” Their excuse? “Racism is a threat to public health.”
  5. Trump did not federalize the National Guard in those rogue states to impose law and order. Like many of his supporters, and likely the advisors who convinced him to remain inert, I reasoned, “Let the blue cities burn. We’ll make sure the federal government doesn’t pay to rebuild them. The Left is trying to trap Trump into overreacting by using force in the hope that civilians will suffer and he will look like the dictator they’ve been calling him since Election Night 2016.”

I now realize Step 6 was a huge mistake, as I’m sure Trump and his team had the chance to reflect on during the four years of lawfare and chaos they all endured under The Secret Committee Formerly Known As Joe Biden.

Now, we need to analyze why this is true so we can give full-throated support to restoring the rule of law today.

Abandoning Territory to Marxist Gangs Is Wrong

Donald Trump is president of the entire United States, and he works for every American. That includes law-abiding citizens in blue states and cities who might not support mayors and governors committed to flouting U.S. laws on immigration, citizenship, and public order. Trump represents the harried, hunted police who work in Los Angeles and the taxpayers forced to fund the health care, education, and even transgender treatments of millions of illegal aliens the Biden regime let in. 

We’re supposed to love our neighbor. At minimum that includes our fellow Americans — even those deluded enough to believe that we owe citizenship and welfare payments to foreigners who broke into our national home. Just as we shouldn’t hand out free heroin to addicts and shrug at the thought that they might OD, we shouldn’t hand anarchy to Californians and Minnesotans, even if it’s what they say they want. “Stinks to be you” isn’t a New Testament maxim.

When Moderation Looks Like Weakness, It Is Weakness

Letting blue cities burn or sink in their own squalor sounds tempting. However, it’s not just a crime: it’s a blunder, as political philosopher Yoram Hazony points out.


The spectacle of U.S. cities roiling with chaos, falling into the hands of Leftist mobs waving foreign flags, makes America look weak and vulnerable in the eyes of its foreign enemies. Furthermore, it makes any president who presides over it seem like a wounded, crippled giant. That was true in 2020, and it’s even truer today — when the riots are aimed not at some nebulous, made-up bogeyman like “systemic racism” or “whiteness,” but directly at the law enforcement policies that got Trump elected and are, rightly, very popular: mass repatriation of blatantly illegal aliens.

These riots are aimed at Trump as a leader and his voters as citizens. They are armed, organized efforts to deprive the U.S. government of its legitimate monopoly on violence in large swathes of its territory. If Trump isn’t willing to take every legal, constitutional measure to crush them and punish the perpetrators, he might as well resign right now and flee with his family into exile like the former Shah of Iran. Of course, that would leave all of us under a revolutionary tyranny every bit as ugly as Iran’s.

Mobs Follow the Strong and Scorn the Weak

It’s a sad fact of fallen human nature: A high percentage of people don’t join causes or adopt opinions because of rational argumentation, or even moral sentiments. People flock to the strong and steadfast, and naturally feel contempt for those who lack the courage of their convictions.

One of the main reasons that George Washington became first a national hero, then our leader in the fight for independence, was his obvious personal fearlessness. Bullets whizzed past him, shot through his hat and even his coat, and he was unperturbed. By contrast, the rival General Horatio Gates who sought to replace Washington at the head of the Continental Army disgraced himself by fleeing a 1780 military defeat at Camden, S.C., leaving his beaten troops behind. Trump can’t afford to do the same today.

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Even thugs who stand for evil ideas can gather a following for their bravery. In their case, it’s the gumption of bullies, and attracts other would-be bullies. But that’s how warlords have triumphed all too often for millennia.

The thugs of illegal alien mobs, backed by the bullies in power in cities like Los Angeles, are counting on decent people to hide in their homes and on Trump to hide in the White House. We cannot let these lawless, unpatriotic, un-American mobs raise foreign flags over our cities. There’s a word for that: It’s “surrender.”

We didn’t vote for a white flag, but for the man who stood tall while bleeding and shouted, “Fight, fight, fight!”

 

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or coauthor of 14 books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His newest book is No Second Amendment, No First.