 "(File) US President Donald Trump. AP")
“We are all just prisoners here
Of our own device”
The above lines from the lyrics of the classic rock song Hotel California by The Eagles couldn’t be truer now with the streets of the city displaying a violent political divide . California emerged as a significant adversary to President Donald Trump due to a confluence of factors including his administration’s perceived overreach of federal power, its policies on immigration and funding and California’s proactive legal challenges.
The relationship between Trump and California was consistently strained, with recent events indicating a deepening animosity. It has taken a turn for worse.
Escalation of tensions and federal intervention
The conflict between the Trump administration and California intensified dramatically, reaching a new low point. Several reports from the US indicated that the White House was aiming to severely reduce federal funding to California particularly targeting state universities.
Protests erupted in Los Angeles following efforts by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to make arrests leading President Trump to declare the federalisation of National Guard members and their deployment to Los Angeles, a move that California Governor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, opposed.
The deployment of the National Guard by a president without the governor’s request was described as a dramatic escalation. The National Guard was previously deployed to Los Angeles in 1992 after the Rodney King verdict, but the destruction at that time was far more extensive than the scattered violence reported in Los Angeles. Some analysts say Trump’s order appear disproportionate.
Impact Shorts
More ShortsNational Guard troops were also deployed in Minneapolis during protests related to the murder of George Floyd at the request of Governor Tim Walz.
In all these cases, governors made the decision to deploy the National Guard. A US president had not done so on their own since 1965, when Lyndon Johnson federalised the Alabama National Guard from Governor George Wallace to safeguard civil rights marchers attempting to go from Selma to Montgomery.
Johnson’s action followed demonstrations by local law enforcement of violent attacks on peaceful marchers, whereas the Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department possessed ample experience and personnel to manage the weekend’s protests.
The Washington Post quoted Elizabeth Goitein, a Brennan Center for Justice scholar specialising in presidential emergency powers, as saying that Trump’s order was not backed by legal authority. The use of the military to suppress civil unrest is usually seen as an absolute last resort by any administration.
Political motivations and centralisation of power
Is Trump intentionally provoking a confrontation with California?
There are critics saying that the president viewed stringent immigration enforcement as politically advantageous and sought to leverage the dispute to expand the federal government’s authority over states. Trump has used funding as a political tool, giving credence to criticism that he thought could cut off funds to states for reasons of political retaliation or personal animosity.
A White House spokesperson said decisions regarding potential cuts were not yet final but justified them by saying that no taxpayer should be forced to fund the demise of our country.
Some of these attempts to coerce states were likely illegal and would face successful court challenges, while others fell into grey areas or were plainly legal, where officials exercised legal but improper or unwise powers.
This approach marked a significant departure from traditional American conservative defences of states’ rights, which historically advocated for local prerogatives against an overreaching federal government, even though these arguments were sometimes used to defend racist policies.
Kristi Noem, the current secretary of Homeland Security, had previously expressed opposition to the federalisation of the National Guard last year when she was Governor of South Dakota. Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, had indicated his willingness to arrest Governor Newsom, an idea Trump publicly supported.
California’s legal counteroffensive
California mounted a significant legal challenge against the Trump administration, engaging in numerous court battles. US District Judge Myong J Joun, during a March hearing in Boston, questioned attorneys representing a coalition of states about the potential losses they would incur if he did not immediately intervene to block federal funding cuts to teacher training programmes nationwide.
California Deputy Attorney General Laura Faer responded that the situation was dire and that programmes across the state faced potential closure, dissolution and termination. Judge Joun promptly issued a temporary restraining order, blocking the cuts as arbitrary and capricious, which was a victory for the states.
However, less than a month later, the Supreme Court reversed this decision, finding that the states had failed to refute the administration’s claim that it would be unlikely to recover the funds if they were disbursed during litigation.
This was a setback for California but not the end of the dispute over teacher training and it represented one of many ongoing legal battles in a broader legal war waged by California and its allies against the Trump administration.
California vs Trump: Two cases a week
Media reports say that during President Trump’s first 100 days in office in his second term, California challenged the administration in court, on average, more than twice a week. The state had filed 15 lawsuits against the administration, almost all alongside other states and had submitted briefs supporting other litigants suing the federal government in at least 18 additional cases.
Attorneys in California Attorney General Rob Bonta’s office were working at an intense pace to prepare and file complex legal arguments opposing Trump’s policies on various issues, including immigration, the economy, tariffs, LGBTQ+ rights, federal employee layoffs, government oversight, the allocation of federal funding to states and localities, the limits of presidential executive authority and the budgetary tactics of his former advisor Elon Musk.
California had achieved victories that had slowed Trump’s agenda and could potentially block some of his policies permanently.
The state had secured multiple temporary restraining orders and preliminary injunctions against Trump policy measures including a widespread freeze of trillions of dollars in federal funding already allocated by Congress to the states and a Trump executive order aiming to end birthright citizenship for US-born children of certain immigrants.
California suffered some losses too
California also experienced losses in court, with some judges allowing administration policies to take effect while the state continued to argue for their eventual reversal.
Higher courts had overturned a couple of restraining orders sought by the state and granted by district court judges, including the one concerning teacher preparation grants and another that had halted Trump’s mass firing of federal probationary employees. Additionally, the state was denied an emergency order to block Musk’s extensive control over the federal budget.
California and its allies also secured early wins with their second lawsuit, challenging an Office of Management and Budget memo that froze trillions of dollars in federal funding pending a Trump administration review of whether the spending aligned with the president’s agenda.
California also obtained a court order preventing employees from Department of Government Efficiency from accessing sensitive Treasury Department data, although that order had since been modified to allow one specific Doge employee access.
Furthermore, California won a permanent injunction to block substantial cuts to National Institutes of Health funding for research institutions nationwide, though the administration had indicated it would appeal this ruling.
Judges were reviewing briefings from California and the Trump administration in several other lawsuits, including the state’s claims that emergency relief was necessary and the administration’s claims that the lawsuits lacked merit.
These cases included challenges to mass firings at the Department of Education, billions in cuts to health and education funding, a Trump executive order requiring voters to show proof of citizenship and restricting mail ballots and Trump’s widespread tariffs against foreign trading partners.
California’s most recent lawsuit challenged the Trump administration’s threat to revoke federal funding from schools with diversity, equity and inclusion programmes.
California-Trump battle in nutshell
California played a leading role in extensive litigation resisting the Trump administration during his first term, which involved approximately 120 lawsuits over four years.
In the second Trump presidency, the White House and supporters of the president sharply criticised the latest lawsuits, asserting that California liberals were harming their constituents by disrespecting the will of voters who elected Trump.