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The images flowing out of Los Angeles over nearly a week of protests against federal immigration raids have cast America’s second most populous city as a terrifying hellscape, where lawbreakers rule the streets and regular citizens should fear to leave their homes.

“They’re calling the city of Los Angeles — where 1 in 40 Americans live — a hellscape, and everybody in the city a criminal. They’re describing protests that are really peaceful as an insurrection. And that’s a very reckless thing to do in a difficult situation.”

During the last months of last year's presidential campaign, Donald Trump would hold his rallies in places like Pennsylvania and complain about Vice President Kamala Harris' home state of California being a violent hellscape that had its residents cowering in terror of the rampaging hordes of immigrant criminals who were routinely killing people in their beds.

In my 30 years of studying the literature and culture of Louis XIV, I never thought I would see an American president actually model himself on the Sun King, to the point that a recent essay in the New York Times declared the current Oval Office décor a “gilded rococo hellscape.”

Leading advocacy groups such as Amnesty International call it a “hellscape.”