Life may be full of uncertainties, but there is one thing you can count on on Election Day, as surely as the sun rises over the Sierra and sets over the Pacific.
Donald Trump will lose California. And it won’t be close at all.
In 2016, Trump was buried in a 25-point landslide against Hillary Clinton. In 2020, he lost to Joe Biden by 29 percentage points.
There is no love lost between Trump and California. If you ranked all 50 states based on one’s self-worth, it’s a safe bet that California would finish last. The GOP candidate hates Gov. Gavin Newsom — a mutual feeling — and his depiction of life in the Golden State makes the Seventh Circle of Hell look like a resort vacation.
But Trump didn’t just trash California during his ego trip last weekend to Coachella. If elected, he has pledged to punish the state — that is, its more than 39 million residents — by withholding federal disaster aid if California leaders refuse to give more water to farmers and cities. (This would come at the expense of the environment and others would refuse their share.)
The remarks echo a threat Trump made last summer, at his Rancho Palos Verdes golf course, where the former president explicitly pointed the finger at Newsom. “If he doesn’t sign these papers,” Trump told reporters, “we’re not going to give him any money to put out all his fires.” It’s unclear exactly what documents Trump is referring to, but there’s no doubt he feels strongly.
And yet…
Trump may have been clobbered twice in California, but he received more than 6 million votes in 2020, the most of any state. On November 5, millions of Californians will vote for Trump again, despite his obvious antipathy toward the state and its Democratic-leaning voters.
For Ken Khachigian, this makes perfect sense.
“Kamala Harris is completely unqualified to be president of the United States and I simply could not imagine putting her in charge of the free world,” the longtime Republican Party strategist said. “I don’t think she’s capable of being much more than a county supervisor in California.”
Khachigian served in two Republican administrations and spent his life in and around politics, which he recounts in his recently published autobiography, “Behind Closed Doors: In the Room with Reagan and Nixon.”
“I think she’s on the far left,” Khachigian said of the vice president. “Donald Trump believes in core Republican principles: lower taxes, less government, tougher on crime, stronger national defense and a strong foreign policy.
“So based on those issues,” he said, “this is the case for California voting for Donald Trump.”
He dismissed Trump’s threats — or hints of blackmail, if you will — by saying that Republican lawmakers in California would not tolerate disaster relief being cut off if Trump actually attempted to do so. “I think it’s just posturing,” Khachigian said. “A lot of this is just because Donald Trump is Donald Trump.”
He also isn’t worried, Khachigian said, about Trump using the National Guard or the military to punish political enemies like California Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff, as Trump suggested in a Fox interview News.
“We have guardrails in our system against crazy things,” Khachigian said. He paused. “Look, I’m not going to defend everything [Trump has] never said during his lifetime. …There are a lot of things people say that are exaggerated. … Exaggeration is the mother’s milk of politics.”
Mike Madrid sees things differently. A former political director for the California Republican Party, he later 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 voting ethnic group.)
Madrid says California voters should take Trump at his word. “We have to learn from history, from what he’s done in the past,” Madrid said, noting that Trump has already shown a willingness to play politics with federal disaster aid.
Politico E&E News recently reported that the ex-president “has at times been overtly partisan in responding to disasters and has hesitated on at least three occasions to provide disaster aid to areas he considered politically hostile.
In one case, Trump initially refused to approve disaster aid for California after a series of devastating wildfires in 2018. Mark Harvey, who was Trump’s senior director of resilience policy on the Council of national security, said Trump changed his mind after seeing 2016 election results that showed the strong support he received in Orange County, among the areas that burned.
While Trump eventually relented after “some adults in the room pushed him,” Madrid wondered if “those adults [will] be in the room” if Trump returns to the White House a second time. “Or will the second administration be all about revenge and pettiness?
More fundamentally, Madrid said: “There is something extremely irresponsible as a citizen about dismissing what a public official says by second-guessing one’s own intention as to what it means or does not mean. All we can do is take people at their word. That’s what this whole system is based on.
There’s a phrase that caught on the first time Trump ran for president, suggesting that the media took him literally but not seriously, while his supporters took him seriously. serious but not literally.
Voters should do both.
