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PARIS — There are the events in California… and then there’s the representation of those events. And the two aren’t exactly the same. The deployment of the National Guard and Marines to Los Angeles, ordered by Donald Trump, has sparked a political confrontation heightened by social media and artificial intelligence. This is inevitable today, because the real battleground is not the territory itself, but the minds of millions of citizen-spectators.
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From the moment Trump decided to act — after commandos from ICE, the anti-immigration police, were met with hostile protests during raids on undocumented migrants — the conflict shifted to a battle of images and symbols. It’s one expression of the ongoing culture war in the United States.
The clash quickly became personalized: on one side, Trump, casting himself as a “tough guy,” a savior of heartland America; on the other, Gavin Newsom, California’s governor, stepping into the role of defender of “democracy under threat,” as he said on Tuesday — and possibly positioning himself as the Democratic Party’s would-be hero ahead of the 2028 presidential race.
Two birds with one stone
Cynical as it may sound, that’s the real battle behind the tough-on-crime and anti-immigration rhetoric. Trump seized on the violence in Los Angeles as a way to distract from his failures and to capitalize on one of the few issues where he still enjoys majority support among Americans.
Trump is killing two birds with one stone: taking a hard line against the undocumented migrants he has consistently demonized — remember his claims about Haitians eating dogs and cats — and pointing the finger at “soft” Democrats who, he claims, aren’t tru American patriots.
The U.S. is a testing ground for the information wars of tomorrow.
It’s a favorable playing field for him, even though the ICE raids aren’t just targeting tattooed gang members, but also workers who’ve lived in the U.S. for decades — people whose children are American citizens. That’s where disinformation comes into play: to support a narrative overwhelmingly to Trump’s political advantage.
Information war
In recent days, American social media has been flooded with dramatic images — many of which turn out to be false. For example, piles of bricks supposedly proving that the riots were premeditated — but the photo was taken somewhere else. Or violent scenes lifted directly from Hollywood movies.
Trump seized on the violence in Los Angeles as a way to distract from his failures.
This disinformation has been boosted by the rise of artificial intelligence and its errors, often referred to as “hallucinations.” David Colon, author of a book on the “information war,” points out that LLMs — large language models — should never be used for fact-checking: “They are stochastic parrots,” he writes, meaning they repeat patterns based on chance.
But in 2025, that’s how both information and disinformation are spread — especially when the political stakes are high. It’s hard to fight and impossible to avoid: the U.S. is a testing ground for the information wars of tomorrow, where technology blurs the line between truth and fiction. Keep that in mind the next time you see an image from California!
