Newsom Hits Back Hard at Trump’s LA Claims: He Thanked His Troops For Ending the Riot Before They Arrived
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California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) hit back hard at President Donald Trump’s wild claim on Monday that “we saved Los Angeles” by sending “our troops” in “right at the beginning.”
“And even the Democrats—I can’t believe it, but they don’t want to admit it, but I can believe it. We could do the same thing in Chicago, New York. Los Angeles. We did it. We saved Los Angeles,” Trump said to applause while speaking at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C.
“Los Angeles was a mess. If we didn’t send our troops in, Gavin Newscum would have had a real problem. We sent our troops. The head police officer, the top person, said, ‘We could have never done this alone,’” Trump claimed, adding:
We sent our troops right in at the beginning, and we killed it. And it was nasty, but we killed it immediately, immediately. And I don’t know why Chicago isn’t calling us saying, “Please give us help,” when you have, over just a short period of time, 50 murders and hundreds of people shot, and then you have a governor that stands up and says how crime is just fine. It’s really crazy. But we’re bringing back law and order to our country.
Newsom hit back, noting that Trump failed to remember the actual timeline of events. “REMINDER: At 11:41pm PT on June 7, Trump praised the National Guard in LA,” wrote the governor’s office in reply to a clip of Trump’s comments, adding:
Problem: THEY WEREN’T DEPLOYED ON THE GROUND YET!
Trump was actually crediting the state & local response he now trashes!
Why doesn’t the President remember where he’s sending troops or when they got somewhere???
Trump did indeed praise the National Guard on Truth Social for ending the protests before they had actually arrived at the scene. “Great job by the National Guard in Los Angeles after two days of violence, clashes and unrest,” Trump wrote on June 8th on Truth Social at about 2:41 a.m. EDT or as Newsom said 11:41 PT. “Thank you to the National Guard for a job well done!”
300 members of the California National Guard 79th Infantry Brigade Combat Team did not arrive on the scene until 9 am that morning. Furthermore, Los Angeles Police Department Chief Jim McDonnell later denied requesting the National Guard or being in a position where he needed additional resources.
McDonnell told CNN a few days after Trump’s deployment, “No, we were not in a position to request the National Guard.”
He explained to Kaitlan Collins, “We have a protocol that we work up through. First, we bring in all internal resources to bear on the issue, whatever it is. Then, we mobilize the department, or part of the department, to be able to get everybody out there dealing with the issue. If we don’t have the capacity at that point to be able to do that, then through the Sheriff we request mutual aid and we get our law enforcement partners from police departments and sheriffs departments throughout the Southern California region to assist us in doing what it is we need to do.”
McDonnell concluded, “We’re at that level now and we’re nowhere near a level where we would be reaching out to the governor for National Guard at this stage, and my hope is that things are going in the right direction now and that we wouldn’t have had to have done that and we won’t either.”
