In 2025, protest policing in major US cities increasingly took on the character of a spectacle: overwhelming deployments, theatrical staging, and aggressive crowd-control tactics that emphasized signaling power over maintaining public safety. This was not a one-off episode; it followed the deployment of federal troops into multiple Democratic-led cities, prompting lawsuits and court challenges that local leaders described, with justification, as militarized intimidation. Los Angeles provided an early template. After protests erupted in June over an increase in aggressive Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids, President Donald Trump ordered roughly 4,000 federalized National Guard troops into the city and activated about 700 US Marines. At the same time, he signaled—online and through traditional media—a willingness to escalate even further by invoking the Insurrection Act. Troops stood shoulder to shoulder with long guns and riot shields as smoke canisters and crowd-control munitions blanketed highways and city streets, a posture nominally framed as deescalation and for the protection of federal property but calibrated to provoke confrontation. Inside the Pentagon, officials rushed to draft domestic use-of-force guidance for Marines …