Police in Los Angeles finally began moving to disperse the anti-ICE rioters late Saturday night — after President Donald Trump announced he was sending in the National Guard.

Until then, cops were under orders to stand down as the “mostly peaceful protesters” hurled rocks, bricks and fireworks at federal agents — also torching vehicles and physically blocking ICE enforcement actions.

The rioters filmed their own violence, sharing it on social media.

And it all followed Mayor Karen Bass’ incendiary words Friday as she slammed ICE raids taking dozens of illegal migrants into custody.

“We will not stand for this,” Bass declared, insisting ICE’s actions “sow terror in our communities and disrupt basic principles of safety in our city” and bragging that her office was “in close coordination” with lefty “community organizations” — an outright cue for the rioting to begin.

By the time police finally got orders to control the chaos, they had to engage in running battles with the mobs in downtown LA and the suburb of Paramount.

How bad would it have gotten if Trump hadn’t announced that 2,000 National Guard troops were on their way?

Gov. Gavin Newsom denounced Trump’s move as “purposefully inflammatory” — a clear sign that he wasn’t going to intervene and proving that the prez was entirely right to cut the pretty boy out of the chain of command.

We’ll never know for sure how bad Bass and Newsom would’ve let things get — but we do know that just months ago they were completely feckless in the face of a natural disaster. Were they going to be more aggressive in fighting fires set by their own political allies?

It’s guaranteed that reinforcements for the rioters were on the way, from the nationwide cadres of leftist goons that flock to every outbreak of “unrest” these days — the folks who in 2020 burned down much of Minneapolis in the George Floyd riots (after Gov. Tim Walz waited days to send in the Guard) and for months laid nightly siege to the federal courthouse in Portland, Ore.

If you don’t shut rioting down fast and hard, it keeps growing: Los Angeles learned that lesson in the 1992 Rodney King riots — though Bass and Newsom have either forgotten that fact, or don’t care.

Here’s the thing: A Democratic president waved 10 million illegal migrants into the interior, and the nation responded by electing Trump to send the masses back home, starting with the violent criminals among them as well as those who’d exhausted their legal claims to stay.

But plenty of Democratic pols still hold power — and are using it to protect the Biden-Harris “legacy” against the Trump deportation drive even in these open-and-shut cases.

From Newark to New York, Chicago to Los Angeles, Democrats are preaching anarchy, pretending that ICE agents have no legal right to arrest people who are here illegally.

Elected officials — from Bass to Newark Mayor Ras Baraka and Boston’s Michelle Wu — are calling for “resistance” to law enforcement.

Rallying riots, in other words.

Now they’re calling Team Trump “deranged” for moving to shut down the LA rioting.

Progressive Democrats think they can still get away with memory-holing any and all evidence that doesn’t fit their agenda.

All the footage of that masked guy waving a Mexican flag as he motorcycled around a blazing car? You’re supposed to just consider it another “cheap fake.”