What’s a president to do?

Efforts to settle the war in Ukraine and the violence in Gaza are going badly.

His feud with fellow multi-billionaire Elon Musk is splitting the Republican Party at an inopportune time.

Trade talks with China and other nations to reach the promised 90 deals in 90 days are still stalemated.

Iran is showing signs of resisting a new agreement to curb its nuclear weapons program.

And economists are warning of the potentially negative impact on growth, inflation and the nation’s health care of the president’s centerpiece legislation, aka the “Big Beautiful Bill.”

Time to change the subject.

For President Donald Trump, that meant time to change the focus back to immigration, his go-to issue ever since he descended that golden Trump Tower escalator in 2015 and the subject that played a crucial role in putting him into the White House not once but twice.

Even now, as his job approval ratings have shown some decline, especially from the growing signs of a slowing economy, Americans remain behind Trump’s goal of deporting millions of illegal immigrants, though they show some doubts about the way he is doing it.

A recent CBS News/YouGov poll showed that while a modest majority of those sampled favored the administration’s deportation goals, a similar margin opposed its methods. Other surveys show his support on the issue has dropped since January, largely because of concerns over the lack of due process being accorded some targeted for deportation.

Since Trump took office in January, he has succeeded in closing the once-porous border, largely stemming the influx of additional asylum-seekers and others without legal entry rights. But even the stepped-up efforts by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have failed to produce the sizable numbers for deportation the administration has sought.

That prompted the architect of the administration’s hard-line immigration policies, deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller, to demand stepped-up raids in the Los Angeles area. They predictably produced protests, demonstrations and scattered violence — as well as illegals.

That gave the president an excuse to pounce, declaring without evidence that local authorities had lost control of the situation and contending that the effort to prevent enforcement of the immigration laws constituted “a form of rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States.”

In an exaggerated depiction of what was going on, he said in a weekend Truth Social statement that “violent, insurrectionist mobs are swarming and attacking our Federal Agents to try and stop our deportation operations.” Miller called it “a fight to save civilization.”

Trump ordered the secretaries of defense and homeland security and the attorney general “to take all such action necessary to liberate Los Angeles from the Migrant Invasion and put an end to these Migrant riots.”

Invoking rarely used presidential authority, he ordered 2,000 members of the California National Guard into federal service over the protests of California Gov. Gavin Newsom. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered in 700 U.S. Marines to protect federal property in Los Angeles.

Newsom objected, calling Trump’s intervention “a manufactured crisis” and accusing the president of “creating fear and terror to take over a state militia and violate the U.S. constitution.” California’s attorney general, Rob Bonta, filed a federal court suit, seeking a restraining order against Trump’s federalization of the National Guard troops.

Amid the standoff, disorders in Los Angeles slowed, enabling Trump to take credit. Without his “great decision” to send in the National Guard, Trump posted on Truth Social, “Los Angeles would have been completely obliterated.”

In a sense, their standoff has created a situation that may enable both Trump and Newsom to score political points.

In Newsom, Trump had what he always needs in such situations, a political target that will appeal to his base, using the blue state of California and its liberal policies toward immigration in the same way he recently singled out Harvard University for resisting his efforts against racial diversity.

“It could not be clearer,” former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich told The New York Times. “One side is for enforcing the law and protecting Americans, and the other side is for defending illegals and being on the side of the people who break the law.”

But that could work both ways. Trump was probably right when he said that “I think Gavin in his own way is very happy I got involved.”

That’s because the California governor, one of several top Democrats with an eye toward 2028, can now portray himself as standing up to Trump’s autocratic policies, just as Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker recently called on Democrats to set aside “decades of stale decorum” and take to the streets against the president.

In the short run, you’d think that Gingrich was probably right in saying Trump’s Los Angeles escalation would play well politically for him, and its billions for immigration enforcement should help pass the “Big Beautiful Bill.”

But that might not be so.

In an instant YouGov poll Tuesday, a plurality of adults opposed the president’s actions, both in federalizing the National Guard and sending in the Marines.

Perhaps people have figured out that, just because Trump seeks to distract from his problems by yelling “fire,” it doesn’t necessarily mean that there is one.

Carl P. Leubsdorf is the former Washington bureau chief of the Dallas Morning News.