Trump's threats are dismissed as bluster but there's cause for concern

Donald Trump standing before a large banner at a rally at Calhoun Ranch in Coachella.

Columnist

Oct. 17, 2024 3 AM PT

Life may be full of uncertainties but there’s one thing you can count on come 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 remotely close.

In 2016, Trump was buried in a 25-point Hillary Clinton landslide. In 2020, he lost to Joe Biden by 29 percentage points.

There’s no love lost between Trump and California. If you ranked the 50 states in terms of his personal regard, it’s a good bet California would finish dead last. The GOP nominee loathes Gov. Gavin Newsom — a feeling that’s mutual — and his depiction of life in the Golden State makes the seventh circle of Hell sound like a resort vacation.

But Trump didn’t just trash California on his ego trip last weekend to Coachella. If elected, he vowed to punish the state — which is to say its more than 39 million residents — by withholding federal disaster aid should California’s leaders refuse to give more water to farmers and cities. (That would come at the expense of the environment and others denied their share.)

The remarks echoed a threat Trump made last summer, holding forth at his Rancho Palos Verdes golf course, where the former president explicitly singled out Newsom. “If he doesn’t sign those papers,” Trump told reporters, “we won’t give him money to put out all his fires.” It was unclear what papers Trump referred to, but there was no mistaking his strong-arm sentiment.

And yet ...

Trump may have been clobbered twice in California, but he did receive more than 6 million votes in 2020 — the most of any state. On Nov. 5, millions of Californians will again cast their ballots for Trump, notwithstanding his obvious antipathy toward the state and its Democratic-leaning voters.

To Ken Khachigian, that makes perfect sense.

“Kamala Harris is monumentally unqualified to be president of the United States and I just couldn’t imagine putting in her hands being the leader of the free world,” said the longtime GOP strategist. “I don’t think she’s capable of being much more than a county supervisor in California.”

Khachigian has served in two Republican administrations and spent a lifetime in and around politics, which he recounts in his recently published autobiography, “Behind Closed Doors: In the Room With Reagan & Nixon.”

“I think she’s on the far left,” Khachigian said of the vice president. “Donald Trump believes in basic Republican principles of fewer taxes, less government, tougher on crime, stronger national defense, strong foreign policy.

“So based on those issues,” he said, “that’s the case for California voting for Donald Trump.”

He dismissed Trump’s threats — or intimations of blackmail, if you will — saying California’s Republican lawmakers wouldn’t stand for disaster relief being cut off if Trump, indeed, tried to do so. “I think that’s just posturing,” Khachigian said. “A lot of that is just Donald Trump being Donald Trump.”

Nor does he worry, Khachigian said, about Trump using the National Guard or military to punish political nemeses like California Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff, as Trump suggested he might in a Fox News interview.

“We have safeguards in our system against lunatic things,” Khachigian said. He paused. “Look, I’m not going to defend every single thing [Trump has] ever said in his lifetime. ... There’s a lot of things people say in overstatement. ... Overstatement is the mother’s milk of politics.”

Mike Madrid sees things differently. A former political director of the California Republican Party, he went on to co-found the anti-Trump Lincoln Project. (He also has a new book out, “The Latino Century,” on the rising influence of the nation’s largest ethnic voting 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 Trump has already shown his willingness to play politics with federal disaster assistance.

Politico’s E&E News recently reported the ex-president “was flagrantly partisan at times in response to disasters and on at least three occasions hesitated to give disaster aid to areas he considered politically hostile.”

In one instance, Trump initially refused to approve disaster aid for California after a devastating series of 2018 wildfires. Mark Harvey, who was Trump’s senior director for resilience policy on the National Security Council staff, said Trump changed his mind after being shown 2016 election returns that showed the strong support he received in Orange County, among the areas that burned.

While Trump eventually relented after “some of the adults in the room pushed him,” Madrid wondered whether “those adults [will] be in the room” if Trump returns to the White House a second time. “Or is the second administration going to be just purely about vengeance and pettiness?”

More fundamentally, Madrid said, “There’s something extremely irresponsible as a citizen to dismiss what a public official is saying by divining your own intent as to what that means or does not mean. All we can do is take people at their word. That’s what this whole system is based off of.”

There’s an expression that gained wide currency the first time Trump ran for president, suggesting the media took him literally but not seriously, while his supporters took him seriously but not literally.

Voters should do both.

Column: Donald Trump threatens vengeance on California. Should we believe him?

More to Read

More From the Los Angeles Times

Most Read in Politics