At a press conference Tuesday, Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) went into peak gaslight mode on the anti-ICE riots in Los Angeles, wagging her finger at Americans for daring to believe the evidence of their own eyes that there was, in fact, violence in the streets.
But the charade didn’t last. On Wednesday, she finally admitted the obvious and acknowledged that there was violence in Los Angeles, though she did her best to bury the admission under a barrage of partisan deflection and blame aimed at President Trump.
Appearing on CNN, Waters first launched into a familiar tirade, accusing Trump of provoking unrest and insisting the responsibility lies with him, not with local leadership. “The President of the United States should do what he didn’t do when we were invaded in the Capitol,” Waters claimed. “He started this. There should be no violence. He should not continue to support violence.”
Trump did not start it, of course. He had nothing to do with the rioters burning cars, looting businesses, or attacking ICE agents. The reason the National Guard had to be brought in was that the LAPD wasn’t doing anything to protect them.
But in the midst of her rant, Waters let something slip — an admission she’s resisted making publicly. “Yes, I understand that there was some violence that [went on] Sunday night,” she said.
Just like that, after days of deflecting and gaslighting, Waters admitted the obvious: Los Angeles has recently suffered violent unrest. Not “mostly peaceful," not just “protests.” Violence.
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Of course, she didn’t dwell on that fact for long. Waters quickly pivoted back to her talking points, saying the police “must be in contact with the governor, and with the mayor, and with the President of the United States, and have a plan, collectively, about how to handle this situation.”
This is a completely different narrative from just one day prior, when she was saying, without any ambiguity, that “There was no violence.” She even doubled down by saying. “I was on the street. I know.”
At the time, Waters insisted that the lack of deaths was proof that there was no violence. “Nobody was shot, nobody was killed. Get it in your head,” she snapped, apparently deciding that unless there’s a body on the ground, it doesn’t qualify as violence.
Waters was so committed to the narrative that there was no violence, she even went so far as to tell the public not to trust their own eyes. “Don’t just rely on… the few incidents that you saw,” she said, as if viral footage of fires, assaults, and destruction across Los Angeles were nothing more than isolated misunderstandings. In other words, ignore the overwhelming evidence and just believe Maxine's version of events, because she says so.
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But despite all the posturing and spin, the truth finally slipped out. In a follow-up interview on CNN, Waters quietly admitted what she had just spent days denying. And with that single sentence, her carefully crafted narrative collapsed under the weight of reality. After all the finger-pointing and deflection, even Waters couldn’t keep the lie going. The truth was too obvious to deny any longer.
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