Is California at War with President Trump?
On Tuesday Trump will arrive for the first time as president in California – a state he apparently reviles and which, according to some estimations, reviles him in return. On his trip President Trump will inspect border wall prototypes and attend a Republican fundraiser in Beverly Hills. Will the trip be a success? The answer depends on whether the animosity between Californians and the president is really as extreme as many would have us believe. More at Boston Globe.
President Trump’s well-documented clashes with California owe plenty to politics, culture and personality. But at bottom, what drives the president’s toxic relationship with the nation’s most populous state is this: his near-obsessive desire to be seen as a winner…
The Golden State is the seat of an entertainment industry that dismissed him as a reality television creation, the home of a business culture where his real estate dreams were stymied and, now, the headquarters of a resistance movement that has tried to cast a cloud over his legitimacy as president.
Despite his clash of ideas with liberal-minded Hollywood, Trump managed to win the vote against Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton in one Beverly Hills district, according to the Times. While the rest of Los Angeles’ west side went decidedly blue, voters in the neighborhood surrounding the Beverly Hills Hotel — one of Trump’s favorite hangouts — voted 54% in favor of the New York businessman.
California and the Trump administration are engaged in an all-out war over immigration enforcement, the president’s signature issue on the campaign trail and in the White House. It is a deeply personal battle in the nation’s most populous and economically powerful state, where 27 percent of the 39 million residents are foreign-born.