By Shawn Hubler | New York Times
In the annals of ill will between California and the Trump administration, Thursday may have been a record-breaker.
The U.S. Education Department announced early in the West Coast morning that it would challenge a major state law protecting transgender students. Two hours later came the revocation of federal waivers that had let California colleges include students living in the country illegally in certain programs that receive federal aid.
The afternoon brought a flurry of investigations into suspected affirmative action in California higher education: The Justice Department said it would investigate whether Stanford University and three schools in the University of California system were violating a Supreme Court decision that banned the consideration of race in admissions. Then the Health and Human Services Department said it was looking into accusations of similar discrimination at “a major medical school in California.”
By sundown, the Agriculture Department had sent Gov. Gavin Newsom a letter saying it would review its education-related funding in California in connection with transgender protections. And the Justice Department announced that the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department was under investigation for allegedly taking too long to approve applications for concealed-carry permits.
Neither California nor President Donald Trump has ever pretended there was much love lost between them. The state, which is dominated by Democrats, sued Trump’s administration more than 120 times during his first term in office. Californians voted against him by landslides in the 2020 and 2024 presidential elections — results that Trump claimed, baselessly, were tied to voter fraud.
It’s unclear what triggered the barrage of attention this week to California, and whether it was choreographed or coincidental. The White House did not immediately respond Friday to a request for comment.
Newsom declined to comment. A spokesperson, Izzy Gardon, said Newsom was “focused on Los Angeles’ recovery.”
Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., who led the first impeachment of Trump, said the president had a “partisan vendetta against California” and was “continuing to weaponize the federal government against the 1 in 10 Americans” who live in the state of more than 39 million people.
California’s Trump supporters applauded.
“Extreme policies and unchecked one-party rule have lowered the quality of life across our state,” said Rep. Kevin Kiley, R-Calif. “All Californians will benefit from greater accountability. We need balance and common sense.”
Other California officials and legal experts said the investigations appeared to be legally questionable and politically driven.
“His command of the law and compliance with the law is inconsistent at best,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta, a Democrat, said of Trump. He said the state was already on track to sue the Trump administration almost twice as many times as it did during the president’s first term, and potentially more than 200 times over the next four years. So far, he said, California has sued the administration eight times in eight weeks.
Since Trump took office this year, he has serially singled out Democratic strongholds.
Last month, he chastised Maine’s governor over the state’s protections for transgender athletes and opened investigations into the state’s educational system. This week, he signed an executive order initiating a “D.C. Safe and Beautiful Task Force” that would increase police presence in Washington, maximize immigration enforcement, expedite concealed-carry licenses and crack down on subway fare evasion. Local officials countered that crime in the district was down.
“I think there is no doubt, from the pattern of investigations, that there is targeting of ‘blue’ states and especially California,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the law school at the University of California, Berkeley, one of the schools where U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi opened “compliance review investigations.”
“Some is likely a difference of policies and values,” Chemerinsky said. “But some likely is retribution and playing to his political base.”
Political experts said they were surprised it had taken this long for the Trump administration to let loose on California. For months, the Democrats who lead the state had braced for a Republican assault on its influential policies on diversity, equity and inclusion; gun restrictions; immigration; equity in college admissions; and LGBTQ+ rights.
Several public affairs experts speculated that the administration had planned to make an example of California immediately after Trump took office, but hesitated after catastrophic fires erupted in Los Angeles on Jan. 7, less than two weeks before his inauguration. Trump falsely suggested in his inaugural address that state authorities had let wildfires tear through Los Angeles “without a token of defense,” but refrained from attacking the state on other, more partisan cultural issues.
After Newsom’s press office contradicted Trump on social media with photos of firefighters assaulting flames and rescuing terrified fire victims, the president pivoted to an inaccurate claim that state protections for endangered fish had diminished the amount of water available for firefighting. In late January, the administration pointedly unleashed a gusher of federal irrigation water nearly 200 miles north of Los Angeles as the president claimed on social media that if California had listened to him years before, “there would have been no fire!”
The water had no direct connection to the infrastructure supplying Los Angeles County, and more than 1 billion gallons ended up trapped in a low spot in the Central Valley, where farmers, many of whom had voted for Trump, complained about the potential impact on summer irrigation supplies.
As Los Angeles area fire victims have turned to rebuilding, attacks on the state have become politically safer.
Jason Elliott, a Democratic political consultant and former Newsom adviser, framed Thursday’s assault on California as a well-worn way for Trump to rekindle his base and distract from bipartisan outrage over tariffs, Elon Musk and the scandal over the discussion of war plans on Signal.
“Clearly, somebody put the smelling salts under their nose and they woke up and realized that culture wars are the only thing they have going for them,” Elliott said. “They turned to the only play they know how to run.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.