Among the unsightly sights and incongruent sounds of the president’s birthday parade the other day in Washington was the distinctive throbbing bass line of “Barracuda,” a half-century-old rock song by the estimable Heart.

Like many artists before her, Heart’s Nancy Wilson wasn’t especially pleased to be included in the freshest of the Trump circuses, and seemed eager to note that the song she wrote with her sister when Trump was still just the irritant son of a Queens realty manager was used without permission.

What a surprise.

They don’t love L.A.

Just as relevant in the moment, in my view, and yet hardly a surprise, was that the Demander-In-Chief’s playlist for Saturday’s military boondoggle did not include Randy Newman’s “I Love LA,” the joyous valentine to the city the Trump administration seems to find so very vexing these days, which I’m sure has nothing to do with the fact that Los Angeles has nearly two million Spanish-speaking residents.

“A city of criminals,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem called the place on her recent visit, along with this little proclamation that was momentarily lost against the spectacle of her goon squad bum-rushing a U.S. Senator out of Noem’s L.A. press conference: “We are not going away. We are staying here to liberate the city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into the city.”

No one asked if Noem didn’t have maybe a recalcitrant pooch to gun down somewhere — RIP Cricket — so we were eventually left to absorb that Noem seemed to mean that Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the National Guard and the United States Marines were going to liberate America’s most populous state from its democratically elected governor and mayor.

Sounds a little coup-ish, right? Coup-like?

I saw on the internet where Laurence Tribe, the Harvard legal scholar and Constitutional expert, called Noem’s plan as outlined, “the very definition of a coup.” That’s a mile past coup-ish and coup-like alike.

The whole Noem act was reminiscent of a conversation I had in March with Harry Litman, scion of Pittsburgh legal titans and a veteran of the Justice Department, who said at the time the strains on the Constitution not two months into “Trump II: The Wrath of Don” were, as I quoted, “terrifying.”

On the phone Monday from California – the post-apocalyptic hellscape its very self – Litman seemed surprised I’d ask about the whole coup thing.

A manufactured crisis

“Not where I thought you were going,” he said. “It’s more a battle where the President of the United States is turning the power of the government against the states, which is without precedent since the Civil War. They’ve manufactured a crisis that’s not a crisis specifically to steamroll not just parts of the country but Democratic cities.

“You’d think the role of the president would be some kind of unifier. This is a spectacular antithesis of what a president should be.”

Every public official with the experience and authority to characterize the anti-ICE demonstrations last week in Los Angeles, including Governor Gavin Newsom, Mayor Karen Bass, and Chief of the Los Angeles Police Department Jim McDonnell, said the level of unrest was well within the capabilities of local law enforcement.

It was nothing, in other words, like 1992, when South Central exploded in rage over the Rodney King verdict and the city was a spectacle of self-immolation that killed scores and injured thousands. The city needed the National Guard and the U.S. Military as fast as it could be activated.

“The place was overrun,” said Litman, who worked on that case at the DOJ. “The governor (Pete Wilson) said, ‘Come on in, George H.W. Bush; we need you.’”

That quaint ’90s notion of appropriate governmental response seems almost idyllic against the post-modern methods, in which Trump contorts reality to align with his own political psychosis and responds only in the way that plays to his political advantage, regardless of the outcome.

“The backdrop principle is this is the last thing you want in a democratic society,” Litman said. “And now he wants Marine boots on the ground. That’s what authoritarian governments look like.”

The point is fear and intimidation, or everything the birthday parade was in the first place, a naked show of force. If abject cruelty shares the stage, Trump is absolutely fine with that as well. The actions of ICE in L.A., sweeping up workers, fracturing families, arresting asylum seekers at their ICE appointments, are designed to spread the panic.

L.A. is merely where this show opens. Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, and very likely other big blue bastions are on the administration’s calendar for what’s shaping up as a viciously hot summer.

Maybe a turning point

Anyone in need of encouragement must take it from millions who marched against Trump’s policies in the No Kings protests, which some smart people saw as a potential turning point.

“Trump depends on appearing as the strongman conqueror of big swaths of the country,” Litman said, “but it’s kind of all he’s got. Eighty percent of the country and half of MAGA are opposed to this overaggression on immigration. The American people seem pretty strong behind the notion that he can’t ignore court orders. He’s overplayed his hand. Put me down as having some tempered optimism.”

OK. (Don’t think I’m there yet).

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