The Morning: Protests in L.A.

The New York Times <nytdirect@nytimes.com>
To: news@emailtest.eu

2025-06-09 13:02

June 9, 2025

Good morning. The National Guard is in Los Angeles. The U.S. is meeting with China for trade talks today in London. And Israel intercepted a ship headed to Gaza with some aid — and Greta Thunberg — onboard.

More news is below. We also have an in-depth look at Trump’s failure to meet his foreign policy goals.

Los Angeles protests

Two people hug while a Mexican flag flies above them.

In downtown Los Angeles. Mark Abramson for The New York Times

Los Angeles is waking up on edge. Yesterday, hundreds of National Guard troops arrived in the city, and crowds of people demonstrated against President Trump’s immigration raids. They clashed with federal agents, leaving burned cars, broken barricades and graffiti scrawled across government buildings downtown. (See photos and video of the protests.)

The gatherings were isolated to pockets of the city, and mostly peaceful, but clashes flared for hours before sunset. Officers fired munitions and tear gas, while protesters aimed fireworks and stones at police vehicles. They also lit several Waymo driverless taxis on fire and briefly shut a freeway. Still, much of Los Angeles is living as normal. It’s supposed to be 77 and sunny today.

The response

Police: The L.A.P.D. chief said that clashes were getting increasingly violent and the police department declared any gatherings downtown unlawful.
State: Gavin Newsom, California’s Democratic governor, formally asked the Trump administration to pull National Guard troops out of L.A. “We didn’t have a problem until Trump got involved,” he said on X. “This is a serious breach of state sovereignty.”
Trump administration: For the president, the protests are a chance for a standoff with a political rival in a deep blue state over an issue core to his agenda. Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, posted on social media that “this is a fight to save civilization.”

The protesters

Downtown. Philip Cheung for The New York Times

Some people demonstrating said they were doing so for their friends or neighbors. Many are carrying Mexican and other Latin American flags as emblems.
Immigration raids have increased across Southern California over the last week, and officials vowed to continue immigration enforcement “every day.” The Los Angeles Times explains your rights.
A man accused of assaulting a federal officer at an immigration protest in Paramount has been added to the F.B.I.’s Most Wanted list.
Police officers and protesters physically fought after a solidarity protest in San Francisco turned violent.

For more: The Daily is on the protests today.

Donald Trump cast in shadow as he prepares to ascend stairs onto a stage.

President Trump Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times

Mirage of power?

	By German Lopez

President Trump returned to the White House with big promises on foreign policy. He would get a peace deal in Ukraine within 24 hours. An agreement between Israel and Hamas would follow. China would stop taking advantage of the United States on trade. For that matter, Europe, Japan and the rest of the world would stop, too.

Things have not worked out as promised. Trump has not ended any wars. His only trade deal to this point is a limited, and temporary, one with Britain. His administration has claimed progress in nuclear talks with Iran, but so far they have produced no agreement. It’s still early in his term, but he has failed to meet the extremely high expectations he set for himself. Why? The United States may not have as much leverage as Trump believed.

Overplayed hands

Consider Trump’s troubles in Ukraine. He once told Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, “You don’t have the cards.” Ukraine is so dependent on the United States, Trump suggested, that he can demand anything he wants.

Yet Zelensky stood his ground. He rejected a peace proposal from the Trump administration that would force Ukraine to give up nearly 20 percent of its territory and its chances of joining NATO. And Zelensky’s concessions either work in his favor (accepting a full cease-fire) or don’t mean as much in the face of his country’s extinction (giving the United States access to some minerals).

President Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky speaking animatedly in the Oval Office.

In the Oval Office. Doug Mills/The New York Times

Last week, Zelensky demonstrated that Ukraine does have some cards. It covertly launched drones across Russia that blew up airfields and bombers — an attack that Russian bloggers compared to Pearl Harbor. Ukraine operated alone; it didn’t give Trump a heads-up. Separately, Ukraine got Germany to promise more military support, including $5.7 billion in new aid. Zelensky has cajoled European leaders to step up as Trump has suggested backing out of Ukraine.

All of this adds up to a sort of message: Ukraine can act on its own, and it has other options. It doesn’t need to go against its interests to appease the United States.

This story, of America’s insufficient leverage, repeats with issue after issue. Russia has rejected Trump’s friendly overtures, continued to align with China and launched new salvos in Ukraine. China believes it can win a trade war. Europe levied counter-tariffs. Israel has prioritized its desire to crush Hamas over keeping Trump happy. Even a decimated Hamas has refused to go along with America’s proposed peace terms.

New era

Trump grew up when America’s world dominance was unquestioned. His aggressive “America First” approach seems ripped from the Cold War, in which the United States could push around other nations and bend the global order to its terms.

But the world has moved on. Countries don’t treat the United States as a superpower to appease but simply as another factor among their many other problems and interests. They will go along with America only if they feel they truly have something to gain.

Even Trump’s victories prove the rule. His administration, for example, seems close to landing a deal with Iran to dismantle its nuclear weapons program. But the context is key. Iran’s economy has collapsed after years of sanctions, and its military and its proxies around the Middle East are diminished from U.S. and Israeli attacks. A deal is as much about Iran’s weakness as America’s strength.

To put this in Trump’s terms: America no longer has all of the cards, and other nations have learned they can call its bluff.

INSIDE OUR GAZA REPORTING

A gif of a young girl walking in a building on fire.

The New York Times

A few weeks ago, a haunting video of a girl in a burning building in Gaza circulated online. She had survived an Israeli airstrike on a shelter and former school that killed 31 people, including 18 children, according to Gaza’s emergency services. Israel said that militants were hiding there. Lauren Jackson, an editor on The Morning, asked Nader Ibrahim, a video journalist based in London, how he and his team found the girl, Hanin al-Wadie. Here’s what he said:

Using social media: We traced the video’s trajectory online to find the person who shot the original. We contacted him, a young man who lived across the street from the school, and asked for the full, unedited clips. We also found witnesses who appeared in the footage and contacted them to confirm how the events unfolded on that morning in late May.
Creating a timeline: The video files’ metadata told us exactly when the clips were filmed. Other videos from the same time frame helped us piece the story together.
Reporting on the ground: One of our freelancers in Gaza, Bilal Shbair, helped the London team identify a medic seen in the videos. Bilal called sources and showed them the picture of the medic until he was able to identify him. We then interviewed the medic from London and confirmed he was the one who rescued the girl. Separately, Saher Alghorra, a freelance Gaza photographer on assignment for The Times, used a similar approach to find the girl in the video. He called sources until he found the girl’s uncle, who told him she was at a hospital in northern Gaza. Saher went there, identified her and filmed her and her uncle.

See The Times’s reporting.

More on Gaza

Greta Thunberg speaking with several other people around her. She and others wear T-shirts saying “Ship to Gaza”, and have kaffiyehs over their shoulders.

Greta Thunberg and activists in Italy before sailing toward Gaza. Fabrizio Villa/Getty Images

The Gaza-bound ship that Israel intercepted also carried Rima Hassan, a member of the European Parliament. Israel called it a “selfie yacht.”
Patrick Kingsley, The Times’s Jerusalem bureau chief, toured a tunnel underneath a hospital in southern Gaza. The passageway embodies a narrative battle over how the conflict should be portrayed, he writes.

THE LATEST NEWS

Tariffs

U.S. and Chinese officials are expected to meet in London today for a second round of talks aimed at a truce in the two countries’ trade war.
The U.S. government is also scheduled to submit a legal brief outlining why Trump’s tariffs should be preserved after a trade court ruled many of them unlawful.

OPINIONS

“MAGA plays to a social desert”: Arlie Russell Hochschild visited Kentucky’s Fifth Congressional District to learn how people there see Trump now.

Here’s a column by David French on the L.A. protests. “America is no longer a stable country, and it is growing less stable by the day,” he writes.

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Carlos Alcaraz Denis Balibouse/Reuters

Tennis: Carlos Alcaraz won his second French Open title, defeating Jannik Sinner in a six-hour thriller.

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ARTS AND IDEAS

People in evening dress filling a stage beneath a display that says “Best Musical: ‘Maybe Happy Ending’” in the style of an illuminated sign.

At Radio City Music Hall. Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

The Tony Awards ceremony was last night. “Maybe Happy Ending,” about two discarded robots who go on a road trip, won six awards — the most of any show — including best new musical. “The triumph of a show with a puzzling title and tough-to-explain themes was a vote of confidence in originality by an industry often dominated by big-brand intellectual property and big-name Hollywood stars,” writes Michael Paulson, The Times’s theater reporter. Here are more winners:

Best musical revival: “Sunset Boulevard”
Best play: “Purpose,” Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama
Best leading actress in a play: Sarah Snook for “The Picture of Dorian Gray”
Best leading actor in a play: Cole Escola for “Oh, Mary!”

See the full list here.