Trump vs. California

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Under Donald Trump, the federal government is like a bad parent: never there when you need him but eager to stick his nose in your business when you don't want him to.
The relationship between Trump and California has always been bad, but the past few days represent a new low. On Friday, CNN reported that the White House was seeking to cut off as much federal funding to the Golden State as possible, especially to state universities. That afternoon, protests broke out in Los Angeles as ICE agents sought to make arrests. By Saturday, Trump had announced that he was federalizing members of the National Guard and deploying them to L.A., over the objections of Governor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat.
Americans have seen the National Guard called out to deal with the aftermath of riots in the past, but its involvement over the weekend represents a dramatic escalation. The National Guard was deployed to L.A. in 1992, during riots after the acquittal of four police officers in the beating of Rodney King. The scale of the destruction in that instance, compared with scattered violence in L.A. this weekend, helps show why Trump's order was disproportionate. (National Guard troops were also deployed in Minneapolis during protests after the murder of George Floyd, at the request of Governor Tim Walz. Trump has falsely claimed that he deployed the troops when Walz wouldn't.)
In all of these recent cases, however, governors have made the call to bring out the National Guard. A president has not done so since 1965, when Lyndon Johnson took control of the Alabama National Guard from the arch-segregationist Governor George Wallace and ordered it to protect civil-rights leaders' third attempt to march from Selma to Montgomery. The situations aren't even closely analogous. Johnson acted only after local leaders had demonstrated that law enforcement would violently attack the peaceful marchers. By contrast, the Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department have plenty of experience and sufficient man power to deal with protests of the weekend's size, and military forces are a riskier choice because they aren't trained as police. This morning, Newsom said he will sue the administration over the deployment.
Elizabeth Goitein, a scholar at the Brennan Center for Justice who has written extensively in The Atlantic about the abuse of presidential emergency powers, told The Washington Post that Trump's order 'is completely unprecedented under any legal authority.' 'The use of the military to quell civil unrest is supposed to be an absolute last resort,' she added.
Trump is doing this, as my colleague Tom Nichols writes, because he wants to provoke a confrontation with California. The president sees tough immigration enforcement as a political winner, but he also wants to use the face-off to expand the federal government's power to control states. Trump's vision is federalism as a one-way street: If states need help, they might be on their own, but if states believe that federal intervention is unnecessary or even harmful, too bad. If the president wants to shut off funds to states for nothing more than political retribution or personal animus, he believes that he can do that. (A White House spokesperson told CNN that decisions about potential cuts were not final but said that 'no taxpayer should be forced to fund the demise of our country,' a laughably vague and overheated rationale.) If states have been struck by major disasters, however, they'd better hope they voted for Trump, or that their governors have a good relationship with him.
Some of these attempts to strong-arm states are likely illegal, and will be successfully challenged in court. Others are in gray areas, and still others are plainly legal—manifestations of what I call 'total politics,' in which officials wield powers that are legal but improper or unwise. This is a marked shift from the traditional American conservative defense of states' rights. Although that argument has often been deployed to defend racist policies, such as slavery and segregation, the right has also argued for the prerogative of local people to stave off an overweaning federal government. Conservatives also tended to view Lyndon Johnson as a boogeyman, not a role model. Kristi Noem, now the secretary of Homeland Security, bristled at the idea of federalizing the National Guard just last year, when she was serving as governor of South Dakota. But Trump's entire approach is to centralize control. He has pursued Project 2025's plan to seize new powers for the executive branch and to establish right-wing Big Government, flexing the coercive capacity of the federal government over citizens' lives.
Tom Homan, Trump's border czar, has suggested that he wouldn't hesitate to arrest Newsom, and Trump endorsed the idea today. And Trump allies have proposed all sorts of other ways to force state governments to comply, such as cutting off Justice Department grants or FEMA assistance for states that don't sign up to enforce Trump's immigration policies, an issue where state governments do not traditionally have a role. This duress is not limited to blue states. Just last week, under pressure from the DOJ, Texas agreed to trash a 24-year-old law (signed by then-Governor Rick Perry, who later became Trump's secretary of energy) that gives in-state college tuition to some undocumented immigrants.
If nothing else, the Trump era has given progressives a new appreciation for states' rights. Democrat attorneys general have become some of the most effective opponents of the Trump White House, just as Republican ones battled the Obama and Biden administrations. On Friday, Newsom mused about California withholding federal taxes. This is plainly illegal, but you can see where he's coming from: In fiscal year 2022, the state contributed $83 billion dollars more to the federal government than it received. If California is not getting disaster aid but is getting hostile deployments of federal troops, Californians might find it harder to see what's in it for them. No wonder one poll commissioned by an advocacy group earlier this year found that 61 percent of the state's residents thought California would be better off as a separate nation.
Secession isn't going to happen: As journalists writing about aspiring red-state secessionists in recent years have noted, leaving the Union is unconstitutional. But the fact that these questions keep coming up is a testament to the fraying relationship between the federal government and the states. Trump's recent actions toward California show why tensions between Washington and the states are likely to get worse as long as he's president.
Related:
David Frum: For Trump, this is a dress rehearsal.
Tom Nichols: Trump is using the National Guard as bait.
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P.S.
My colleague Katherine J. Wu's latest wrenching dispatch from the dismantling of the federal scientific establishment was published today. Katherine writes about a letter from more than 300 National Institutes for Health officials criticizing the NIH's direction in the past few months. One official, who both signed the letter and spoke with Katherine anonymously, told her, 'We're just becoming a weapon of the state.' The official added, 'They're using grants as a lever to punish institutions and academia, and to censor and stifle science.' That quote struck me because it dovetails directly with the mindset that Trump demonstrates in his dealing with the states: Parts of the federal government are most valuable to him when they can be used not to provide services to citizens, but to serve as a cudgel.
— David
Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.
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Article originally published at The Atlantic