President Donald Trump’s bizarre riff about Iran “taking out” Los Angeles and San Diego reflected something more important than his usual bluster: Republicans have spent years turning California into a place their voters are preprogrammed to despise, an avatar for Democratic misrule, crime, homelessness, illegal immigration, high taxes, excess regulation, Hollywood liberalism, Silicon Valley arrogance and progressive excess. California cities in the context of an Iranian attack? They cheered, and therein lies the problem.
The campaign against California, which reliably delivers its enormous bloc of 54 Electoral College votes to Democrats, carries an obvious potential benefit in 2028. The state’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, who called the remarks “deranged” and “dangerous,” has built a national profile, battled Trump, debated Florida's Ron DeSantis on Fox News and openly entertained a presidential run. If Newsom becomes the Democratic nominee, Republicans will say: He did this to California, and now he wants to do it to America.
Even with another Democratic presidential nominee, California remains a useful symbol of the liberal America that Republicans love to hate and love to campaign against. They even turned it into a verb. Texas sees itself as California’s main rival and is happy to see it disparaged, given the migration of companies and workers in its favor.
The problem for California is that there is enough truth in the indictments of its enemies to make the caricature effective. California has supplied Republicans with stories and images of homelessness on a staggering scale, absurd housing costs, recurring budget problems and years of progressive experimentation in San Francisco that became nationally famous for all the wrong reasons. California has, at times, been its own worst enemy.
Its progressive excesses have handed Trump and his allies a seemingly inexhaustible supply of ammunition: San Francisco's tolerance of open-air drug use and street disorder; shoplifting and repeat offenders becoming symbols of a criminal-justice system that lost its bearings; diversity bureaucracies and ideological litmus tests in public institutions; schools preoccupied with identity politics while struggling to teach basic skills; and environmental regulations so convoluted that building desperately needed housing becomes an ordeal. Add soaring taxes, extravagant public spending and a political culture in which performative wokeness too often substitutes for practical governance, and the Republicans have plenty to work with. State voters themselves eventually rebelled against part of California’s criminal-justice experiment.
Proposition 36, approved in 2024, increased penalties for some repeat theft and drug offenses and partially reversed changes made by Proposition 47 a decade earlier. California also had about 182,000 homeless people in 2025, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, representing almost a quarter of America’s homeless population.
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