Life may be full of uncertainty, but there’s one thing you can look forward to on Election Day as certain as the sun rising over the Sierra Nevada and setting over the Pacific Ocean.
Donald Trump will lose California. And it’s not far away.
In 2016, Trump lost in a 25-point landslide to Hillary Clinton. In 2020, he lost to Joe Biden by 29 percentage points.
There’s no love lost between Trump and California. If he were to rank the 50 states based on his personal rating, California would definitely come in last place. The Republican candidates hate Gov. Gavin Newsom, it’s a mutual feeling, and his depiction of life in the Golden State makes the Seventh Circle of Hell feel like a vacation at a resort.
But Trump didn’t just troll California with his ego trip to Coachella last weekend. If elected, he vowed to punish the state, its more than 39 million residents, by withholding federal disaster aid if California leaders refuse to provide more water to farmers and cities. . (That would come at a cost to the environment, and others refused that burden.)
The comments echoed Trump’s threats at a Rancho Palos Verdes golf course last summer, when the former president explicitly singled out Newsom. “If he doesn’t sign these papers, we won’t give him the money to put out all the fires,” Trump told reporters. It is unclear what kind of paper President Trump referred to, but his strong sentiments were unmistakable.
And yet…
Trump may have been robbed twice in California, but he won more than 6 million votes in 2020, the most of any state. On Nov. 5, millions of Californians will vote for Trump again, despite his clear antipathy toward the state and Democratic-leaning voters.
To Ken Khachigian, it makes perfect sense.
“Kamala Harris is completely unqualified to be president of the United States, and I couldn’t imagine leaving the leadership of the free world in her hands,” the longtime Republican strategist said. “I don’t think she’s any better than a county supervisor in California.”
Mr. Khachigian served in two Republican administrations and spent his entire life in and around politics. His recently published autobiography“Behind Closed Doors: In the Room with Reagan and Nixon.”
“I think she’s far left,” Khachigian said of the vice president. “Donald Trump believes in the core Republican principles of lower taxes, smaller government, tougher crime, stronger defense, and stronger foreign policy.
“Given these issues, California’s vote for Donald Trump is no different,” he said.
He denied Trump’s threats or insinuations of extortion, saying California Republicans would not tolerate disaster relief being cut off if Trump actually tried to do so. “I think it’s just an attitude,” Khachigian said. “A lot of it is just Donald Trump being Donald Trump.”
Khachigian said he was also not concerned about President Trump’s indications that he might use the National Guard or military to punish political sworn enemies like California Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff. fox news interview.
“Our system has safeguards against crazy things,” Khachigian said. he stopped. “Look, I’m not going to defend everything. [Trump has] I’ve never said that in my life. …I often exaggerate things. …Exaggeration is the mother’s milk of politics. ”
Mike Madrid sees things differently. A former political director for the California Republican Party, he co-founded the anti-Trump Lincoln Project. (He also has a new book, The Latino Century, about the growing influence of the nation’s largest ethnic voting group.)
Madrid said California voters should take Trump at his word. “We have to learn from history, from what he did in the past,” Madrid said, noting that President Trump has already shown a willingness to play politics with federal disaster relief.
Politico’s E&E News recently reported The former president “occasionally displayed overt partisanship in his response to disasters, and on at least three occasions hesitated to provide disaster relief to areas he considered politically hostile.”
In one example, President Trump initially refused to approve disaster aid to California after a series of devastating wildfires in 2018. Mark Harvey, former senior director for resilience policy on President Trump’s National Security Council staff, was shown the 2016 election results showing strong support for President Trump in Orange County, one of the burnt areas. President Trump said he had changed his mind.
President Trump eventually relented after “some of the adults in the room pushed him,” but Madrid said “those adults… [will] When Trump returns to the White House for the second time, stay in the room. ” “Or will the second government be purely about revenge and pettiness?”
More fundamentally, Madrid said, “It is extremely irresponsible as a citizen to assume your own intentions and ignore what a public official’s words mean or don’t mean.” All we can do is take people at their word. That’s the basis of this whole system. ”
There is an expression that became widely known when Trump first ran for president. The media took Trump literally, but not seriously, while his supporters took him seriously, not literally.
Voters should do both.
