Trump very obviously views disorder in the streets of Los Angeles — against federal authority and under foreign flags — as a gift.

There’s never a good time to launch a riot against the duly-elected government of the United States, and rioters tend to be malicious actors and/or idiots. There’s always some of them who are just interested in mischief for its own sake, or are revolutionaries searching for the eternal high of heightening the contradictions.

That said, the protesters against Trump immigration and deportation policy who chose to cross the line from peaceful protest to riot were especially foolish. First of all, polls have regularly shown that the public is behind a policy of strict border enforcement and significant deportations, but uneasy with how Trump is going about it. The best possible remedy for Trump is to recast the other side of that debate as the aggressors — a role they are eagerly embracing.

This goes beyond the politics of immigration, however, to the calculus of a riot. Unless you are a true revolutionary, rioting only makes even the most primal sort of sense if you think the law can be scoffed at with impunity. It’s a way of demonstrating the impotence of authority in the face of the raw power of the street — the eternal enemy of public order and small-c conservatism. Long experience has taught the inhabitants of California to think this way. But after a decade of Donald Trump on the national stage, this is a catastrophic misreading of the man and his incentives.

In spite of a spate of press hysteria over his deployment of federal power at Lafayette Square — which led D.C. to be gun-shy about accepting help defending the Capitol on January 6, 2021 — the dominant story of mid-2020 was that Trump folded like a cheap suit in the face of civil disorder across the nation’s cities. He was then in the midst of a difficult reelection campaign while juggling a global pandemic and for various reasons did not feel empowered to come down hard on disorder, at cost both to his political brand and to the rights of innocent Americans who saw their homes and businesses torched. Today, there’s a meme circulating on Wall Street about tariff fights — TACO, an abbreviation for “Trump Always Chickens Out.” Democrats have stupidly adopted this as a taunt at Trump, without considering the downsides of goading the president into taking actions they claim to oppose.

Now, Trump is following through on nationalizing the California National Guard and putting them seriously to work in restoring order over the impotent protests of California Governor Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass. Anybody who read the situation and the man could have told them this would happen. Yes, there’s some truth in the TACO taunt: Trump doesn’t much like standing up to people who can fight back, and he often blusters his way into positions he can’t or won’t back up. But Trump has no downside here. He knows he was elected to restore some basic, commonsense ideas that are overwhelmingly popular like public order in the streets, and that Newsom, Bass, and Kamala Harris are about the least sympathetic adversaries possible. He’s also just over four months into his term; it’s not 2020 anymore. A new president responds to challenges such as this one not only with an eye to the situation, but also with an eye on the tone set for the remaining three-plus years. Why did Ronald Reagan come down so hard on the air traffic controller strike? Partly out of principle but also partly to send a message: There’s a new sheriff in town, and you’re not messing with him. The public-employee unions got the message; so did the Soviets and Congress. Reagan meant what he said and was prepared to go to the mattresses.

All of the incentives for Trump, against people burning Waymos and wearing keffiyehs and waving Mexican flags, point in the direction of doing the same. Before you try to use leverage against an opponent, you should first consider whether your acts are received by him as pressure or as a gift. Trump very obviously views disorder in the streets of Los Angeles, against federal authority, and under foreign flags, as a gift. You have to be a special kind of stupid to hand him that. But nobody ever said rioters were smart people.