Trump this week turned up the dial on an epic power struggle with an iconically blue state where he is wildly unpopular — and which represents the fifth-largest economy in the world.
SACRAMENTO — Donald Trump wants to put the most influential state in the nation in its place.
Trump has taken particular glee in lashing out at Gov. Gavin Newsom, who succeeded Jerry Brown — another longtime Trump foil — in the governor’s mansion in Sacramento this past January. Trump had a field day on Twitter when Newsom announced last winter that he was refocusing California’s high-speed rail away from a promised San Francisco-to-Los Angeles leg that had been the target of conservative ire.
Also on Wednesday, in what has become a routine display of defiance, California's governor stood beside Attorney General Xavier Becerra to decry the president's latest threat while vowing the state would prevail in court. "Our message to those who claim to support states' rights: Don't trample on ours," Becerra said Wednesday in a thinly veiled message to Trump.
While Newsom and mayors have said they would welcome more federal dollars, the most direct ways of dealing with homelessness fall to cities and counties. Reports that Trump is contemplating federal law enforcement action — bolstered this week by his advisers, who said better policing must play a role — had state and city officials warning Trump against intervening in their affairs.
Former U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, before he was fired last year, had actually flown out to Sacramento to announce that lawsuit in person. In a tense speech to hundreds of California police officers, the former Alabama senator went so far as to invoke the Civil War, warning that "there is no secession."
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