The last time the phrase “Los Angeles riots” dominated the national headlines, Patrick Buchanan told a story about order being restored to the city.
“The mob retreated because it had met that one thing that could stop it,” he said at the 1992 Republican National Convention in Houston. “Force, rooted in justice and backed by moral courage.”
President Donald Trump has been compared to Buchanan before. As streets burn in Los Angeles in defiance of federal immigration law, he may have the opportunity for his ultimate Buchananite moment as he sends in the National Guard.
These Los Angeles riots are even less defensible than those of more than three decades ago. Nearly all big-city riots end up only doing more damage to communities that are already hurting. These mobs are attacking the very legitimacy of immigration and border enforcement.
Republicans didn’t win the 1992 presidential election. In fact, they lost California in the Electoral College for the first time since the country went all the way with LBJ, the last president to federalize the National Guard against the will of a Democratic governor, back in 1965. The aftershocks of the 1990–91 recession, compounded by a promise-breaking tax increase signed into law by the GOP incumbent, still lingered.
Instead of Buchanan, Republicans renominated the incumbent who broke his pledge not to raise taxes, presided over the recession, and generally seemed more interested in the New World Order than American domestic affairs.
But in Bill Clinton, Democrats nominated someone who balanced his sympathy for Rodney King with a rebuke of Sister Souljah. Clinton was also the party’s first presidential standard-bearer in a generation to back capital punishment for murderers, just four years removed from the Willie Horton fiasco. Clinton promised to help pass a crime bill and hire 100,000 new police officers to patrol the streets.
Today’s Democratic elected officials agree with the anti-ICE rioters that mass immigration, even when illegal, is the civil rights issue of our time. They believe that the next phase of the Resistance should be to resist the deportation of illegal immigrants. Gov. Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass find themselves appealing to states’ rights.
Some of the people being deported may be sympathetic on an individual basis, even if Kilmar Abrego Garcia does not seem like the best example with which to make that point. But Democrats are ignoring that a diverse coalition of voters, including a majority of Hispanic men, elected Trump precisely to get immigration back under control after nearly four years of neglect under former President Joe Biden. The polls suggest majorities still support that endeavor.
In 2024, Gallup found that 55 percent wanted reduced immigration levels. That was the biggest majority behind that position recorded by the venerable pollster since 2001. Just 16 percent supported an increase in immigration.
It isn’t 1992 anymore. Neither is it 2020.
At a purely naked political level, each party is heeding its base. Republicans elevated Trump over 16 other candidates a decade ago because they believed he was more serious about immigration than his rivals. They helped return him to the White House after the Biden border crisis. But Biden unleashed that influx because he believed Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was the future of the Democratic Party and he could not bear to be called the “deporter-in-chief” like his former boss, Barack Obama.
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Public opinion on immigration can be nuanced. But there is still more reason to believe that for now the Trump-era Republican stance on immigration has more crossover appeal than a Democratic alliance with mobs waving Mexican flags in protests against American law enforcement. The Democrats’ border failures have hardened popular attitudes compared even to Trump’s first term.
The Democrats, led by a California governor who would like to be their 2028 presidential nominee, have chosen the mob. Trump has picked the other side. We will eventually see who was right. For now, it looks like it will take massive overreach—or another recession—to turn the tide.
Bill Clinton isn’t walking through that door. But maybe Pat Buchanan is.
