For his first trip outside Washington, Donald Trump chose Los Angeles, where he will travel on Friday, January 24. Even as president, he doesn't intend to miss such a fine opportunity to mock California, and indeed to humiliate the Democrats who run the country's most populous state.
The fires that ravaged several neighborhoods of the film capital between January 7 and 10, and the unpreparedness they exposed, came at just the right time for Trump to practice the transactional approach he now intends to apply to relations between Washington and the US states: no humanitarian aid without a minimum of cooperation.
A few days before his departure, Joe Biden granted massive reconstruction aid to the Californian megalopolis. But the state's governor, Gavin Newsom, and the mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, remain at the mercy of an ukase from the White House. All the more so as Trump has reiterated his accusations that the Democratic state is wasting water. His ally Mike Johnson, speaker of the House of Representatives, has not ruled out using federal aid to bend a state that refuses to follow the new administration's injunctions on the deportation of undocumented immigrants.
California bashing
Trump couldn't be more thrilled with his supporters. In their eyes, California is the anti-model, the symbol of the excesses of progressive politics and "woke culture." California bashing is nothing new in the Republican Party. But with the candidacy of Kamala Harris, the state's former attorney general, the Golden State's scapegoat status has intensified in the national culture war.
It wasn't always so. For most of the 20th century, California was seen as the Eldorado of the new gold diggers. People came here in search of fame, beaches, freedom and a new start. California's aura was tarnished in the 1960s-1970s, when conservatives discovered that the state was also home to protesters (in Berkeley), hippies (in San Francisco) and free lovers (everywhere).
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