Trump vs. California

Donald Trump wanted to change the subject. A week ago, he was frustrated by unflattering news coverage regarding the federal budget debate, the Ukraine war and his breakup with Elon Musk. He knew that escalating a crackdown on Southern California’s undocumented immigrant population and provoking a confrontation with state and local political leaders would refocus public and media attention in a much more favorable direction for him. Immigration and border policy are the only remaining policy matters on which the American people still give him positive approval ratings, and now he has managed to move these issues back to center for most American voters. 

Gavin Newsom would have certainly preferred for this entire controversy to have never occurred, but he and his advisors are also sufficiently savvy to recognize the opportunity it presented for him. As much as Trump enjoys picking fights with California for the benefit of his conservative loyalists, Newsom equally relishes his clashes with the president and knows how effectively these battles can unify his own fellow partisans. Newsom is a master at reframing policy disagreements as personal face-offs, and fighting with Trump over immigration policy rallies otherwise fractious California Democrats to his side and further elevates his standing on the national level in the pre-pre-pre presidential primary process.

Karen Bass also accomplished her political objectives, perhaps to an even greater level than Trump or Newsom. After two years in office largely invisible to most Angelenos, the city’s mayor suffered near-fatal political damage earlier this year due to the widespread perception that she had badly mishandled the aftermath of the region’s catastrophic wildfires. But in the first days after the ICE raids began, Bass emerged as the type of visible, forceful and unifying leader that had been painfully missing during the fires. Bass may not have saved her mayorship this week, but she may have earned herself a rare second look for a typically disinterested electorate.

But the political calculations surrounding this emergency are deceptively simple. If we take a few steps back to look at this confrontation from a broader societal and cultural perspective, we can see the scope of the challenges that the current crisis has revealed. This clash is not just between Trump and Newsom, between Republicans and Democrats, or even between Red and Blue America. Rather, at the risk of indulging in a hopefully permissible amount of melodrama, what we are now witnessing is a struggle between this country’s past and its future.

Southern California is the most demographically diverse community in the history of our planet. There are hundreds of nationalities represented in Los Angeles County and more than 100 languages spoken by students in our public schools. Roughly 40% of the city’s residents were born in other countries and the state of California is home to more than one-fifth of the nation’s 12 million undocumented immigrants. We live in the middle of the most ambitious social experiment ever attempted. By the time that experiment concludes, we will know whether Los Angeles can serve as an example for other metropolitan areas around the world, either as a paradigm for tolerance and mutual respect and understanding, or as a warning of the problems that arise when these cultural and ethnic and religious fusions occur too quickly.

Ten years ago, Trump took over a Republican Party whose leaders had concluded that they needed to adopt a less restrictionist approach to immigration policy. Trump demonstrated that their voters — and many non-Republicans (and nonvoters) — were not yet ready for that shift. Since then, he has both reflected and led a movement that comprises roughly half the electorate against what they consider to be overly rapid change. For their part, Democrats are still wrestling with the degree to which their alternative should be accommodating or confrontational.

But politics doesn’t happen in a vacuum. This electoral foreplay reflects a far larger challenge for all of us as we consider how to find at least some common ground between those who think change is happening too quickly and those who believe it is not coming fast enough.

Dan Schnur is the U.S. Politics Editor for the Jewish Journal. He teaches courses in politics, communications, and leadership at UC Berkeley, USC and Pepperdine. He hosts the monthly webinar “The Dan Schnur Political Report” for the Los Angeles World Affairs Council & Town Hall. Follow Dan’s work at www.danschnurpolitics.com.