President Donald Trump on Tuesday did not rule out invoking the Insurrection Act if necessary to squash violence at the Los Angeles protests.
“If there’s an insurrection, I would certainly invoke it,” Trump said. “We’ll see. But I can tell you, last night was terrible.”
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.@POTUS on the rioting in Los Angeles: "If there's an insurrection, I would certainly invoke it… If we didn't get involved, right now Los Angeles would be burning just like it was burning a number of months ago… We are not playing around." pic.twitter.com/UAGSJKSDuI
— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) June 10, 2025
The Insurrection Act of 1807 allows the president to send military forces to suppress insurrections or civil disorder within states. Trump has already caused controversy by calling in the National Guard to Los Angeles, against the wishes of Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA), and he seems ready to take the next step if he feels it is necessary.
Protests have been raging in Los Angeles for days following federal illegal immigration raids, sometimes spilling out into violence that has included property destruction and setting electric vehicles on fire.
Trump, speaking in the Oval Office, described rioters breaking pieces of concrete off of street curbs and then hurling them at police cars.
“If we didn’t get involved, right now, Los Angeles would be burning,” Trump said.
On Tuesday, Trump administration officials held an impromptu press conference to discuss reworking the Federal Emergency Management Agency to give governors more control over disaster relief.
However, the topic quickly turned to the situation in Los Angeles once media members began asking questions.
“I could tell you there were certain areas of Los Angeles last night, you could have called it an insurrection,” Trump said when asked for a second time about the Insurrection Act. “It was terrible. But these are paid insurrectionists.”
Trump remained ambivalent throughout on whether the term “insurrection” was appropriate, appearing to keep the option open if he felt like he needed it later.
“You could not use the word insurrection, but you could also use the word,” he said. “These are very dangerous people. They’re bad people.”
But he was adamant that his previous deployments of the National Guard and the Marines were appropriate and on solid legal ground.
“I’ve been here before, and I went right by every rule,” Trump said in reference to the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. “I waited for governors to say, ‘Send in the National Guard.’ They wouldn’t do it, they wouldn’t do it, and they just wouldn’t do it.”
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“I said to myself,” he added, “if that stuff happens again, we’ve got to make faster decisions.”
Asked when the National Guard would leave Los Angeles, Trump said, “Until there’s no danger.”