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At the start of Project 2025’s conservative playbook for a second Trump presidency, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts took aim at leaders who he said wield power to “serve themselves first and everyone else a distant second.”
He mentioned North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un comfortably ruling over an impoverished nation, “billionaire climate activists” flying on private jets while criticizing carbon-emitting cars, and two “COVID-19 shutdown politicians” in California who were seen out and about — at a hair salon and a fancy restaurant — while calling on their constituents to stay home.
Name-dropping U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi and Gov. Gavin Newsom in the conservative right’s blueprint for the White House was a way for Roberts to tie them, and California, to the idea that out-of-touch coastal elites are ruining the country.
That notion — well worn in American politics — appears throughout the Project 2025 plan, a wonky, 900-plus-page manifesto released last year by conservative thought leaders and Trump acolytes.
The idea is also evoked more subtly in the much snappier, 16-page Republican Party platform spearheaded by Trump and adopted by party officials last week, which criticizes American politicians who “insulated themselves from criticism and the consequences of their own bad actions” while average Americans suffered.
Gov. Gavin Newsom of California stood by his words from September and said he would not run for president against Vice President Kamala Harris.
Roberts and other Heritage Foundation officials were not available for comment. A Heritage Foundation spokesperson said Project 2025 is a product of more than 100 conservative organizations and “does not speak for any candidate or campaign.”
According to political experts, the conservative strategy of criticizing “woke” liberal ideas, many of which got traction in California, has become particularly useful in the current election cycle, as Trump’s base has proved especially receptive to conservative virtue signaling on issues such as abortion, climate change, guns, immigration and LGBTQ+ rights.
That strategy will only grow, the experts said, if President Biden comes off the Democratic ticket and is replaced with a California politician such as Newsom or Vice President Kamala Harris, a former senator.
“This is a vital angle to be hitting,” said Jon Michaels, a constitutional law professor at UCLA with a forthcoming book on right-wing authoritarianism. “California becomes a convenient foil, and the excesses of California are what Republicans can run against.”
Issues at play
Conservatives have long cast California — sometimes fairly, other times not — as a failing state crumbling under the weight of out-of-control regulation, crime and homelessness, and the 2024 race has intensified those lines of attack.
“Instances of California really going in a different direction from what the Republican Party wants is all over the [Project 2025] report — everything from diversity, equity and inclusion, to connections to China, to high tech [companies] to homelessness,” said Bruce Cain, a political science professor at Stanford University. The aim is to portray a state in disorder, an “undemocratic, patronizing state controlled by the high-tech elites completely out of touch with where the rest of America is.”
Both Project 2025 and the GOP platform envision a second Trump presidency where federal bureaucrats use the powers of the executive branch to beat back an array of California policies — including protections for undocumented immigrants, the environment, unionized workers, those seeking abortions and transgender youth.
In its phrasing, the GOP platform is at times bombastic — just like Trump, who helped draft it — and lays out a relatively clear framework for how he intends to govern in sharp contrast to California leaders.
“California becomes a convenient foil, and the excesses of California are what Republicans can run against.”
— Jon Michaels, constitutional law professor at UCLA
For example, Los Angeles and other major California cities decline to use their police forces or city personnel to enforce immigration laws. Trump’s platform promises to “cut federal funding” to such jurisdictions.
California is in the process of reining in oil drilling in the state, with leaders raising concerns about the environmental and health impacts. The platform calls on the nation to “DRILL, BABY, DRILL.”
California requires LGBTQ+-inclusive curricula in schools and the Democrat-controlled state Legislature just passed a law barring school officials from informing parents of kids who identify as transgender at school if the kids don’t want that information shared. The platform says Republicans support “parental rights” and will “defund schools that engage in inappropriate political indoctrination of our children” or push “radical gender ideology.”
The Project 2025 plan is even more ardent in its rebuke of California policies.
Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts said the new American Revolution will be bloodless ‘if the left allows it to be.’
Roberts, in his foreword of Project 2025, speaks much of American liberty, but defines it squarely within a Christian nationalist framework, saying the Constitution gives each American the liberty to “live as his Creator ordained” — to “do not what we want, but what we ought.”
The plan calls on Trump, if elected, to “make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors” — a process that it says should start with deleting all references to queer identities, “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” abortion or “reproductive health” from federal legislation and rules.
Calling California and other liberal states “sanctuaries for abortion tourism,” the plan says the Trump administration should “push as hard as possible to protect the unborn in every jurisdiction in America,” work with Congress to enact antiabortion laws, and mandate state reporting of abortion data to the federal government — including patients’ state of residence and “reason” for receiving a procedure.
Critics say such actions would empower conservative states that ban abortions to identify and punish women who go to liberal states such as California to have those procedures.
The party platform does not call for a national abortion ban, which rankled some on the right, but does back state policies restricting it and says Republicans “proudly stand for families and Life.”
Both plans criticize the nation’s shift to electric vehicles, and Project 2025 says the federal government should rescind a waiver allowing California to set its own clean air standards around fuel economy, which underpins the state’s goal of shifting exclusively to zero-emissions vehicles by 2035.
The fight ahead
Although Project 2025 is authored in large part by prominent advisors and former appointees of Trump, he has recently sought to distance himself from the plan.
In an online post July 5, Trump wrote that he knew “nothing about it,” but also that “some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.” Even so, he wished those behind the plan “luck.”
“This isn’t Alabama or Mississippi. You are taking on a very powerful state with a lot of resources — and a will to resist.”
— Bruce Cain, political science professor at Stanford University
Trump’s campaign referred questions about Project 2025 and the GOP platform, and their relation to California policies, to the Republican National Committee.
Anna Kelly, a committee spokesperson, said the party platform “contains commonsense policies like cutting taxes, securing the border, ending absurd [electric vehicle] mandates, securing our elections, defending our constitutional rights, and keeping men out of women’s sports” — with the last being an apparent reference to transgender women.
“If reporters find those principles contradictory to values pushed by California leaders,” Kelly wrote, “maybe it’s time for Democrats to evaluate how their state is run.”
Democrats, including Biden, have repeatedly tied Trump to Project 2025, saying his claims of distance from it are absurd given how many people in his orbit are leading it. On Tuesday, Harris called out Project 2025 at a campaign event in Las Vegas, noting that it calls for the dissolution of the U.S. Department of Education, cuts to Social Security and a nationwide abortion ban.
Since President Biden’s debate performance, Vice President Kamala Harris has received more attention than at any time since her early, rocky days as his No. 2.
“If implemented, this plan would be the latest attack in Donald Trump’s full-on assault on reproductive freedom,” she said.
Experts said that if Biden is replaced by Harris or Newsom — who are considered leading candidates amid a swirl of doubt about Biden’s age and ability to defeat Trump — conservative derision about California and its liberal policies will increase, and find a receptive audience in many parts of the country.
A Times survey earlier this year found that 50% of U.S. adults believe California is in decline, with 48% of Republicans saying it is “not really American.”
If Trump wins, California is expected to lead the liberal resistance to Trump’s agenda, just as it did during his first term, experts said. Such efforts will be hampered by California’s budget woes and the conservative-leaning Supreme Court, they said, but not undone completely.
“California will fight back, and it has the means to fight back,” Cain said. “This isn’t Alabama or Mississippi. You are taking on a very powerful state with a lot of resources — and a will to resist.”
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