The last time Donald Trump was president, California led the liberal resistance to his agenda. Now it is poised to reprise the role.
In fact, as Trump’s return to power came into focus late Tuesday, California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta said he already had a plan to do so — that the state was “1000% focused” and ready to fight, in court and beyond, for California’s progressive way of life.
“We will use the full force of the law, the full authority of the office, to defend and protect California’s progress, our people, our values,” said Bonta, who is eyeing a run for governor.
“We’ve been spending months, in some cases over a year,” Bonta added, “planning on potential attacks and our responses to them across all the different issues and areas — from attacking our environment to attacking reproductive freedom, our common sense gun laws, our LGBTQ+ community, our civil rights, different constitutional rights.”
California sued the first Trump administration more than 100 times — often successfully — and Bonta said a similarly litigious approach was almost certain during the former president’s second term.
“If Trump doesn’t break the law, if he doesn’t violate the Constitution, if he doesn’t overreach his authority in unlawful ways, there’ll be nothing for us to do,” Bonta said. “But if he does what he did last time, and if he does what Project 2025 suggests he will do, of course we will clash with him in court — because he will be breaking the law.”
Bonta’s messsage was one of defiance in the face of a sweeping defeat for Democrats and a stinging one for Vice President Kamala Harris, a Californian who was ridiculed by Trump as a “radical left lunatic who destroyed San Francisco.”
Trump in his early-Wednesday victory speech said the American people had given Republicans an “unprecedented and powerful mandate” to usher in their conservative agenda — which includes the largest mass deportation in U.S. history, sharp restrictions on abortion, slashed environmental regulations, strengthened gun rights and fewer queer rights.
“This will truly be the Golden Age of America,” Trump said.
Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation — which produced the arch-conservative and anti-California Project 2025 playbook that Trump has distanced himself from but many see as a likely policy guide for his second term — said Trump had “triumphed over a relentless left-wing machine intent on stopping him,” and “the entire conservative movement stands united behind him.”
In the Golden State, the nation’s most populous and economically mighty, Trump’s claimed mandate seemed muted, like a rumbling from elsewhere.
As of Wednesday morning, Harris was beating Trump in California by nearly 1.7 million votes with nearly half the state’s ballots still to count — or by more than the entire population of many U.S. states. Rep. Adam B. Schiff, one of Trump’s chief antagonists during his first term, had been swept to victory as the state’s newest senator.
In that way, Californians gave their leaders a mandate of their own, said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of Berkeley Law.
“There is an enormous ideological difference between California voters and Donald Trump,” Chemerinsky said. “California officials, such as the attorney general, will use the law to fight back.”
Eric Schickler, co-director of the Institute of Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley and author of the new book “Partisan Nation,” said he has no doubt that California will continue to be a “focal point of resistance” to Trump.
“It fits generally where the state’s electorate is, and certainly the national ambitions of somebody like Newsom,” he said — referring to Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Harris surrogate and constant Trump critic.
But it also “does carry downstream risks or costs,” Schickler said, particularly given Trump’s penchant for “retribution politics” and outright threats to the state.
During a campaign stop in Coachella last month, for example, Trump blasted the state as a wasteland of high costs, overregulation, homelessness and crime, mixing real problems facing the state with a litany of falsehoods.
He also blasted Newsom over the state’s handling of its water supply — and threatened to cut off federal disaster aid for wildfires if California doesn’t make more water available to farmers and homeowners.
“We’re going to take care of your water situation, force it down his throat, and we’ll say: Gavin, if you don’t do it, we’re not giving any of that fire money that we send you all the time for all the fire, forest fires that you have,” Trump said.
Newsom did not immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday. But just last week, he said “no state has more to lose, or more to gain, in this election.”
Trump’s promised mass deportation of undocumented immigrants alone would devastate California’s economy — and the national and global economies as a result — if implemented, Newsom said, with “impacts from valley to valley, Silicon Valley to Central Valley.”
Such a move would harm California’s reputation as a land of opportunity and innovation and entrepreneurial spirit for multi-generational American families and newcomers alike, he said.
Newsom was calling on voters to block Trump from power. But his remarks echoed a resistance to Trump going back years.
Just months into Trump’s last term, then-Lt. Gov. Newsom gave a rousing speech at the state Democratic Party’s 2017 convention about California fighting for all the same progressive beliefs that Bonta touted Tuesday — on immigration and the environment and the LGBTQ+ community.
“We are all Californians. Wear it with pride. This is our moment,” Newsom said then.
By August 2020, just months before Trump would lose his reelection bid to Joe Biden, the state had made good on its promises. Then-California Atty. Gen. Xavier Becerra — who is now Biden’s health and human services secretary — announced the state’s 100th lawsuit against the Trump administration.
More than half of those suits alleged the administration had undermined or failed to comply with federal environmental rules. Others challenged the administration’s policies on immigration, education, healthcare, guns and civil rights.
“I am surprised that any president in any administration would at least 100 times be caught red-handed violating the law,” Becerra said at the time. “I am not surprised we have had to sue, because we have to protect our people, our resources and our values, and we use the rule of law to do that.”
Democratic attorneys general won 83% of the 155 lawsuits they brought against the first Trump administration, according to a tally by Paul Nolette, a political science professor at Marquette University.
California Democrats were already pledging to fight again as it became clear Tuesday night that Trump was ascendant once more.
“To be clear: California will fight to protect our democracy, our freedoms [and] the basic dignity of all people,” state Sen. Scott Wiener, a San Francisco Democrat, wrote on X. “California won’t roll over for fascism.”
Schiff hit on similar themes in his victory speech. “California will continue to be at the forefront of progress, the bulwark of democracy, the champion of innovation and the protector of our rights and freedoms,” Schiff said.
Trump did not speak directly to the idea of winning over blue states like California in his own acceptance speech, but did promise to deliver for all Americans. He called his victory a “historic realignment” of diverse groups of Americans behind him, and suggested his mandate was not just from them, but from God — given his having survived a near-deadly assassination attempt.
Schickler said California will face special challenges during Trump’s second term.
“There just are a lot of federal policies that Trump will push that can have a big impact on the state, and the tools to resist it may be limited, especially given Trump’s aggressive willingness to use executive power, and then the fact that the courts are generally controlled by conservatives who take a strong view of presidential power,” he said.
There could be big fights over a host of major issues that the Trump administration and California hold vastly different positions on — including the distribution of abortion pills in the mail, the focus on diversity, equity and inclusion and race-conscious education in public universities and colleges, and protections for vulnerable populations such as transgender people and children.
More volatile than anything else, Schickler said, could be the standoff over immigration.
“Immigration is going to be one of the main flash points, assuming there are efforts at mass deportation,” Schickler said. “That’s going to involve the federal government doing things within the states, and you can imagine some resistance to that from folks in California.”