Here’s a question that no one, to my knowledge, has asked any of California’s Democratic candidates for governor: If, in January 2027, Trump decides that he’s going to turn San Diego into another Minneapolis, how would you respond?
There are any number of related questions you could ask. What do you do if Trump dispatches ICE officers to polling stations in California in November 2028? What if he illegally impounds federal Medicaid funds? And then there are the more delicate questions: In the event that federal agents run amok in California, what steps can you take to ensure the loyalty, or at least neutrality, of state law enforcement? Who is actually going to protect Californians from getting abducted or murdered by ICE? And, if and when it all goes down, how sure can you be that the governor’s security retinue is going to be a guarantor of your safety instead of another potential threat?
These are not idle questions. We’ve all seen what the Trump administration is capable of. Even now that the sack of Minneapolis has abated somewhat, the White House is still finding new ways to harass the state of Minnesota — for example, by blocking the Congressionally mandated transmission of more than a quarter of a billion dollars in Medicaid funding. There’s nothing to stop them from launching similar assaults on California.
In fact, they’re already casting around for a cassus belli. In last week’s State of the Union address, Trump announced a “war on fraud,” citing “Minnesota, where members of the Somali community have pillaged an estimated $19 billion from the American taxpayer.” Other states, including California, “are even worse,” he said.
This “war on fraud” has alread been in progress for months, according to Trump. The racist slander against Somali immigrants in Minnesota was just one part of it. In January, Trump attempted to illegally freeze billions of dollars in childcare subsidies to California. Nick Shirley, the regime-affiliated propagandist who helped lay the groundwork for ICE’s invasion of Minnesota, was subsequently spotted skulking around San Diego day cares.
And Shirley isn’t the only apparatchik who has gone fishing. Last year, the Trump administration tried, unsuccessfully, to get access to California’s voter registration data. In February, just a week before the State of the Union, Customs and Border Protection asked San Diego County to tell them who owns every parcel of land in the county.
It is clear that the Trump administration wants another domestic invasion, and that California is a likely target. Based on Shirley’s whereabouts and that strange CBP request, I would guess that they’re zeroing in on San Diego as a potential site for their next siege. It’s something that the State of California, and in particular the next governor of California, should be prepared for. Given how much we already know about the Trump playbook, there’s no excuse to not be prepared.
And yet I haven’t seen much evidence that any of the Democratic candidates for governor are taking the threat from Trump-occupied Washington seriously. Cruising around the candidates’ campaign websites, I can find barely any mention of specific, actionable strategies for resisting Trump. Swalwell says he will “work to unmask ICE,” which is certainly worthwhile but deeply insufficient; Becerra notes that he sued Trump when he was attorney general, but doesn’t say anything about his future plans to fight the administration; Tom Steyer and Katie Porter are vocally anti-Trump but I’m not aware of any specific recommendations they’ve made regarding, for example, anti-ICE counter-measures.
In the absence of a serious and sober analysis of the threats to California, we have fairly conventional issue platforms. There’s nothing wrong with a conventional issue platform; needless to say, I am extremely interested in what all of the candidates have to say about housing policy, among other things. But this moment calls for something more than a normal campaign and a conventional governor. I’m still waiting for one of Newsom’s potential successors to recognize this.