RANCHO PALOS VERDES, California — Former President Donald Trump, speaking at his cliffside golf course overlooking the Pacific Ocean, lambasted California as a hellscape that Vice President Kamala Harris would inflict on the rest of the nation should she win the White House.
It was the type of broadside against the state that many expected Trump to let loose on the debate stage against Harris earlier this week. Instead, the former president, in town for a fundraising jaunt, delivered the attack in person.
The result was an incongruous mashup: Trump’s dystopian view of the nation’s most populous state set against one of its signature coastal vistas.
“I'm here today in California with a very simple message for the American people,” Trump said at his Friday news conference. “We cannot allow comrade Kamala Harris and the communist left to do to America what they did to California. California is a mess.”
California is a standard punching bag for conservatives, who portray the state as a monument to liberal excess. But that critique has taken on new salience with Harris, a California native, at the top of the Democratic ticket.
Trump tore into Harris’ California record, particularly as a prosecutor — on which Harris has leaned heavily as a central campaign pitch. He portrayed her record as soft on crime, dubbing her the “godmother of sanctuary cities.” (Harris, who did support San Francisco’s sanctuary city policies to protect undocumented immigrants from deportation, also faced heat from the left in the past for backing a policy to turn over undocumented minors suspected of committing a crime to federal immigration authorities.)
He also criticized her handling of the 2004 murder of San Francisco police officer Isaac Espinoza when she ruled out the death penalty for his killer before Espinoza was even laid to rest. The case sparked immediate backlash at the time, including from fellow Democrats, and became a pivotal moment in shaping the rest of her political career.
The Harris campaign quickly dismissed his news conference as a continuation of Trump’s bad week, after a debate performance that even fellow Republicans such as Karl Rove described as “catastrophic.”
“Donald Trump took his train wreck on the debate stage straight to California,” said James Singer, a campaign spokesperson. “In a rambling, defensive, often incoherent event to promote his golf course, he yet again showed the country how he is melting down.”
Harris wasn’t the only object of Trump’s ire. He spent plenty of time deriding California Gov. Gavin Newsom — whom Trump has nicknamed “Newscum” — for presiding over the state’s problems with homelessness and perceived high crime rates.
Violent crime is up 3 percent in California compared to last year, but the state’s homicide rate dropped significantly — nearly 16 percent — according to a July report from the state attorney general. And while crime has trended higher in recent years, it remains below the peak violent crime rate of the early 1990s.
“I’m saying how bad she was and what a bad job she’s done. What a horrible governor Newscum has been — he’s been horrible,” Trump said, acknowledging that his rhetoric “knocking the hell” out of the state may cut against his own California real estate interest.
“So many people are leaving, and I’m hurting my own property. And that cost me lots of money,” Trump said. “But it’s OK because this is unimportant compared to saving the United States of America.”
During a lengthy diatribe on water scarcity, Trump at one point threatened to withhold federal disaster relief money if state officials didn't agree to circumvent environmental laws to send more water to Southern California.
"And Gavin Newscum is going to sign those papers, and if he doesn't sign those papers, we won't give him money to put out all his fires, and if we don't give him the money to put out his fires, he's got problems," he said.
Newsom posted a clip of those remarks online, saying every voter should be aware that Trump "just admitted he will block emergency disaster funds to settle political vendettas."
"Today it’s California’s wildfires. Tomorrow it could be hurricane funding for North Carolina or flooding assistance for homeowners in Pennsylvania," Newsom wrote, in a reference to key swing states. "Donald Trump doesn’t care about America — he only cares about himself."
Trump's attacks on the state’s leaders even extended to local issues, albeit one that hits unnervingly close to his California home base of the Trump National Golf Course. Located in the South Bay city of Rancho Palos Verdes, the course is less than a mile away from an active landslide plane, where residents have had their utilities shut off and evacuation warnings in place due to the threat of more damaging land movement.
He invited Rancho Palos Verdes mayor John Cruikshank to speak at the top of his news conference, where Cruikshank called for greater state and federal support for the precarious situation.
“I guess the governor’s not doing much,” Trump said, later accusing both the state and federal government of being “missing in action.” Newsom proclaimed a state of emergency for the city 10 days ago.
Trump insisted that bettering California would be the “easiest thing to do,” waxing poetic on the state’s natural advantages that have helped build California into an outsized economic and cultural powerhouse.
“We're standing out here on the Pacific Ocean in the most beautiful weather,” Trump said. “A lot of states don't have weather like this. They don't have Pacific Oceans. So it's many things you could do, but you start lowering taxes and making it friendly.”
Such friendliness, he said, includes courting business figures like Elon Musk, who have noisily (if not completely) left California in recent years, denouncing its social liberalism and high taxes. Trump said Musk claimed no elected official, including Newsom, tried to convince Musk not to leave the state.
“Nobody even calls him to try and get him to stay. I would have been on him. I would have said, ‘Let's have lunch, let's have dinner and then let's have breakfast the following morning.’”
In between the California attacks that had gone unsaid at the debate, Trump turned his attention back to his Tuesday televised showdown with Harris, insisting “I did very well, but I was fighting three people, fighting crazy left radical lunatics at ABC.”
Trump’s anger at the network that hosted the debate extended even to stars who weren’t on-stage that night, such as George Stephanopoulos. But most of his anger was reserved for David Muir, one of the two moderators, whose fact-checks of the former president clearly still stung.
He referred to Muir as a “foolish fool” and said the anchor was wrong to correct Trump’s assertion that crime was through the roof. Muir interjected to note that FBI figures said crime was down overall.
The Trump campaign has since rejected that assertion, arguing that the federal government’s statistics omit some of the largest cities, including Los Angeles and Chicago. A new set of preliminary statistics released on Thursday showed a slightly higher rate of nonfatal violent victimization — which includes rape, assault and battery — than from the previous year.
“Findings show that there was an overall decline in the rate of violent victimization over the last three decades, from 1993 to 2023,” said Kevin M. Scott, the bureau’s acting director. “While the 2023 rate was higher than those in 2020 and 2021, it was not statistically different from the rate 5 years ago, in 2019.”
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