Scott Bessent is both heartless or the USA’ most dedicated treasury secretary up to now.
As Los Angeles residents and on-the-ground reporters are being pelted with rubber bullets and maced in response to an organized protest in opposition to ICE raids, Bessent’s greatest qualm appears to be over the destruction of some Waymo self-driving autos.
“The cost of hardware alone on these autonomous vehicles is estimated to be ~$97,000,” he wrote on X Monday. “Multiple have been set ablaze. All to the jeers of masked men waving foreign flags.”
A number of Waymo automobiles burn close to Los Angeles’ Metropolitan Detention Heart on June 8.
Certainly, Bessent didn’t intend to sound like he values autos greater than people, proper? It’s laborious to inform today.
In spite of everything, it’s Bessent’s personal boss, President Donald Trump, who ordered the Nationwide Guard to infiltrate Los Angeles, the place protesters have been exercising their proper to dissent from the Trump administration. He’s has even flirted with the thought of sending 500 Marines to Los Angeles.
That is the primary time {that a} president has federalized the Nationwide Guard with out consent of a governor since 1965, when President Lyndon B. Johnson deployed members to Alabama to guard protesters at a civil rights march.
Whereas the Nationwide Guard can’t perform regulation enforcement in Los Angeles with out Trump enacting martial regulation, he hasn’t dominated it out. Although declaring martial regulation would require approval from Congress, when has that stopped Trump earlier than?
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