SACRAMENTO — California’s growing data center industry will have more oversight after Gov. Gavin Newsom signed seven bills to regulate the industry’s electricity costs and track water consumption.
The new laws come amid growing public concerns about environmental and economic impacts of the massive facilities, and are aimed at protecting consumers from growing electricity costs and tracking the centers’ immense energy and water consumption.
Newsom on Monday criticized President Trump for dismissing calls to curtail or regulate the facilities and heralding them as “money machines,” even as states and communities across the nation take action to ban or regulate the centers.
“While the Trump administration moves toward deregulation, communities are left to deal with the consequences — higher electricity demand, grid constraints, water use, and pollution,” Newsom said in a written statement Monday. “With these laws, we are ensuring that Californians remain in the driver’s seat — and that those profiting from data centers aren’t doing so at our expense.”
Senate Bill 886 by Sen. Steve Padilla (D-Chula Vista) and Assembly Bill 2383 by Assemblymember Rick Chavez Zbur (D-Los Angeles) establish special rules for data centers’ electrical use. The law orders California Public Utilities Commission to create special requirements and rates for data centers’ use of electricity, including the costs for new power and for infrastructure upgrades.
Scores of other states have already passed similar legislation, according to utility groups.
Two bills by Assemblymember Diane Papan (D-San Mateo) will require oversight of data center water consumption. One measure will require data center operators, when applying for a business license or permit, to disclose an estimate of their water use and the expected source of water. Another will bar cities and counties from approving a new or expanded data center unless the developer submits a water assessment and a water scarcity plan, and will require developers to cover the cost of any water system upgrade that is necessary.
Newsom vetoed a similar Papan bill last year that would have required new data centers to disclose their expected water use. The governor said he was “reluctant to impose rigid reporting requirements” on “this critically important digital infrastructure” without understanding the full impact on the businesses.
But over the past year, a wave of data center pushback has swept the nation, including California, where dozens of cities and counties have proposed or adopted moratoriums on the facilities. While California lawmakers have hesitated to pursue outright moratoriums and bans that the public is calling for, the political tide has nevertheless turned against the facilities.
Data centers have existed for decades but are rapidly expanding because of the rise of artificial intelligence, or AI. The centers help power everything from streaming services to videoconferencing calls.
Data centers in California are typically smaller than the mammoth, 500+-megawatt AI facilities making headlines in other parts of the country. Electricity costs and state regulations on gas-powered generators limit the vast majority of them to under 100 megawatts.
But as proposals increase in number, opposition has been fierce and growing. A Public Policy Institute of California poll from July showed that 73% of residents oppose the construction of data centers in their communities.
WASHINGTON — As Republicans contend with President Trump’s deep unpopularity, Democrats are attempting to seize the opening to take the U.S. Senate in the Nov. 3 midterm elections. Polls have shown Trump with an approval rating consistently below 40%, with no end in sight to the Iran war and voters expressing deep economic anxiety.
Republicans currently hold a 53-47 edge in the Senate, and 35 seats are on the November ballot.
Months of polling indicate that eight Senate seats — six of which are currently held by Republicans — are now up for grabs. Democrats will need to win at least four of them, while holding on to two contested seats currently held by their party, in order to flip the chamber.
Five key races are unexpectedly close, with some polls giving Democrats a better edge than expected, but the outcomes are still in doubt, as swaths of voters remain undecided. The Cook Political Report, a leading forecaster, rates each one a toss-up. Here’s how they are shaping up:
Michigan: El-Sayed vs. Rogers
In perhaps the highest-profile contest, former public health official Abdul El-Sayed is facing Republican Mike Rogers for the seat being vacated by retiring Democratic Sen. Gary Peters.
El-Sayed, aligned with the party’s progressive wing, narrowly defeated moderate Rep. Haley Stevens in a heated Democratic primary. He is looking to rally her supporters as well as disaffected Republican voters.
Rogers is courting independents and a cohort of Jewish Democrats who view El-Sayed’s desire to reduce funding to Israel’s military as a dangerous proposition.
According to a CNN/SSRS poll of likely voters released Sept. 9, El-Sayed led Rogers 47% to 44%, a result within the margin of error. Notably, 26% of respondents said they could still be persuaded to vote for either candidate, leaving the race wide open.
The barbs in this race have become deeply personal, with anti-Muslim rhetoric taking center stage.
In a series of ads and artificial-intelligence-generated images, Republican groups — including the National Republican Senatorial Committee and Front Line Action — have cast El-Sayed as a supporter of terrorism. During speeches and interviews, members of the Trump administration, including the president, have repeatedly referred to the candidate by his full name, Abdulrahman Mohamad El-Sayed.
Rogers has continually drawn attention to a campaign event hosted by El-Sayed that included Hasan Piker — a Los Angeles-based online political commentator who recently drew widespread attention for a 2019 comment that “America deserved 9/11” while discussing blowback against U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East.
El-Sayed has railed against Rogers for refusing to debate and for his endorsement by Trump.
This week, El-Sayed stood alone on the Fox 2 Detroit debate stage after Rogers declined an invitation, dubbing his opponent “Mike Dodgers” on several occasions.
Rogers later accused the moderator of bias toward the Democratic candidate. The candidates have agreed to debate on Oct. 8 and 21.
Texas: Talarico vs. Paxton
State Rep. James Talarico is seeking to become the first Texas Democrat elected to the Senate since 1993.
His Republican opponent, state Atty. Gen. Ken Paxton, received Trump’s endorsement and defeated four-term incumbent Sen. John Cornyn in the primary.
While gaining a seat in Texas has long been a far-off dream for Democrats, Paxton’s controversies have dogged him during the race. A Mason-Dixon Research poll showed the Democrat leading Paxton 46 to 43, in a state that Trump won by nearly 14 points in 2024. Other polls, including one from Insider Advantage, had the margin at a single point.
Paxton is seen as a prominent fixture in the MAGA movement, using his position as attorney general to contest Obama-era clean energy and healthcare acts and launching lawsuits against the Biden administration for its immigration policy.
Talarico has made Paxton’s association with the president a key piece of his campaign, slamming Paxton as “the most corrupt politician in Texas” and spotlighting his impeachment by the Texas House of Representatives in 2023 over allegations of bribery, breach of public trust and misuse of his office to aid a donor. (Paxton survived the impeachment vote and denied wrongdoing.)
Several attack ads on Talarico, launched by Republican political action committees, have focused on his past support for transgender youth and accused him of exaggerating his faith to garner the Christian vote.
Maine: Jackson vs. Collins
Six-term incumbent Republican Sen. Susan Collins is hoping to retain her seat as Democratic challenger Troy Jackson attempts to replicate the grassroots success of former nominee Graham Platner’s campaign.
Jackson, a former state lawmaker, was chosen by Maine Democratic Party delegates to run in place of Platner, who dropped out in July after sexual misconduct allegations against him. A former lumberjack, Jackson shares Platner’s working-class background and is running on Medicare for All and increased taxes for billionaires.
Collins has repeatedly demonstrated her staying power and won reelection in 2020 even as the state went blue in the presidential race. Her willingness to stand up to Trump could become a deciding factor this time around; Collins is working to highlight her votes to block Trump’s $1.8-billion Department of Justice anti-weaponization fund and against the Iran war.
She has mostly stuck to promoting her decades-long record on the campaign trail, which has recently focused on increased healthcare access for seniors, workforce development and Social Security benefit increases.
She has faced criticism from Jackson and others over her vote to confirm Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, who faced sexual assault allegations, which he denied, and later voted to strike down Roe vs. Wade, which had granted a constitutional right to choose an abortion.
Jackson has had difficulty generating the same enthusiasm among voters as his predecessor, Platner, who consistently held town halls across the state and had a viral social media presence. Over Labor Day weekend, Jackson hosted at least a dozen events up and down Maine to make his first public introductions to voters deep into the cycle.
A recent poll from YouGov shows Jackson narrowly leading the incumbent, 46% to 44%, with a crucial 9% undecided.
Alaska: Peltola vs. Sullivan
Former Democratic Rep. Mary Peltola and incumbent Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan are leading a field of candidates — including another Dan Sullivan — ahead of a ranked-choice general vote.
Alaska hasn’t elected a Democratic senator since 1995, giving Peltola an uphill battle in a state that Trump won by 13 percentage points in 2024.
A late July poll by Change Research showed Peltola in the lead by six percentage points. A more recent poll from Alaska Survey Research had the race within 1 point in favor of Peltola.
Much of the media attention surrounding this race, however, has focused on the third-place candidate, who only received 2.5% of the primary vote — and also happens to be named Dan Sullivan.
Dan J. Sullivan, a retired teacher who made the top four in ranked-choice voting, has been accused by Republicans of being a Democratic plant that could potentially confuse voters. Sullivan has denied these accusations and the Alaska Supreme Court decided to keep him on the ballot.
If none of the candidates receive over 50% of first-place ranked-choice votes — which is likely in this race — the last-place candidate will be eliminated, with their vote distributed to their next choice until one candidate receives a majority of the total.
Iowa: Turek vs. Hinson
In a race that has seen the candidates trade political jabs in separate speeches on the same state fairgrounds, Republican Rep. Ashley Hinson and Democratic state Rep. Josh Turek are nearly neck and neck.
According to a Suffolk University poll, Hinson is leading Turek 45% to 40%, in a state where Trump won by 13 points in 2024. A poll conducted by YouGov, however, has Turek in front by a single point.
GOP incumbent Sen. Joni Ernst elected not to run this year, leaving the seat open for a potential flip.
Turek, a two-time Paralympics gold medalist, has attacked Hinson for past campaign ads in which she said: “I don’t trade stocks, and no one else in Congress should either.” Tucker pointed to the fact that Hinson purchased and sold stocks in Amazon, Tesla and insurance firms after she was elected, according to financial disclosure forms.
In return, Hinson criticized Turek for missing over half of his state Legislature floor votes, and labeled him an “anti-ag” activist.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has stopped publicly revealing where it is holding thousands of detainees who are subject to final deportation orders, an unannounced move that has made it far more difficult for lawyers and relatives to find them, according to current and former officials familiar with the practice.
ICE removed those detainees from its online detainee locator system on Sept. 15, according to three current and former ICE officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the change. Several lawyers contacted by The Associated Press confirmed their clients vanished from the system this week, and the American Immigration Lawyers Association warned its members about the situation Friday.
The move represents a stark departure from previous practice and highlights the hardline nature of President Trump’s immigration crackdown, leaving thousands of detainees exceedingly hard to trace and potentially unable to exercise all of their legal options.
The practice, which applies to detainees who have received final orders of removal from an immigration court, could speed deportations by making last-minute legal challenges harder to pursue, immigration lawyers said. Nearly 16,000 people who were arrested and booked into ICE detention in July were subject to final removal orders, more than a third of the overall bookings, according to ICE data obtained by the Deportation Data Project based at U.C. Berkeley and UCLA.
The practice does not apply to detainees held at a detention facility in Adelanto, California or at temporary holding facilities in Minneapolis, New York City or suburban Chicago, the sources said. Judges have ordered ICE to list detainees in those facilities in the online locator promptly upon their arrival, as part of litigation over their detention practices.
Lawyers and relatives distressed by lack of information on detainees
The effort to hide their locations adds to the ways in which the Trump administration has made life harder for detainees and their families as it has increased pressure on them to waive appeals and agree to deportation.
ICE did not publicize the move and in a statement issued to the AP, the agency did not confirm or deny it. The statement said detainees with final removal orders were being prioritized for deportation, even as ICE faces a “historic number of injunctions” from courts stopping individual removals.
As a result of the change, lawyers and relatives lost track of their clients and loved ones without explanation, which is especially concerning because detainees are frequently moved to new facilities before deportation, said Greg Chen, senior director of government relations at the American Immigration Lawyers Association.
“Families are freaking out because they think the person has been deported and they don’t know where the person might be,” he said. “On the attorney side, this has serious implications for the ability to contact their client. It certainly has implications about how it will interfere with the attorney-client relationship.”
The Department of Homeland Security, ICE’s parent agency, has argued that people who are subject to final removal orders have received due process. That usually means an immigration judge has ordered their removal after a hearing, including cases when immigrants fail to show up, and the decision was affirmed on appeal or not appealed.
Detainees with final removal orders still have options to appeal
Still, those detainees have options to challenge their detention and removal, including seeking to reopen the case or by bringing what’s known as a habeas petition asking a judge to release them on constitutional grounds. Federal judges have granted thousands of rulings ordering that detainees be released or granted bond hearings.
ICE detention facilities held more than 65,000 people as of early July, the most recent available data. Around 30% of them likely have final removal orders, said Michelle Mendez, legal director at the National Immigration Project.
More people have been issued final removal orders after failing to show up for hearings in recent months because the administration’s immigration courts have taken steps to make it harder to participate and to reopen such cases, she said.
“To me, it’s just another iteration of disappearing people,” she said. “Why would we do that in the United States of America? It’s something we’d hear about in another country and be concerned about individual rights and due process.”
Some with final removal orders also have legal protections against deportation to their countries of origin based on the likelihood they would be tortured or persecuted. Many of them are facing removal to third-party countries where they have no ties and their disappearance in ICE’s system will make legal challenges harder, lawyers said.
Lawyers say clients have vanished from ICE locator system
ICE initiated the online detainee locator system in 2010 to allow relatives, lawyers and the public to search for people in custody. Previously they had to call ICE regional offices or individual facilities to try to track them down.
Many advocates and lawmakers have complained that the system updates too slowly and contains too much inaccurate or missing information, allowing ICE to shield the locations of detainees for days or weeks. Minors, people who have been held by U.S. Customs and Border Protection for less than 48 hours, and detainees who are being transported are not in the system, among others.
But the exclusion of detainees with final removal orders has no apparent parallel, several immigration lawyers said. Atenas Burrola Estrada, a deputy program director with the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, said that “every single one of our clients who has a final order has disappeared from the locator,” including 17 in all as of Monday.
Among those disappeared from the locator system are eight Somali men being detained at the U.S. military base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, according to one of their attorneys, My Khanh Ngo, of the American Civil Liberties Union. She said the change could make it “nearly impossible” for people to challenge their removals in some cases.
“If you can’t find your client, don’t know what’s happening to your client, you can’t get that information to the court to stop their removal,” she said.
California Atty. General Rob Bonta and Paramount Skydance Chief Executive David Ellison have reached an agreement to end the state’s antitrust fight, paving the way for Ellison to complete his $111-billion purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery, said a person familiar with the matter.
The two sides have agreed to resolve antitrust claims that Bonta and 11 other state attorneys general brought in late July, said the source, who was not authorized to comment publicly on the settlement.
As part of the deal, Paramount agreed to pay a penalty if the company fails to make good on a promise to distribute 30 films per year in theaters and to spend $1.5 billion on film production in Hollywood over the next five years, said the source who was not authorized to comment.
Representatives of Paramount and Bonta did not respond to a request for comment.
A federal judge must approve the agreement. Paramount would then be poised to quickly finalize its purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery — a blockbuster combination that will reshape Hollywood by collapsing two historic film studios with rights to Batman, Harry Potter, “Top Gun,” and Bugs Bunny and by combining the HBO Max and Paramount+ streaming services.
In addition to CBS, Paramount would own dozens of cable television channels, including CNN, TBS, HGTV, Food Network and Comedy Central.
The road to a resolution was fraught. Bonta abruptly canceled a negotiation session with Paramount in late August after potential deal terms leaked. Then, after talks restarted and the settlement began taking shape, several powerful Bonta allies, including New York Atty. Gen. Letitia James and Connecticut Atty. Gen. William Tong, signaled their displeasure with proposed deal terms.
They felt the deal points didn’t go far enough to mitigate the potential clout Paramount would wield over the film and television industries if it was allowed to swallow its larger industry rival, according to three people familiar with the matter but not authorized to comment.
Ellison’s goal had long been to complete the Warner takeover by the end of September — before midterm Congressional elections and prior to a key deadline for Paramount to increase its payout to Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders. Ellison received a boost from California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and Xavier Becerra, the Democratic nominee for California governor, who pressed Bonta to end the dispute rather than take the case to trial in Oakland in March.
Newsom said he took “seriously” Paramount’s threat to leave the state. He advocated for a settlement behind the scenes, according to two people close to the matter who were not authorized to comment.
State Attorney General Rob Bonta in 2025. (Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)
(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)
Ellison was highly motivated to strike a deal because his company’s expenses will soon accelerate. Beginning Oct. 1, Paramount is on the hook to pay Warner investors a “ticking fee” of 25 cents per quarter, per share until the deal closed. That obligation is expected to add $7 million a day to the cost of the $31 a share that Paramount agreed to pay Warner shareholders when it won the bidding war back in February.
Paramount’s takeover will be heavily leveraged. The company’s bankers have lined up nearly $80 billion in debt to finance the merger. Ellison’s father, billionaire Larry Ellison, late last year agreed to backstop the $47-billion in equity needed to complete the acquisition. Royal families from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Abu Dhabi have agreed to chip in $24 billion for an equity stake by assuming some of Ellison’s financial commitments.
Late last week, the Federal Communications Commission approved Paramount’s request to allow the foreign investors to own nearly 50% of the merged company. The Ellison family, however, will retain its voting control.
Paramount has promised Wall Street that it would make more than $6 billion in cost cuts. A recent Los Angeles County economic report predicted the merger could lead to an estimated 4,500 workers in the Los Angeles region losing their jobs as Ellison works to combine the two companies.
The truce comes after Paramount received clearances from regulators around the world, including the European Commission, Canada and the U.S. Justice Department.
Larry Ellison separately announced plans to switch the headquarters of his software behemoth Oracle to Nashville from Austin, Texas (after Oracle relocated from Silicon Valley six years ago).
Paramount also enlisted major Hollywood unions, the Directors Guild of America and the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, and prominent cinema chains to drop their opposition to the deal.
Bonta’s suit had leaned heavily into potential harms to theatrical distribution and lawyers for the states had been banking on theater executives’ testimony at trial.
The parties also were facing a key court hearing Thursday. Paramount was poised to ask U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín in Oakland to make the states and the Writers Guild of America post a $1.88-billion bond that would cover some of Paramount’s delay-related deal costs should the company eventually prevail.
The states and the WGA, which also sued to block the merger, have balked at the request, which was designed by Paramount to create fissures within the coalition of states by raising doubts about the strength of their case.
Paramount’s high-profile lobbying campaign reached a crescendo in late August after Paramount called out activist-actor Mark Ruffalo, accusing him of resorting to “antisemitic tropes” to argue against the merger.
Prominent Jewish groups rushed to Paramount’s aid. Ruffalo, who frequently works with HBO, denied the allegation, saying he had a 1st Amendment right to speak against the deal as well as Oracle’s business ties to Israel. Numerous Jewish artists came to Ruffalo’s defense, saying his free speech rights were being squelched.
Bonta abruptly canceled a settlement conference, accusing Paramount of leaking confidential information.
“If you want to have an adult, legitimate, serious settlement discussion — no problem,” Bonta said during an Aug. 25 appearance in Los Angeles. “But if you want to play games, we’ve got better things to do.”
The states’ 37-page lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for Northern California, claimed the Paramount-Warner combination would violate the U.S. Clayton Act, a century-old antitrust law to prevent mergers that weaken competition and raise costs for consumers.
The states, which also included Nevada, Colorado, Oregon, Washington, New Jersey and New Mexico, had argued the tie-up of two legacy movie studios would give Paramount-Warner too much marketshare in two categories — wide-release movies and potential blockbusters.
Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison has pressed to get his blockbuster deal done before his company must make higher payouts to Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders and before the mid-term elections, which could change the makeup in Congress.
(Mark Schiefelbein / Associated Press)
The states also said Paramount-Warner would control nearly 30% of the cable television channel space with more than 50 networks.
Paramount has been facing a June 4 deadline to complete the deal — or owe Warner Bros. Discovery a $7-billion breakup fee. Paramount has already paid $2.8-billion to cover a termination fee paid to Netflix after the streamer withdrew from the auction in February.
WASHINGTON — FBI Director Kash Patel on Tuesday defended the bureau’s loosening of hiring standards regarding an applicant’s past experience with prostitution and bestiality, insisting that the changes were meant to enable victims of those acts to be considered for employment without fear of automatic disqualification.
The subject arose during a contentious Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in which Patel clashed with Democrats over his firing of agents who participated in investigations of President Trump, a spate of media leak probes, and whether employees would be dispatched to the polls on Election Day in light of the bureau’s ongoing election-related investigations and Trump’s repeated and false claims about the existence of pervasive voter fraud.
The hearing featured the name-calling and bitingly personal exchanges that have come to define Patel’s appearances on Capitol Hill, with Democrats characterizing the Trump appointee as unqualified, criticizing him for politically charged investigations into Trump’s enemies and highlighting travel that has included a trip to the Winter Olympics in Italy during which he partied with U.S. hockey players and a snorkeling excursion at the Pearl Harbor memorial in Hawaii.
“He’s an incompetent lackey. He’s like an 18-year old-kid who wants to join a fraternity that he could never be a member of, doing keg stands and chugging with friends. He’s an embarrassment to the agency and wouldn’t qualify even to be an FBI agent,” said an exasperated Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), his voice rising in anger.
Given a chance to respond, Patel replied: “I don’t have much to say. This guy called me a thug. It’s kind of ironic. He’s running for president of the United States. He just got his 20-second ad campaign.”
Booker ran for president in 2020. He has not announced a candidacy for 2028.
Patel was pressed on the FBI’s hiring standards
The FBI quietly issued guidance this spring lifting a categorical hiring ban on applicants who had previously engaged in prostitution. The bureau made a similar change with regard to past experience in bestiality as a child.
Under questioning, Patel denied that the changes reflected a lowering of employment standards and insisted they were designed to prevent victims who’d been forced to engage in that conduct from being automatically disqualified.
“We did not want to punish victims of bestiality, victims who were trafficked. We did not want to make it an automatic disqualification for the FBI to consider you if were a victim of these awful, heinous acts,” Patel said. “We are not going to target victims and prevent them from serving in their capacity to serve this country.”
The questioning spanned partisan lines, with Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) grilling Patel about the rationale for a change that the FBI director said was proposed to him by subordinates.
“When you saw bestiality, I say this with respect: The person who recommended it, why didn’t you just say, ‘What planet did you parachute in from?’” Kennedy asked. Patel conceded that that was his initial reaction.
The Associated Press reported last month that the FBI still intends to disqualify some applicants who are revealed to have previously engaged in prostitution, including if they’ve done so within the last 10 years.
Patel faced questions about the FBI’s role on Election Day
The hearing unfolded two months before the midterm elections in November and at a time when the FBI has opened investigations related to the 2020 contest, including by seizing voter data in Fulton County, Ga.
Trump regularly makes false claims that elections are rigged and riddled with fraud, especially in the months before an election. But there is no widespread fraud in American elections. Local election officials have detailed processes for auditing the accuracy of the vote after ballots are tallied. Even as he disputed his loss in 2020, audits, reviews and recounts in the battleground states where he challenged the outcome all affirmed President Biden’s win.
Democrats repeatedly pressed Patel on whether the FBI would be dispatching agents to polls. The director said the FBI has an election coordinator in each of its 56 field offices to respond to issues at polling places, including alleged election interference. He did not rule out the idea that agents could be dispatched to the polls if problems arose.
“Do you pledge that you will not in any way interfere in the will of the America people when they go to the polls in November?” asked Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) in one of the more combative exchanges.
“I pledge unequivocally that I will not participate in your charade of lies,” Patel said, later calling Welch a “total fraud.”
FBI firings were also a featured topic of the hearing
Patel repeatedly touted what he asserted was his record-breaking success at the FBI, proclaiming the “most prolific reduction in crime in U.S. history” even though murder rates in American cities had begun dropping even before Trump took office last year.
The Republican-led panel tried through its questioning to keep the focus on Patel’s crime-fighting efforts from his perch at the nation’s premier federal law enforcement agency. But Democrats seized on the tumult inside the FBI over the last year, including sweeping firings of agents who participated in investigations of Trump, the bureau’s aggressive efforts to investigate media leaks by serving subpoenas at reporters’ home and Patel’s travel schedule that has blended private leisure with professional responsibilities.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) pressed Patel on the firing of national security agents with expertise in Iran shortly before the U.S. launched attacks on the country last February. He noted that the agents had participated in an FBI investigation into Trump over his retention of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.
“Do you think firing the president’s political opponents is more important than retaining the decades of experience and expertise monitoring intelligence threats from Iran?” Blumenthal asked.
“I think what’s most important is to not have a weaponized FBI, and I will endeavor every single day to make sure we have no one there that is doing that,” Patel responded. He did not say why their participation in the Mar-a-Lago investigation represented “weaponized” law enforcement.
Patel later suggested that the firings had been overblown, saying many agents had retired on their own. And he defended his personal travels by pointing to numbers that he said showed that two recent predecessors, Chris Wray and James Comey, had traveled more.
SACRAMENTO — Three state bond measures are on California’s November ballot. You probably haven’t paid much attention to them. So here’s my read on these big-ticket proposals.
One is a no-brainer “yes.” It would help middle-class Californians buy a new home by allowing them to borrow most of the down payment. And it wouldn’t cost taxpayers a dime. That’s Proposition 37.
Another housing measure is probably worthwhile, but gives me pause because it accommodates too many interests in order to attract broad political support. And it burns a barrel of money. That’s Proposition 1.
The third proposal would fund important medical research. But I wince because it was written to largely benefit one institute that was co-founded and is headed by the measure’s chief backer. That’s Proposition 38.
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Propositions 1 and 38 combined would add $18.4 billion to the state’s general fund bond debt, which already is about $80 billion, according to the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst‘s Office.
Plus, there is $40 billion in previously authorized bonds waiting to be sold. The new bond proposals would cost the state at least $1 billion annually for 20 to 25 years. Taxpayers are paying about $6 billion annually to retire state bonds.
Bonds are boring, but they’re also tax eaters. So we should pay some attention before voting on them.
“People think about bonds as free money. And, of course, they’re not,” says Mark Baldassare, polling director for the Public Policy Institute of California. “People don’t think bonds are going to raise their taxes.”
But most bonds are repaid by the state’s general fund, the main cash box that finances major programs such as education, healthcare, prisons and fighting wildfires. Bond debt has No. 1 dibs on the money. When revenue runs short — a common dilemma in Sacramento — other programs must be cut or taxpayers are hit harder. So bonds aren’t necessarily tax-free.
Baldassare released a PPIC poll last week that found a majority of likely voters supporting all three bond measures — especially Proposition 37 to ease homebuyers’ down payments.
The pollster noted that fall election campaigns are just starting and opposition arguments could reduce support for the measures.
But there’s no organized opposition to the two housing proposals. And although the medical research measure has some outspoken critics, there’s no money for an opposition campaign.
OK, a few specifics on each measure.
Proposition 37 is a taxpayer freebie, a $25-billion bond repaid solely by homebuyer beneficiaries. Here’s how it would work:
Middle-income people could pay 3% down on their home purchases rather than the normal 20%. They’d borrow the other 17% as a second mortgage and repay it along with the first mortgage.
The proposition defines middle class as household income that’s less than double the median for the area. Statewide, that income ceiling would be around $200,000 but would vary greatly by locale.
The purchased dwelling must be a brand-new home, whether stand-alone or a condo. That’s to increase the housing supply and create construction jobs. Politically, it gains the support of developers and unions.
No vacation home. It must be owner-occupied full-time. And the buyer must be a California resident.
The state’s sale of revenue bonds would create the down-payment pot. Regular lending institutions would arrange the loans and charge minimum fees. Loan repayments would replenish the pot and make it self-sustaining.
This was the brainchild of Bob Hertzberg, a former Democratic Assembly speaker and Senate majority leader from the San Fernando Valley.
Hertzberg tried several times to sell his proposal to the Legislature, but lawmakers wanted to juice it up with their own pet ideas. “I couldn’t get something just focused on the middle class,” he says. So he crafted this citizen initiative.
Proposition 1 proposes $11.25 billion in bonds for a smorgasbord of affordable housing.
This is the political establishment’s creation — Gov. Gavin Newsom, the Democratic-controlled Legislature and housing interests. There’s no organized opposition.
It was dressed up with $1.25 billion in popular CalVet loan bonds for military veterans. They repay their home loans through mortgages, costing the state nothing.
But the remaining $10 billion in bonds would be repaid through the state general fund, costing at least $500 million annually for 25 years.
The measure is mainly designed to generate affordable rentals for poor people. But to assure legislative passage, money was added for affordable student and farmworker housing, plus other goodies.
It’s a lot of money and makes only a small dent in California’s unaffordable housing plague. Moreover, it seems too scattershot.
But it could spare more people from becoming homeless — living in their cars or on sidewalks, ultimately costing taxpayers even more.
Then there’s Proposition 38, the problematic $8.4-billion general fund bond for medical research, including cures for cancer, heart disease and Alzheimer’s.
The hang-up for me and others is that the ballot initiative was crafted to virtually assure that half the bond money would go to one outfit, the UCLA-affiliated California Institute for Immunology and Immunotherapy. The institute was co-founded and is headed by the proposition’s originator and chief backer, billionaire Gary Michelson.
“I know opponents want to create a billionaire boogeyman, but isn’t curing cancer and other terrible diseases exactly what we want billionaires to spend their money on?” says Robin Swanson, a campaign spokesperson.
Sure. But being backed by a billionaire isn’t the problem. It’s being written to substantially benefit one research institute that’s led by the billionaire.
Two cancer survivors and political opposites — conservative consultant Jon Fleischman and liberal consultant Steve Maviglio — co-authored an op-ed that declared:
“Imagine either major political party proposing to borrow billions of dollars and writing the qualifications so narrowly that an organization founded and chaired by a principal campaign benefactor appears positioned to collect half the money. The other party would rightly howl. So should voters.”
With the deadline for mailing out millions of California ballots nearing, Los Angeles County’s top election official welcomed the U.S. Postal Service’s recent assurance that it will process those ballots as normal — not under the untested new vetting system backed by President Trump and rejected as unworkable by the U.S. Supreme Court.
“That certainly serves as a stabilizing force, as we’re literally weeks away from mailing the ballots,” said Dean Logan, head of the L.A. County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk’s office.
Still, there are other Trump administration challenges to deal with, he said — including unsubstantiated public claims of widespread voter fraud, refusals by top-ranking officials to rule out deployments of armed federal agents to polling places, and behind-the-scenes criminal probes into local voter lists.
Since March, Logan’s office has received a series of federal grand jury subpoenas demanding voter registration and other information on dozens of individuals who the Trump administration says may not be U.S. citizens, Logan confirmed to The Times.
Logan said his office is now in the “interesting place” of having to comply with the subpoenas despite suspecting that the Department of Homeland Security relied on inaccurate or outdated voter information to compile the names to investigate.
“We’re responding appropriately as directed through a subpoena, but that doesn’t afford the dialogue for us to get the background on what they’re looking for and how they came up with the names that they did,” Logan said. “There’s really no information being provided to us on that.”
In July, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin publicly claimed, again without evidence, that there may be more than 190,000 such voters on California rolls. On Friday, the Justice Department announced it had charged 16 noncitizens in six states with illegal voting and other election-related crimes following investigations alongside its Homeland Security partners.
California Secretary of State Shirley Weber dismissed Mullin’s claims. Independent elections experts and Democratic officials say voter fraud should be taken seriously, but is exceedingly rare. California has more than 23 million registered voters.
Mullin’s remarks and the subpoenas appear part of a much larger and unprecedented federal effort to bolster allegations from Trump that the upcoming Nov. 3 elections are unsafe and corrupted by noncitizen voters.
Trump issued two executive orders, one requiring voters to provide additional identification and proof of citizenship, and one ordering the Postal Service to refuse mail ballots it deems illegitimate. The Justice Department has sued California and other states for their voter rolls, and Homeland Security has threatened state elections officials with criminal sanctions if they don’t purge noncitizens from their rolls.
Trump gave a speech in July alleging that the American election system is “so vulnerable that no one can possibly defend it.” Earlier this month, he encouraged his supporters to “cheat like hell” to keep Republicans in power, and told them they would receive $5,000 each if they succeed — which many experts derided as a “bribe.”
Last week, FBI Director Kash Patel refused to rule out sending federal agents to polls.
Despite all that, California officials and independent elections experts have maintained the election will be safe — in part because Trump’s executive orders and the Justice Department’s many lawsuits seeking state voter rolls have all been blocked by the courts.
“The bottom line for voters in California right now is nothing has changed. We’ve had safe and secure elections, and we will continue to do so,” said Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.).
Logan said it “is clear that the administration is aggressively pursuing their narrative” about voter fraud being widespread as part of Trump’s old “playbook” of questioning votes he expects to lose — but that the election in California will nonetheless “be fair and secure and transparent.”
The fight over fraud
At least three subpoenas have been issued to Logan’s office — one in March, one in July and one this month — including from the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of California, The Times confirmed.
U.S. Atty. Adam Gordon, who leads the federal prosecutor’s office in San Diego, did not respond to a request for comment. First Assistant U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli, who leads the federal prosecutor’s office in Los Angeles and has announced two voter fraud cases in recent weeks, also did not respond to questions about his office’s election work.
Essayli did say Saturday, in response to Gov. Gavin Newsom touting new state laws aimed at safeguarding California elections from Trump administration interference, that no state law can prevent the Justice Department from investigating voter fraud and that his office “will continue to investigate, arrest, and prosecute all violations of federal election laws.”
Additional information, including how the subpoenas may relate to Mullin’s claims, wasn’t immediately available.
Mullin in July alleged in a letter to Weber that a federal review of unspecified data found “as many as 190,832 non-citizens registered to vote in California.”
Weber responded in writing that she had “serious doubts about the reliability” of that analysis, as California election officials “work every day to maintain accurate voter rolls” and have never shared their rolls with the Trump administration — despite the administration’s failed lawsuit demanding them.
Weber criticized Mullin for having made such claims with “no detail whatsoever that my office can use to evaluate the veracity of your allegations,” and asked that he provide a “detailed description” of the data and methodology used to reach such conclusions.
Weber’s office said Mullin’s letter was “part of a broader effort to intimidate Californians and make it burdensome to participate in our democracy.”
In a statement to The Times, a Homeland Security spokesperson said the department offered to meet with Weber and her staff “to engage in a collaborative good faith discussion” about identifying noncitizens on state rolls, which she declined.
The spokesperson said Mullin’s count of potential noncitizens on California rolls was based on “publicly available data from states’ voter rolls” that was cross-referenced with its own lists of “known” noncitizens. “It’s not rocket science; it’s an easy step to secure our elections.”
Independent experts also have questioned Mullin’s claims, pointing to investigations elsewhere — including in Texas — that found Homeland Security data on alleged noncitizen voters were substantially inaccurate. A federal judge recently blocked the use of a Trump administration database known as the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements program based on the likelihood that it could lead to legitimate voters being purged from rolls.
Last week, Padilla and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) released a Homeland Security whistleblower report alleging that department leaders, under a new “Unlawful Voter Initiative,” were requiring poorly trained employees to identify at least five potentially illegal voters per hour — one every 12 minutes — using questionable data the department said it compiled using “magic.”
In a letter to Mullin, the senators demanded the initiative be halted, arguing that work at such a “breakneck pace” is bound to produce errors and that agency officials appeared to be circumventing court orders blocking their access to state vote rolls by gathering such information “by any means, regardless of state laws.”
Padilla on Friday asked California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta’s office to investigate the whistleblower’s claims. A spokesperson for Bonta’s office said the allegations “describe yet another fishing expedition by the Trump Administration to uncover evidence of widespread voter fraud despite repeated findings that there is none,” but otherwise declined to comment.
The Homeland Security spokesperson rejected the whistleblower claims, saying its work has been “conducted diligently and professionally” as part of a “commonplace law enforcement” effort. The spokesperson said that the agency cannot comment on active investigations, but that its investigative branch — Homeland Security Investigations, or HSI — is “actively rooting out and investigating election fraud wherever it can be found.”
“There is no quota on criminality. DHS will pursue each and every illegal voter to the fullest extent of the law,” the spokesperson said.
Election experts said some of the worst threats have already been blocked, but acknowledged remaining worries.
Rick Hasen, director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA Law, said he is concerned the Trump administration will try to deny the outcome or seize ballots in close congressional races — but only if control of the House or Senate rests on them.
Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth College and co-director of Bright Line Watch, said he worries that isolated incidents of federal agents intimidating voters or seizing ballots in key races will throw the legitimacy of the entire election into question — and that the Trump administration will capitalize on that to serve its own agenda.
Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), part of a Democratic task force preparing for such issues, said that Trump and other administration officials are trying to interfere in the election because they know they have “failed to deliver for the American people” and the Republican Party stands to lose power as a result.
Schiff said that Democratic leaders are fighting back “and largely succeeding,” but that “the best way to uphold the integrity of our elections” remains voters making their voices heard.
Padilla said the attempt by Homeland Security to push its way into elections has been “shoddy” in part because “they don’t have the expertise [and] it’s not their charge,” but also because Trump has put Mullin and other election “conspiracy theorists” in charge.
“If you install a conspiracy theorist into these roles, then they’re gonna come out with these claims that are not based on facts, not based on evidence, not based on any data,” he said.
Padilla said Trump and his supporters are “absolutely laying the groundwork” to question November election results they don’t like, but voters should know that “there’s even more of us standing up and fighting back and protecting their right to vote.”
CNN, MS NOW and Politico are headed to court to challenge the constitutionality of President Trump’s order to ban the three news organizations from the White House.
The three outlets announced Monday they are jointly filing a lawsuit in U.S. Federal Court in Washington, D.C. asking for a temporary restraining order that restores their access immediately while the case is heard.
“This morning we notified the government that we are filing a lawsuit today to protect our First Amendment rights and defend the principle that the government does not decide what the press reports and publishes,” CNN, MS NOW and Politico said in a statement. “Without notice or due process, the White House revoked our journalists’ credentials because it objected to our reporting. Left unchallenged this threatens press freedom and the public’s right to indpendent journalism free from government interference.”
The lawsuit against the Trump Administration will allege that the ban violates the 1st Amendment by retaliating against protected newsgathering as punishment for unfavorable coverage, as well as blocking reporters from a “nonpublic forum” for unlawful reasons.
The suit notes precedent is a case from 1977 that ruled the White House cannot arbitrarily restrict press credentials for reporters on grounds that there’s retaliation for viewpoint discrimination.
Trump announced the ban Friday in a Truth Social post, describing CNN, MS NOW and Politico as “fake news.” He did not cite any specific story that prompted the action, claiming the outlets have long been unfair to him and never provide any positive coverage.
Trump was asked Friday how his ban will hold up in court.
“I don’t think a court should allow fake news to be written day after day after day,” he said. “I think that somebody has a right to keep them away if they’re going to write false stories all the time.”
Trump’s asserts that the ban is the result of unhappiness with the coverage he receives from the three outlets. Trump’s statements are likely to be used against him in court.
The ban has already raised questions on how the public will be able to monitor the president’s activities. CNN was scheduled to provide the video feed of Trump’s Monday trip to New York for the United Nations General Assembly. The pool feed, as it’s called, provides video to all other press outlets.
CNN’s assignment does not appear on the press schedule issued Sunday by the White House.
On Saturday, journalists from CNN, MS NOW and Politico were barred from entering White House grounds as they learned their press credentials were no longer valid. Some were asked to hand them over to Secret Service.
Trump has tried twice to deny news organizations White House access. In 2018 during his first term, the White House tried to ban journalist Jim Acosta, then working for CNN, but a court ordered that his press credential be resinstated.
Last year, the Trump White House issued a ban on the Associated Press when the news organization refused to recognize the president’s renaming of the Gulf of Mexico by executive order. A federal judge ordered that the AP’s access to the White House be restored on the grounds that the government cannot punish a journalistic outlet over the content of its speech.
A divided appeals court panel later paused that ruling for the Oval Office, Air Force One and other restricted spaces, allowing the White House to keep the AP out of them while the case proceeds.
Trump has railed against outlets that he considers unfriendly to his administration, calling for the Federal Communications Commission to pull the TV station licenses of the broadcast networks. He has also asked the FCC to take action against individual journalists who irk him, the last being “Meet the Press” moderator Kristen Welker.
FCC Chairman Brendan Carr has tried to act on Trump’s behalf by calling for a review of ABC’s TV licenses, which the Walt Disney Co.-owned network is challenging in court.
“This is about more than the rights of journalists. It is about the right of the American people to receive a full and independent account of the activities, policies and decisions of whoever occupies the nation’s highest office,” Heinrich said in a statement.
Trump has also lashed out at individual reporters in person or over social media, sometimes in strikingly personal terms — insulting them in briefings, or in his recent speech at the White House Correspondents’ Assn. dinner.
Trump’s press attacks have spread to other parts of his administration. The Department of Defense tried to restrict journalist access to the Pentagon.
The department also recently fired three journalists at the military’s newspaper Stars and Stripes for insubordination after they appeared in a CBS News report on how the Trump administration has tried to restrict their reporting.
Within hours of a Feb. 28 missile attack that hit an Iranian school, some Pentagon personnel knew the U.S. was responsible, according to officials involved in an internal investigation of the incident. That probe found what the officials now describe as a cascade of preventable failures.
Two Tomahawk missiles struck the building and its grounds that Saturday, killing more than 150 people, including at least 123 children. The strikes devastated the two-story school, which was built on land that was part of a military compound in the southern Iranian town of Minab. In terms of child casualties, it’s the deadliest American military targeting error of the 21st century.
United Nations investigators said Thursday that there were reasonable grounds to conclude that the strike on Minab and another U.S. attack that took place on the same day amounted to war crimes. The U.S. has yet to publicly accept responsibility for the school strike, and President Trump has previously suggested it was Tehran’s fault. As recently as July 14, he told Fox News, “I don’t think anybody’s going to ever be able to say what happened there.”
But in interviews, officials with direct involvement in the Pentagon’s internal investigation have offered some of the first accounts of the probe. The strike didn’t result from a single catastrophic decision but an accumulation of smaller ones, they said, and their review has identified a series of missed opportunities to prevent the disaster. The officials, like more than two dozen others who provided descriptions of targeting procedures or background information for this story, asked not to be named to discuss sensitive matters.
In the final days of February, the Trump administration demanded an overwhelming aerial assault. More than 1,000 Iranian targets were hit within the first 24 hours alone. That order compressed the time frame for finalizing targets, the officials said, instilling an urgency that — combined with gaps in underlying information about the site, cuts in civilian protection personnel and an overreliance on artificial intelligence technology — set the stage for the deadly error.
Full details from the investigation remain tightly held. Officials who described it said they faced constraints on the amount of information they could share. Previous news reports have indicated that by early March, a preliminary internal review determined the U.S. was likely responsible for the Minab strike.
A report on the full Pentagon investigation, which commenced in March, hasn’t been released — though the officials said it has been all but complete for several months.
Adm. Brad Cooper, who heads U.S. Central Command and ordered the investigation, told members of Congress in May that he’s committed to providing transparency. Yet it’s not clear how much detail will be included, nor how much of the report ultimately will be released to the general public.
A child runs past a banner strung across the rubble of Shajarah Tayyebeh Elementary School showing portraits of the children and teachers killed there by a U.S. missile strike.
(Vahid Salemi / Associated Press)
A Pentagon spokesperson said the incident remains under investigation and declined to comment further.
In response to questions, including about when the White House was informed that the strike was a mistake, a senior administration official also cited the ongoing probe and added: “The United States does not target civilians.”
Last week, a report from the United Nations’ Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Iran said that the U.S. had “failed in its obligation to do everything feasible to verify” that the school was a military target and that the failure “went beyond negligence.” The U.S. Department of Defense has declined to comment on the report.
U.S. officials have said that outdated intelligence was a problem. Although the site in Minab had been identified years earlier as a military compound, there was clear evidence that it had been modified and undergone a change of purpose, the officials said. Physical changes reflecting new construction — visible on satellite imagery — dated back almost a decade, they said, and the site operated openly as a school.
Analysis of commercially available satellite images shows construction of walls and entrances that separate the school site from the military base, work that appears to have been completed by 2017. An image from 2018 shows brightly painted walls alongside a soccer pitch, assembly rows and play markings on the ground.
Some U.S. intelligence analysts took notice, the officials said. Bloomberg reported in June that one analyst detected changes to the site as early as 2019, and logged remarks about the modifications in a system that wasn’t connected to the primary military intelligence database, which informs targeting.
Inside Centcom, which conducted the U.S. attack, some personnel relied too much on the artificial intelligence embedded in Maven Smart System, the officials said. Maven, which is made by Palantir Technologies Inc., allows users to view and coordinate complex military operations — from targeting to command and control — using AI-enabled software that fuses more than 150 different data inputs into a coherent set of information to inform commanders’ decisions.
In the past year, the Defense Department has rapidly made Maven a cornerstone of the U.S. military apparatus. Several former senior U.S. military officials now work for Palantir, including some with high-level security clearances in Centcom’s Tampa headquarters. Their role is to keep the software functioning inside secure military environments.
Some Centcom personnel expected Maven to flag stale information or inconsistencies in the underlying intelligence assembled for potential targets, the officials said. It’s not clear why they had such expectations.
A Palantir spokesperson said that the company “is not responsible for the underlying data nor identifying intelligence deficiencies” and that there’s no evidence that its software was at fault in the Minab strike.
Two people familiar with the firm’s Pentagon contracts said the government retains primary responsibility for the quality of the information that’s fed into Maven. But they said it’s not uncommon for personnel who use tools such as Maven to develop operational understandings that differ from contractual terms.
After the Minab strike, Palantir built new capabilities into Maven that “re-review underlying intelligence to identify factors that would disqualify a target and flag inconsistencies and inaccuracies that human review may have missed,” according to a person familiar with the matter. That work has already caught some anomalies, the person said.
The ‘kill chain’
As Feb. 28 approached, Pentagon officials were tasked with identifying strikes they thought would paralyze Iran’s military before Tehran had a chance to respond, the officials said.
High on Centcom’s list: the naval division of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the most powerful force across the country’s military, economy and politics. It’s tasked with defending — and at times, disrupting — the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz. The Minab school site — with its uncorrected classification as a Revolutionary Guard facility — was fed into Maven along with other potential targets. It ultimately emerged as one of the recommended Day 1 targets, people involved in the investigation said.
As all targets do, the Minab site moved through a multi-stage assessment process known by the military as the “kill chain.” Steps in that process have traditionally involved intelligence analysts, imagery specialists, targeteers, lawyers, operational commanders and launch crews, according to U.S. military doctrine and interviews with current and former Defense officials. Today, Maven sits at the heart of those operations — between the initial intelligence inputs and the latter review stages, officials said.
In past conflicts, preparing lists of proposed targets — work that includes assessing how they align with an operation’s objectives — had taken hours for staffers to complete. Ahead of the U.S. attack on Iran, much of that work was condensed into several minutes via Maven, people involved in the Pentagon’s internal review said.
Officials involved in the investigation pointed to gaps that they said were left after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth dismantled most of the Pentagon’s civilian harm mitigation, or CHM, units — cutting headcount across a number of teams by roughly 90% to fewer than 20 staff members, people with direct knowledge of the matter said. Centcom’s team was reduced from 10 to 1.
No CHM team member reviewed the Minab site before the strike, according to officials involved in the internal investigation. That was a consequence of the cuts in staffing but also a decision not to involve the group in planning and operations, the officials said. While not mandatory, that sort of review had become routine in recent years, they added. It’s unclear whether such checks, which include mapping the civilian environment, assessing noncombatant presence and developing lower-risk strike options, would have been enough to raise questions about the Minab site.
The Biden administration had built up civilian-harm-prevention capabilities within the Pentagon after an August 2021 drone strike in Kabul killed 10 civilians — based on the misidentification of an aid worker as a threat. Hegseth has characterized his subsequent cuts to those efforts as a shift away from “Biden-era, non-lethal programs.”
“America, regardless of what so-called international institutions say, is unleashing the most lethal and precise air power campaign in history,” Hegseth said at a news conference March 2, days after the Minab attack. “All on our terms with maximum authorities. No stupid rules of engagement, no nation-building quagmire, no democracy-building exercise, no politically correct wars.”
Under Hegseth’s leadership, the U.S. military has prioritized speed of delivery. People involved in the Pentagon probe said a rush to finalize targets shortly ahead of Feb. 28 contributed to the tragedy.
“Haste can lead to errors,” said Laurie Blank, who was appointed a special counsel at the Pentagon’s general counsel during the Biden administration from 2022 to 2024. She drew a distinction between planned targets and those that arise in the heat of battle. “A rush to hit pre-planned targets just isn’t the same thing,” she said, “especially when the operations are launched by choice and not in response to an attack where you are responding without time to plan.”
Why Minab?
A little more than 800 miles south of Tehran, the city of Minab sits on the critical Strait of Hormuz, at the crossroads of centuries-old trade routes and the nation’s modern military might. As the U.S. attack on Iran began, it was deemed a high-value target, according to people involved in the investigation.
As the strait’s significance grew in the 1980s, so did the number of military assets devoted to protecting it and projecting power into the Persian Gulf. The Revolutionary Guard’s missile units, naval facilities and logistics compounds operate alongside neighborhoods where fishermen, teachers and civil servants have lived for generations in the city of 76,000.
Shajarah Tayyebeh Elementary School was built almost a decade ago on land originally occupied by a Revolutionary Guard naval unit. The Pentagon had cataloged the site as a military base several years earlier — a determination that wasn’t updated before the February attack. The New York Times reported in June that targeting officials used satellite imagery that hadn’t been updated in seven years and that did not show a school at the site. Investigators have focused on the Defense Intelligence Agency’s failure to reclassify the location, officials involved in the inquiry said.
On Feb. 28, Minab awoke to clear skies. Shopkeepers unlocked their storefronts. Fishing crews unloaded ice chests along the docks. Children in green-plaid uniforms walked through the gates of the 260-student school, before heading into classrooms.
Firsthand descriptions of the events that took place in and around the school that day have been gathered by a group of human rights advocates, lawyers and digital forensics experts who’ve spent months reconstructing the attack. Members of the informal consortium — including some based in the U.S. and Europe — asked not to be named given the sensitivity of their outreach efforts with victims’ families. Their work and an assessment by the U.K.-based watchdog group Airwars — viewed as a highly reliable source by some Pentagon officials — provides the following account:
After the first reports of attacks on Iran emerged that Saturday morning, teachers called parents and asked them to collect their children, saying the school planned to close early. Shortly after 11 a.m., a first missile hit part of the school, triggering an explosion that reverberated across the neighborhood. Panicked shrieks filled the air. Teachers ushered children from the playground back inside to take cover in a prayer room.
Within minutes, a second missile struck, sending metal fragments across the school. Part of the roof collapsed. Only a few children inside the prayer room survived, buried beneath the rubble.
Rescue vehicles rushed to the scene while passersby helped the wounded. Some injured children were pulled from the rubble while dozens more, deceased, were slowly identified. One rescue crew member stumbled upon a child’s hand, detached and laying on the ground. He wept as colleagues continued to hunt through the debris alongside him.
Some parents were left to identify their dead children by fragments of clothing or belongings — a pencil case, bracelet or shoe — as many faces were no longer distinguishable. The father of Arash Gol-Azin didn’t learn the fate of his 7-year-old son until reaching the morgue. Only then did he spot him by identifying his sock.
Payam Akhavan, a Toronto-based lawyer who has practiced before the International Criminal Court and is an expert on civilian protection, said it’s important for investigators to determine what efforts U.S. officials made to try to ensure they were targeting a military installation.
“The Geneva Convention says you must take all feasible measures to determine that this is, in fact, a military objective,” said Akhavan, who spoke before Thursday’s U.N. report was published. “This does not mean that every mistake is a war crime, because mistakes will be made, even if you take all feasible measures.
“But if all feasible measures were not taken,” he added, “then that raises a question of criminal responsibility.”
At least 1,701 civilians were killed in the opening 39 days of the war, according to data compiled by the U.S.-based group Human Rights Activists in Iran. That’s an average of 43 people a day, and the group — viewed by some in the Pentagon as an authoritative source for Iranian casualty figures — said it’s a low estimate.
“We should be asking how so many civilians were killed amid an unprecedented tempo of strikes over just a matter of weeks,” said Skylar Thompson, the group’s deputy director.
More recently, Iranian officials and a United Nations body said the U.S. was responsible for a Sept. 1 strike on Kuhestak — some 20 miles south of Minab — that hit a residential area where a wedding party was underway and killed at least five people with dozens more injured. The U.S. is investigating the incident, Vice President JD Vance said earlier this month.
Target libraries
For decades, American military planners had maintained extensive target libraries in anticipation of potential conflict with Iran, encompassing everything from limited strikes to maritime war and major air campaigns. The list stretched into the thousands and included air bases, missile factories, nuclear facilities and ports, according to current and former U.S. officials familiar with the plans.
Some potential targets had remained on the books for years, accumulating layers of satellite imagery, intelligence reports and legal reviews.
But these catalogs can age quickly, according to people who’ve dealt with them. Buildings appear and disappear. Headquarters switch locations. Where a military barracks once stood, schools, hospitals and mosques may now exist. So the libraries’ contents require close and continual review well before any particular building or site winds up on a target list.
Maintaining the lists is critical but labor-intensive. Officials involved in the internal investigation of the Minab incident described gaps in vetting — or checking whether the underlying information is accurate, reliable and timely — that came well before the school site was selected.
Some of the most sensitive sites, such as Iran’s nuclear facilities — attacked by Israel in its 12-day war with Tehran in June 2025 — faced relentless attention from U.S. intelligence analysts ahead of the 2026 war, according to officials with direct knowledge of the matter. Less prominent locations, such as Minab, went months without receiving another close look, the officials added.
War planners start to think they’ll have time to revisit the less urgent sites, current and former Pentagon officials said.
That assumption evaporated during the final days of February as diplomatic talks between U.S. and Iranian officials in Geneva faltered and then collapsed on Feb. 26.
Work that had unfolded in previous conflicts over weeks or months — matching sites from the library, such as buildings, airfields or bases — was completed in a matter of days, according to officials involved in the inquiry. More than a thousand potential targets had to be reassessed and approved.
By the time the first Tomahawk missile bound for the Minab site left its launcher on a ship operating in the Arabian Sea, roughly three dozen people were involved along the kill chain, the officials said.
Most sat in secure facilities more than 7,000 miles away in Tampa, Fla., studying maps, imagery and databases in preparation for a war that, until 48 hours before the Minab attack, many officials had believed for decades wouldn’t occur.
Typically, part of their work entails refining a list based on satellite imagery and on-the-ground intelligence that’s used to create a pattern-of-life analysis reflecting human movements on the site and changes over time. In Iran, a bitter U.S. adversary for almost half a century, such intelligence was limited, especially in the south of the country, people involved in the probe said.
Additional steps in the kill chain address other types of issues. Lawyers assess whether each proposed target is a lawful military objective. Specialists estimate potential collateral damage. Weapons experts debate not only which missiles to fire but when.
Every stage leaves a record. Analysts sign off on each piece of the chain. They’re told to report any inconsistencies to superiors.
Then a series of questions is asked by the senior commander: Is the target lawful? Is there sufficient intelligence? And have reasonable precautions been taken to minimize civilian harm? In the early hours of Feb. 28, the answer to each question about the Minab site was yes, according to the officials involved in the probe.
The Pentagon’s internal investigators, who examined the satellite imagery, intelligence databases, targeting materials, operational chat logs and computer records that analysts used, concluded that there was high confidence throughout the kill chain that the Minab site was a Revolutionary Guard facility, according to people involved in the probe.
“Insufficient intel wasn’t really viewed as a concern before the war,” said one Pentagon official involved in the internal probe. “We were confident in our intel. Minab proved you should never be too confident.”
Political pawns
Government researchers and auditors have noted deficiencies in the primary intelligence database that’s used to develop strike targets, and the Pentagon is working to replace it with one that will introduce more automation. And Minab isn’t the first time that flawed intelligence has directed U.S. precision weapons toward the wrong target.
The accidental bombing of the Chinese Embassy in the Serbian capital Belgrade in 1999 killed three people and injured 27 others. A mistaken 2015 airstrike on a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz in Afghanistan killed 42 people. More recently, soon after the Pentagon’s civilian-harm-mitigation teams were disbanded, a strike on the Ras Ina port in Yemen in April 2025 resulted in at least 80 civilian deaths.
In the months since the attack, the children of Shajarah Tayyebeh Elementary have become symbols. Their faces were plastered on the backs of the seats of Iranian planes ferrying diplomats to Islamabad for talks with the U.S. in April. They adorn memorials on the streets of Minab. Some families have complained that their injured children haven’t received the treatment they need. Critics accuse Iranian officials of leveraging the school attack to their political advantage.
In the U.S., the disaster has become a different sort of political touchstone. Democratic lawmakers, who are seeking to take control of the Congress in the November election, are asking how the attack could have happened.
Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the ranking member on the Senate Armed Services Committee, accused the Pentagon of deliberately withholding the results of the investigation, and his Republican counterpart, Thom Tillis of North Carolina, called for congressional briefings on what went wrong.
That call is echoed by Sen. Richard Blumenthal, who also sits on the committee, which helps set spending caps for the Pentagon’s roughly $1-trillion annual budget.
“The administration should have been forthcoming within hours or days, and here we are months later and nothing has been provided,” Blumenthal said.
Tensions flared on the eve of a critical week ahead for Paramount Skydance’s proposed $111-billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, amid new urgency for talks aimed at settling antitrust litigation brought by California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta and 11 other states.
Over the weekend, opposition intensified to a proposed settlement as details trickled out, including a proposal to establish a bipartisan editorial board to monitor cable news channel CNN, one of Warner’s premier properties that Paramount Chief Executive David Ellison would control along with CBS News.
It wasn’t clear Sunday whether a proposed settlement would require Warner to sell off assets — something Bonta repeatedly has insisted upon. Critics of the deal urged Bonta and other state attorneys general to resist pressure to reach a settlement that would allow Ellison’s deal to move forward.
“State Attorneys General, please hang tough against the giant proposed Paramount-Warner Brothers merger,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) wrote on social media late Saturday.
“Paramount, run by the Ellisons, should not own both CBS and CNN. California must not cave and take a deal that leaves both under the same owner,” Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Fremont) wrote.
However, New York’s Letitia James and at least two other attorneys general who joined Bonta’s lawsuit in July privately have expressed reservations about the proposed compromises, believing they don’t go far enough to mitigate concerns about the power Paramount-Warner Bros. would wield over the film and TV industries should the merger go through, according to the people familiar with the matter.
James isn’t on board with Bonta’s proposed settlement, two of the people said. A potential split within Bonta’s coalition could be a setback because Bonta needs the other state attorneys general who joined his legal effort to sign off on any deal.
A spokesperson for Bonta did not respond Sunday to a request for comment.
Paramount maintains its deal to bring HBO, CNN, CBS, TBS, Comedy Central and two legendary film and television studios together would create a stronger company that could withstand the fierce competition from tech giants such as Apple, Netflix, Google (which owns YouTube) and Amazon. The two studios, on their own, would not be strong enough on their own to remain viable in the streaming age, the company has said.
On Thursday, Paramount lawyers plan to demand that U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín in Oakland require the states and the Writers Guild of America to post a $1.88-billion bond that would cover some of Paramount’s delay-related deal costs should the company eventually prevail.
The states and the WGA, which also sued to block the merger, have balked at the request, which was designed by Paramount to create fissures within the coalition of states, which also include Minnesota, Oregon, Colorado, Connecticut, New Jersey and Massachusetts.
Ellison wants the merger finalized by Oct. 1, when his company will be obligated to make a higher payout to Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders. The company has threatened to move its Hollywood base from its historic Melrose Avenue lot to Tennessee or Texas should the antitrust battle stretch into October.
The prospective loss of an iconic California business — a century-old film studio that helped establish Hollywood — has rattled state and local politicians, who are fearful of losing more jobs at a time when Los Angeles film production levels already are at alarming lows.
Gov. Gavin Newsom, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and Xavier Becerra, the Democratic nominee for California governor, have publicly called on Bonta to settle the suit rather than prepare for a trial next spring. City Councilmember Nithya Raman, Bass’ opponent in the L.A. mayor race, has been one of few California politicians in support of Bonta’s fight.
In an opinion essay Sunday, a trio of 1st Amendment and antitrust experts dismissed Paramount’s threat to leave Los Angeles as a ploy that doesn’t make business sense.
“Ellison’s threat is empty, and the AG should call that out — not give into it,” the experts — Fiona Scott Morton, Gene Kimmelman and Norm Eisen — wrote in the Contrarian.
Both Morton, an economics professor at the Yale School of Management, and Kimmelman formerly served in the U.S. Justice Department during Democratic administrations. Eisen, founder of the group Democracy Defenders Action, is helping lead the Block the Merger campaign.
“Paramount [would be] sinking the cost of moving before it knows what businesses it owns and how best to combine and organize them — which makes expensive strategic mistakes inevitable,” the trio wrote. “A company that raises its own costs while leaving behind the most valuable labor in the industry does not threaten California; it threatens itself.”
The group noted Paramount, in its regulatory filings, still lists its Times Square offices in New York as its corporate headquarters — not its Melrose Avenue campus in Hollywood.
“There is also the possibility that Ellison is planning to move Paramount to Tennessee regardless of how the lawsuit resolves,” the group wrote.
Bonta and Paramount have discussed including in any settlement a condition that Paramount would keep its operations in California for a set period, according to people familiar with the proposal but not authorized to comment.
Merger opponents planned a Sunday evening rally outside Bonta’s offices in Oakland to encourage him to stand tough. The group plans subsequent demonstrations this week outside James’ office in New York City and the Paramount lot in Hollywood.
The jockeying comes as President Trump, who favors the Ellison takeover of CNN and Warner Bros., has sought to block several prominent news organizations, including CNN and Politico, from reporting from the White House.
“Trump just locked CNN out of the White House. Now his billionaire allies want to own it,” Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) added in a Sunday post. “State attorneys general: Don’t settle. Hold the line. Block this merger.”
The LA Times/SurveyMonkey poll set out to measure feelings about football and Super Bowl, both in the U.S. as a whole and in the Los Angeles region.
Each day, a huge range of organizations — schools, churches, bowling leagues, companies and more — use SurveyMonkey’s online platform to poll their members, customers or associates.
To conduct surveys on questions of broad public interest, like this one, SurveyMonkey randomly selects some of those people and asks them if they’d be willing to take an additional online poll. Those who say yes get a survey to fill out.
As with traditional telephone surveys, the results then are weighted to match standard Census Bureau measures of the nation’s population — to make sure that the sample mirrors the nation’s distribution of age, race, gender, geography and education levels.
The result is a representative sample of the adult population.
In this case, the poll, which was developed jointly by SurveyMonkey and The Times, was conducted in English and Spanish from Feb. 1-7 among a national sample of 7,590 adults. The sample included 1,659 Californians and 743 people who live in Greater Los Angeles, which encompasses Los Angeles, Orange, Ventura, San Bernardino and Riverside counties.
As with all polls, the results are subject to sampling error. For this survey, the modeled error estimates are 2 percentage points in either direction for the national sample, 3.5 percentage points for the statewide California sample and 5 percentage points for the Los Angeles metro area.
EDINBURG, Texas — Quinten Martinez, pumping gas under a hot south Texas sun, remembers a time when fueling up didn’t require difficult decisions.
“Is it going to be groceries this week?” said the 28-year-old Amazon delivery driver as he watched the numbers tick higher. “Is it gonna be getting gas in our tank to go to work?”
He shook his head when asked about President Trump’s assertion last week that higher gas prices are a small price to pay for the war with Iran.
“I don’t feel like it’s a good trade-off,” Martinez said. “I don’t feel like this is good for anyone.”
Voters across the country, and across the political spectrum, tend to agree.
Interviews with voters in several states, along with a fresh round of national polling, reveal an overwhelming sense of frustration that skyrocketing gas prices — a direct result of Trump’s war — are creating serious and sustained financial hardships for America’s working class.
The acute concerns are adding to a bad political environment that may be worsening for Trump and his Republican Party as early voting gets underway in the November midterm elections.
Historically, the party holding the White House has suffered major losses in midterms. About seven weeks before election day, Republican candidates at all levels are struggling with the additional burden of Trump’s weak approval ratings, an unpopular war and an affordability crisis that Trump and his congressional allies had promised to fix.
But when Trump campaigned in North Carolina on Wednesday, he played down the effect of surging gas prices.
“You have a little higher. It’s a very inexpensive price to pay for what we’ve done,” Trump said of the war, which he describes as necessary to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. “Remember that. It’s a little more. Frankly, even if it was a lot more.”
‘Gas prices matter’
Despite what Trump says, there are few things that may matter more this election year than the price of a gallon of gasoline, according to political operatives in both parties.
Gas prices are moving sharply in the wrong direction at a time of year when drivers typically get some relief. The national average for a gallon of gas reached $4.48 on Friday, according to the American Automobile Assn., up roughly 17 cents over the last week, 40 cents in a month and $1.27 from a year ago.
“Gas prices matter because they’re one of the few economic indicators voters experience and see in real time,” said veteran Republican strategist Chris Wilson. “The price is literally staring them in the face several times a week. So I wouldn’t minimize the frustration we’re seeing, particularly among working- and middle-class voters.”
Interviews with voters last week found bipartisan frustration and disappointment.
Democrats and unaffiliated voters were especially motivated to punish Republicans at the ballot box for their economic hardship, while some of Trump’s working-class supporters pledged to support Republicans this fall, even if they weren’t happy with the president’s leadership on the economy.
Some Republicans say they’re disappointed
Dan Lloyd, who voted for Trump, lamented the president’s leadership as the 63-year-old carpenter paid $4.39 a gallon to fill up his pickup truck in Mesa, Ariz.
“He hurt himself stepping into this,” Lloyd said of Trump. “Where’s all this oil from Venezuela? I thought we were flush with gas and everything, but no. The American people eat it every time, whether it’s interest rates, food, gasoline.”
Still, he expects to vote Republican in the midterms.
“I think the Democratic Party has lost its way,” Lloyd said. “I just feel like the whole system’s on the verge of collapse.”
In sweltering Edinburg, Texas, 52-year-old Kristin Jimenez shrugged off the rising price of gas after filling up her Mercedes.
“We’ve paid the same price under Republican presidents, we’ve paid this price under Democrat presidents,” said Jimenez, a mother who runs a small business. She plans to vote for a Republican because they’re the “lesser of two evils.”
She said gas prices aren’t part of her calculation.
“We don’t mind paying $8 for a cup of coffee at Starbucks, but we have a problem paying four bucks at the pump?” she said. “Make it make sense.”
More than 1,500 miles to the north in central Michigan, 35-year-old Garth Johnson is trying to make ends meet running a deep-cleaning business with several gas-powered vehicles and one machine fueled by diesel, which was $6.79 a gallon as he filled up his SUV.
Johnson voted for Trump, but doesn’t know what he’s going to do in November. He said he doesn’t feel qualified to second-guess the president’s evaluation of the war, but he’s feeling financial pressure in his own life.
“I like a lot of the things he’s done,” Johnson said, but added, “I’m a little guy and I’ve got to live my life.”
Other voters are less forgiving
Midterm voting was already underway Friday in Virginia, where Alan Johnson said Trump seems to have “no empathy” for Americans who are struggling financially.
“With the gas prices being what they are and continuing to grow, we’ve got to do something. Hopefully the Democrats can get into office and turn the ship around,” said the 60-year-old engineer, who cast ballots in the morning for Democrats for the U.S. Senate and House.
In Raleigh, N.C., teacher Brittney Bivins sees surging gas prices as evidence that Trump and his Republican Party aren’t dealing with the issues that matter most to people like her.
“He really doesn’t care about everyday people,” the 45-year-old said. “He can afford the gas, but most of us can’t. So it feels like he’s not even connected to his own people.”
Bivins, who described herself as an independent, said she’s eager to support Democrats this fall — especially the party’s emerging democratic socialist wing.
At a gas station in Lansing, Mich., Rina Risper spent $50 on eight gallons of premium gas.
“When I rolled up I was in shock, actually, and said, well, maybe I should drink water instead of having that $4.99 bottle of whatever it was I was gonna get,” Risper said. She thinks Trump’s tariffs will make affordability even worse.
“We’re not in Miami. We’re in Lansing, Michigan,” she said. “It’s really going to impact our people.”
Polls reflect economic distress
Nationwide, more than three times as many voters say they are falling behind financially as getting ahead, according to a Fox News survey released Wednesday. By a 15-point margin, Democrats are considered the party that would better handle inflation and prices at a time when the cost of living and the economy are voters’ top concerns.
The Fox poll found that 61% of voters say gas prices are a major problem for their household, compared with 48% two years ago, while 52% say the same for healthcare costs, compared with 44% in 2024. Majorities also view housing costs and grocery prices as major problems, although neither has increased.
Overall, nearly two-thirds of voters (63%) say the administration has made the economy worse, compared with 52% in September 2025, including one-quarter of Republicans. Only 46% of Republicans say the administration has improved the economy, while about one-quarter don’t see an impact.
Back in rural south Texas, an area where Trump’s GOP made gains in recent elections, Martinez, the Amazon delivery driver, could not contain his frustration.
Trump “likes to tout that we are the best economy in the world,” said Martinez, but in rural towns, “you don’t see any of the winning, you don’t see any of the ups that he’s talking about.”
“You just see struggles for day-to-day life,” he said.
Peoples, Bedayn and Cooper write for the Associated Press. Peoples reported from New York and Cooper from Mesa. AP writers Allen G. Breed in Raleigh, Jacqueline GaNun in Lansing, Sarah Rankin in Richmond and Nicholas Riccardi in Mason, Mich., contributed to this report.
WASHINGTON — President Trump said Sunday that the massive arch he wants to build between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery would become a “top grade military complex” able to host drones and snipers while storing ammunition.
It is one more example of how Trump is insisting that his initiatives to remake the White House and its environs are also serving a defensive purpose. Trump has been calling the new White House ballroom a “military complex” and arguing it is necessary for national security purposes, at least in part to help it pass legal muster.
The Pentagon said it had no information beyond the president’s statement.
Trump’s announcement comes as the arch, like his other projects, faces legal challenges. Though the arch has received early approval from the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, whose members were all appointed by Trump, a group of three veterans and an architectural historian sued, saying the project needs to be approved by Congress.
“The president’s belated efforts to manufacture a national security justification for this project do nothing to cure its fundamental illegality,” Nicolas Sansone, one of the attorneys representing the litigants, said Sunday. “Congress has not authorized the arch, and unless and until Congress does so, the project should not be permitted to move forward.”
The president said in a social media post that he had agreed, at the “strong request” of the military, to convert the planned 250-foot-tall memorial arch “into a top grade Military Complex/Triumphal Arch, to house, store, and have the rapid ability to use large numbers of drones, plus Snipers, on both the roof and plaza areas, and additionally have and hold large quantities of sniper ammunition in storage.”
The arch is proposed for a circle adjacent to the Memorial Bridge, which is a heavy traffic area as one of several connecting bridges between the nation’s capital and northern Virginia.
Among the other projects Trump is pursuing to refashion Washington’s cityscape are renaming and renovating the Kennedy Center, refurbishing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool and rebuilding a golf course in East Potomac Park that could significantly reduce the public’s access to running and biking paths. Some of the projects have run into trouble: The Kennedy Center now faces closure and perhaps demolition, and the botched Reflecting Pool renovation, originally set for completion by July 4, remains incomplete.
The groundbreaking for the arch was to have happened sometime this month. The project has not yet received final approval from the National Capital Area Planning Commission, which greenlighted the site and preliminary plans at its July meeting. The commission is expected to take up the matter again this fall.
WASHINGTON — As President Trump tells supporters to vote in November as if he were on the ballot, California Republicans in tight congressional races are sending a different message to voters.
The four California Republicans running in the state’s most competitive U.S. House races, plus a fifth opposing a fellow Republican in a close contest, are appearing to keep some distance from Trump as they campaign ahead of the Nov. 3 election.
They all skipped the president’s midterm convention in Dallas this month. Two candidates in tough races removed references to Trump on their campaign websites. And most are favoring a heavy focus on local and state issues in their campaigns — a contrast to Trump’s approach, driven home in Dallas, of casting the election as a loyalty exercise.
President Trump watches as balloons fall at the Republican convention.
(Alex Brandon / Associated Press)
“You’ve got to do me the biggest favor you’ve ever done me. You’ve got to do this for me: You have to pretend I am on the ticket,” Trump told a crowd at the GOP midterm convention. “Pretend I am on the ticket because this is going to turn out to be one of the most important elections.”
The dynamic within the GOP reflects several competing factors: the need to attract new voters in districts made more purple by California’s redistricting, the hope that Trump can rally the base while candidates focus on swing voters, and the fear among Republicans that the president’s flagging approval ratings could cost them crucial seats in the midterms.
“There is a bit of jujitsu to it,” said Rob Stutzman, a longtime California Republican consultant. “These candidates are hoping that Trump motivates these voters to vote … [while they] focus on gaining votes, particularly from independents who don’t like the president right now.”
The state’s redistricting under Proposition 50, which redrew the congressional map to be more favorable to Democrats, also handed Republican candidates the necessity of persuading more unaffiliated voters and moderate Democrats — likely a major factor in their stances toward the White House, said Pete Peterson, dean of the Pepperdine University School of Public Policy.
“To the degree that Republican candidates are distancing themselves, they’re understanding that they’re actually appealing to newer electorates,” Peterson said. “[The districts] have been made more moderate, more purple, and candidates may be responding accordingly as a way of trying to attract those voters.”
Facing headwinds
The party in power typically faces an uphill battle in midterm elections, and vulnerable candidates often distance themselves from the sitting president. As Republicans fight to keep control of the House and Senate in November, however, they are dealing with particularly serious challenges stemming from Trump’s low favorability rating and public frustration with the economy, the war in Iran and the escalating trade war with Canada.
Trump largely has dismissed concerns about the economy and the war, even as polling shows both are weighing heavily on voters. He also has exacerbated challenges for his party amid the growing public backlash to data centers and artificial intelligence, doubling down on his support for AI advancement in recent days even as GOP candidates in tight races look to respond to constituents’ concerns.
He also drew criticism from some within his party after promising to give a $5,000 payment to every adult citizen if Republicans win the House and Senate in November, a legally murky idea.
Still, Trump has urged Republican lawmakers in tough reelection campaigns to run on his record and earlier this month vowed to spend the last month before the election stumping for candidates in 35 battleground races, including in Alaska and Texas. He has not yet mentioned plans for California.
“All you have to do is talk about it, and you’re going to win and you’re going to win big,” Trump said of his record.
Candidates nationwide seem unconvinced. A Washington Post analysis found that Republican politicians have stopped mentioning Trump on social media, doing so about half as often as they did in January. Many in competitive races skipped his convention, and in recent weeks some have broken with him on data centers and the payout pitch.
In California, the headwinds for the GOP were captured in a survey released last week: A greater share of independents said they would vote for the Democratic candidate over the Republican in their House districts, the Public Policy Institute of California found, and a majority of likely voters polled Sept. 4-10 said they would choose the Democratic candidate if the election were held now.
Robert Rivera, left, of San José and Corky Galey of Modesto listen to gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton during a town hall in Modesto on Aug. 26.
(Sara Nevis/For The Times)
Last week, Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton’s campaign blasted a fundraising text to voters that began: “We get it. Maybe you don’t like Trump. Maybe you can’t stand MAGA.”
Democrats have seized on the dynamic.
“California Republicans know their loyalty to a toxic MAGA brand is a losing strategy,” said Anna Elsasser, spokesperson for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “Unlucky for them, no desperate rebrand can save them from their clear record of broken promises — from raising costs, to ripping away health care, to supporting another forever war everyone hates.”
Leaning on the local
Rep. Young Kim (R-Anaheim Hills) stripped her campaign website of the “America first” branding and references to Trump that defined it before the primary.
(Bill Clark / CQ Roll Call via Associated Press)
In Orange County, Rep. Young Kim — in a close contest with fellow Republican Ken Calvert — has stripped her campaign website of the “America first” branding and references to Trump that defined it before the primary. And in Northern California, Rep. James Gallagher has scrubbed Trump’s endorsement from his campaign website, which months ago prominently featured his close ties to the president.
Other candidates in tight races — Rep. David Valadao, running for reelection in the Central Valley; Kevin Lincoln, challenging Democratic Rep. Adam Gray; and Jim Desmond, running to fill the seat of retiring Republican Rep. Darrell Issa — have leaned on campaign optics centered around their regions rather than on sharply partisan politics.
None of the three attended Trump’s convention. Valadao rarely mentions Trump on social media and is the last House Republican still running who voted for Trump’s second impeachment. Desmond does not mention his support from Trump on his endorsements web page; Lincoln does.
Rep. Kevin Kiley, who left the Republican Party this year after his district was redrawn and after he clashed with Trump over tariffs, also is making an appeal to middle-of-the-road voters, promoting legislation around AI safeguards while taking aim at Sacramento policies. Kiley still caucuses with congressional Republicans but says he won’t if reelected.
Representatives for Gallagher, Lincoln, Desmond and Valadao did not respond to requests for comment.
Chris Pack, a spokesperson for Kim, said she was “proud of her work with President Trump to deliver results for Southern California.” But he framed her race as a choice between Kim and her opponent, saying the campaign’s messaging is focused on Calvert’s record. Pack didn’t answer a question about the removal of Trump’s name from Kim’s website.
Moves like Kim’s and Gallagher’s are angled at conveying to moderate voters that “they’re not going to be beholden to the party line, they’re simply going to run on common sense,” and may give centrist Democratic voters “permission” to consider the candidates, said one GOP operative who works in the state, granted anonymity in order to speak candidly.
In competitive districts like the ones California Republicans are trying to hold on to, Trump’s ask for voters to pretend he’s on the ballot is “probably not as helpful,” the operative said.
Instead, strategists see the local focus as the most effective strategy for California Republicans, along with a focus on statewide issues that allow them to counter policies of Gov. Gavin Newsom that they perceive as unpopular with voters.
“California Republicans know what’s best for their districts,” the operative said. “They all have their own independent records and are pretty well-known by their communities.”
Republicans are making the case that California’s long-term affordability issues, which far predate the current national economic landscape, have been exacerbated and mishandled by Democrats. The party also is leaning on an argument that Democrats are overly focused on Trump and have few substantive policy solutions.
Texas attendees hold up flags and cowboys hats at the Republican convention.
(Smiley N. Pool / Dallas Morning News via Getty Images)
Mike Madrid, a veteran California Republican political consultant, argued that a last-minute rebrand is unlikely to stick for candidates whose party has built a political identity around loyalty to the president and his policies. He said Republicans’ retreat is a sign of how Trump’s popularity is dwindling.
“I wouldn’t call that subtle in politics,” he said. “When you’re distancing yourself from the president of your own party, a man that everybody’s been championing as a political and cultural hero in those parts, I don’t think that’s subtle at all.”
When asked to make his case to midterm voters in an interview last week, Vice President JD Vance argued that Americans should give his party more time to deliver.
“Give us another chance,” Vance said on the All-In Podcast. “Give us another couple of years to continue to work on the amazing things that we have been doing for the past two years.”
In the second week of the college football season, in a clash of titans, the University of Texas scored 21 unanswered points to surge past Ohio State in the fourth quarter and win, 24-23.
The comeback, Gov. Greg Abbott decreed, was the greatest home victory in more than 130 years of Longhorn football.
A screen grab of one celebratory moment showed a group of students ecstatic beyond belief. They were clad in the university’s signature burnt orange. Two wore cowboy hats. One flashed “Hook ‘em Horns,” the university’s proud hand signal.
To see the picture earlier this month was to witness pure, untempered joy.
Most of the students were darkly complected and apparently of South Asian heritage. French posted the photo and wrote on X, “I heard UT graduation this year looked like this. I didn’t believe it. The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined.”
“Like body-cams exposed criminals, social media is exposing how many Americans have been displaced by foreigners,” French spewed. “It’s everywhere and far worse than any of us could imagine.”
In many places, French’s unapologetic, unvarnished bigotry would be disqualifying. But given Texas’ strong Republican leaning he stands a better-than-even chance of being elected in November to the state Railroad Commission, which, despite its name, oversees Texas’ vast oil and gas industry.
The hateful gibe was perfectly in character. “In some ways in Texas this is old news,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, who teaches political science at the University of Houston.
Last year, as chairman of the Tarrant County GOP, French posted an online poll asking, “Who is a bigger threat to America?” The choice on offer: Muslims or Jews.
Speaking in March at a political conference, he urged President Trump to round up and deport every Muslim in the country, calling the Islamic faith subversive and a clear and present danger to America.
“The Republican Party is used to Bo French making these kinds of outrageous statements,” Rottinghaus said.
Still, the response to French’s latest acrid emission was telling, not least for what it says about reflexive partisanship and today’s political reward structure.
As you’d expect, his Democratic opponent, state Rep. Jon Rosenthal, was scathing. “I spent 25 years as an oil and gas engineer,” he wrote on social media. “Bo French spent Sunday morning sorting our student section by skin color … A man who can’t tell a Longhorn from a foreigner has no business regulating anything in TX.”
The state’s outgoing U.S. senator, Republican John Cornyn, was also quick to denounce French. “This is the Republican nominee for statewide office,” Cornyn said in a post. “Are other Republican elected officials going to condemn the intolerance and racism, or look the other way while it becomes normalized.”
“That is not my message,” Abbott said in a written statement, summoning the moral clarity and political courage of a puff pastry. “We all support our college football teams. The way we win the state is the same way we win football games. We unite under the brand of Texas.”
Then, just to have it both ways, Abbott suggested “that doesn’t mean that Texas cannot also lead in having the toughest immigration laws of any state in America and freezing H1B visas at our universities.” (The overwhelming majority of those holding H1B visas are Asian nationals from India and China.)
Paxton responded by attacking his Democratic opponent, state Rep. James Talarico, for saluting Cornyn for taking a stand against French’s prejudice. “I condemn racism in all its forms,” Paxton wrote on X, adding, “Only one person in this race has a history of dividing Texans by race, and it’s James Talarico.”
A simple, straightforward condemnation shouldn’t have been hard. Lacey Hull, a Republican state representative from Houston, was among those in the GOP who showed how.
“Please delete this,” she urged French on X. “This post breaks my heart. I see college kids cheering on their football team. I see Texans.”
Both need a robust GOP turnout to win in November and neither wants to risk alienating too many within the party’s xenophobic, anti-immigrant wing.
“They’re concerned about turnout,” said Mark Jones, a political scientist at Rice University. “Texas is a red state, but one thing that Republicans are concerned about is that the base may not turn out in as large a number as they need.”
Given French’s loathsome history, Abbott and others in the party establishment worked hard to keep him from winning the Republican nomination, Rice noted. But not Paxton. He headlined the kickoff to French’s campaign and has good reason to be glad he won and is now part of the GOP ticket.
His presence means that Paxton is only the second most odious figure seeking statewide office in Texas in November.
WASHINGTON — Several of the nation’s largest voter engagement and racial justice organizations are facing steep funding shortfalls and staffing cutbacks just as voting is getting underway in an election that will determine control of Congress for the final two years of President Trump’s term.
The shortfalls are setting off alarms among Democratic strategists, who are betting on high turnout and robust voter protection efforts to boost the party’s chances this fall. They are worried that many grassroots groups will not be able to mount effective registration and get-out-the-vote efforts, much less protect against the possibility of election interference from the administration given Trump’s efforts to restrict voting access and assert federal control over the election.
America Votes, a coordinating hub for more than 400 progressive groups, has fallen “well below” the level of funding it had during the 2022 midterms, the group’s executive director, Daria Dawson, said in a statement to the Associated Press. America Votes has acted as a nerve center for the voter mobilization efforts of groups such as the NAACP, Planned Parenthood, the League of Conservation Voters, the AFL-CIO and SEIU labor unions, as well as local groups focused on racial justice, climate and civil liberties.
“There is still time to reach voters and bring them into this election, but we are no longer talking about a future opportunity,” Dawson said. “The window to engage them is open now, and it is narrowing every day.”
Racial justice activists feel betrayed
Wealthy donors and philanthropic groups have reduced their support of many liberal causes since the 2024 presidential election. That pullback has been especially stark for voting groups geared toward engaging communities of color.
While multiple organizers said some funders had expressed an interest in adopting different strategies, racial justice organizers have felt that as a betrayal.
A retreat in donor support is “handcuffing our ability to persuade our communities to vote in a year where there is no Voting Rights Act,” said Esosa Osa, a veteran Democratic strategist and founder of Onyx Impact, a research group focused on combating misinformation in Black communities.
A Supreme Court ruling this year knocked out one of the last remaining pillars of that landmark 1965 law, essentially gutting it.
“We are watching surrender, not strategy,” Osa said.
A July memo that circulated among major Democratic fundraisers warned that “the organizations that registered and persuaded millions of voters to participate in the 2018 and 2022 midterms are drastically underfunded. They have raised nearly 40% less than they had at this point in those cycles.”
It further warned that funding voter mobilization groups was especially critical “given that the Democratic brand is underperforming on generic ballot tests relative to historical comparisons and the president’s approval ratings.”
The shortfalls have led organizations focused on engaging and mobilizing key voting groups to scale back operations and staffing over the last year. That has included programs aimed at registering and mobilizing lower-propensity voters, voters of color, and rural and younger voters.
The Democratic National Committee, which has faced its own funding challenges, has consolidated voter engagement efforts this year partly in response to the ecosystem’s past shortcomings. The DNC in a statement said it was making “historic investments” in its organizing but did not address the weaknesses among allied groups.
“We are expanding our voter protection infrastructure to defend Americans’ sacred right to vote, hold Trump and Republicans accountable in court, and register and mobilize voters across the country,” said Angelo Fernández Hernández, a DNC spokesperson.
‘Being Black … again has become a bad word’
The reasons for the troubled funding landscape are varied and at times unclear, according to nearly two dozen fundraisers and organizers who spoke with the AP. Some donors, still disappointed with the Democratic Party and some of its allies following the 2024 presidential election, have closed their pocketbooks to liberal causes entirely.
While a small group of liberal megadonors has continued to bankroll progressive causes, most focus their support on liberal legal organizations that have taken the Trump administration to court, rather than political or voter engagement groups.
Others, including major philanthropic institutions, have pulled back out of fear of retribution that giving to political or racial justice causes could draw the administration’s ire. Organizers who have engaged with potential donors said the administration’s targeting of political opponents and diversity initiatives seems to have put a chill on fundraising for their causes.
Tameka Ramsey-Brown, founding director of the Michigan Coalition on Black Civic Participation, said multiple donors since the 2024 election had asked whether her group could remove the word “Black” from its name or find financial conduits to mask the source of donations for fear of retribution from the administration.
“Just being Black in this country again has become a bad word, and it has made it that much more difficult just to raise money because funders don’t want the added pressure and stress or attacks on them by funding us,” she said.
Smaller budgets, shifting strategies
Many of the nonprofit groups that traditionally have conducted the registration, voter education and organizing say they are trying to adapt to their new, leaner reality.
Vamos a Votar, an initiative of the largest civil rights and advocacy groups focused on Latino communities, has had to readjust its ambitions this year due to a lack of investment from funders.
“This is shaping up to be a cycle where investments haven’t gone to the Black and brown communities that will ultimately decide this election,” said Juan Proaño, chief executive of the League of United Latin American Citizens, a member of the initiative.
In a September pitch circulated among donors, the coalition said it aimed to invest $27.5 million in voter engagement and persuasion efforts this year, but still required $5.4 million from donors to fund voter turnout efforts across 10 states and 17 House districts. Even that investment reflected reduced ambitions from previous pitches to donors early this year.
“It has been extremely disappointing to see that progressive donors are not meeting the moment,” said Héctor Sánchez Barba, head of Mi Familia Vota, one of the affiliated organizations. “We are not waiting. We are always on the front lines for our democracy and our communities.”
To counter the funding cutbacks, some groups have begun relying more heavily on artificial intelligence to provide voter registration guides, share information in multiple languages and track potential election issues. Some groups have increased their partnerships with ride-sharing companies to provide free rides to polling places instead of bus shuttles.
With fewer in-person organizers, some groups are also focusing on social media and partnering with liberal content creators to boost their messages.
“In my more than 30 years of organizing, it has never been this bad to raise money to support Black causes of any kind,” said Melanie Campbell, president and chief executive of the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation, a nonpartisan civil rights group.
“We’re going to do the work, our state affiliates are doing all that is possible. … But the bottom line is that those who believe that democracy matters should make sure they fund the work.”
COMSTOCK, Texas — The Trump administration has started building a border wall through a west Texas section of the Big Bend region, marking the first major construction in an area of the U.S.-Mexico border where the administration’s plans have met heavy, bipartisan opposition.
The start of construction marks a milestone in the administration’s $46-billion efforts to line the border with walls, barriers, roads and technology as it seeks to make good on a campaign promise by President Trump to finish the wall. And it comes as Customs and Border Protection says it has doubled the pace at which it is building the wall across the border.
Customs and Border Protection said in a statement to the Associated Press that “border wall panel installation is underway” in a 47-mile stretch of Hudspeth County in west Texas known as Big Bend 1. There are five project areas that make up the roughly 500-mile Big Bend region stretching from an area of Hudspeth County south of El Paso to Lake Amistad.
CBP said the first panels were erected Wednesday. On a map on the agency’s website where it posts updates of wall construction along the southern border, a photo showed a crane lifting one of the 30-foot-tall steel wall panels into place as construction workers looked on.
The new activity was separate from a border infrastructure project in the nearby Big Bend National Park, where the administration has suspended construction in an attempt to reach out to opponents.
In the broader Big Bend region of Texas, CBP has run up against concerted opposition from landowners, environmental groups, business owners and ranchers who say the remote region isn’t a high-traffic area for illegal immigration. Political leaders from both parties, including U.S. Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), have joined the opposition.
Activists said Friday they would continue opposing the border infrastructure projects in the rest of the Big Bend region, even as the panels were being installed.
Clara Benson, one of the founders of the No Big Bend Wall Coalition, which has been fighting against CBP’s plans, said in an interview Friday that the organization had been receiving reports of trucks moving supplies into the remote area along the Rio Grande and that contractors had been clearing yards to stage supplies.
Speaking from Washington, D.C., where she and others in the coalition were meeting with lawmakers, she said that the organization and others would continue to fight the wall-building plans across the region.
“We will continue to fight for this land no matter what the outcome is. We will continue fighting to the end,” said Benson. “You talk to people in west Texas and they say even if they put it up, we’ll fight for them to take it down. So this fight is not over.”
The news comes as the administration is speeding forward with a plan to line the entire border with a combination of 30-foot-tall steel bollard walls, barriers designed to stop vehicles from crossing the border, new patrol roads, and various technologies to deter and detect migrants or smugglers from crossing the border.
Customs and Border Protection said it is building an average of 12 miles of barriers per week along the 2,000-mile border with Mexico and recently reached a milestone of 200 miles of new barriers built since the second Trump administration took office. The 12-miles-a-week average is double the pace that the agency’s head, Rodney Scott, cited earlier this year.
The agency has faced opposition from environmental groups, a small town that worries the wall will cause flooding in its area, Native Americans who say the construction is disturbing sacred sites and landowners who say the construction will infringe on their land.
In Texas, much of the opposition has centered on the agency’s plans for Big Bend National Park, in the state’s southwest on the Rio Grande that is a draw for tourists from around the world. But up- and downriver outside the park, much of the land is owned by private landowners, many of whom have organized against the government’s efforts.
Earlier this week, landowners, ranchers and business owners in the Big Bend region along with a nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting the region’s landscape and heritage sued to stop the administration’s plans.
Activists and landowners have also shown up at county meetings to push their elected officials not to cooperate with contractors hired by CBP to build the wall, and many landowners have refused to allow government officials or contractors onto their land to survey it.
SACRAMENTO — Gov. Gavin Newsom on Saturday signed legislation to increase security for the state’s voting systems and protect Californians’ ability to cast ballots in an effort to guard against potential interference in the Nov. 3 election, including by the Trump administration.
Newsom pointed to the Trump administration’s recent effort to restrict mail-in voting through the U.S. Postal Service, which was struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court, and the presence of federal monitors at California polls last year as evidence that Trump “will continue his efforts to interfere with the November election.”
“Donald Trump won’t stop until he can exert dictatorial control over your free vote and disenfranchise millions of people this November. California will stop him at every opportunity,” Newsom said in a statement.”We have no bigger task than fighting to protect the right to vote from interference and meddling — the future of democracy is on the line. These bills today build upon the wall California has built to safeguard our electoral process.”
The governor signed the package of bills at the Japanese American National Museum in Little Tokyo, where a year earlier federal agents gathered outside a political rally he was hosting. Then Border Patrol Sector Chief Gregory Bovino, who had been leading the immigration operations in California, was among those outside the event, joined by agents in helmets, camouflage, masks and holding guns. Newsom described their presence as political intimidation.
One bill Newsom signed Saturday cites efforts to “weaponize law enforcement authority for political purposes,” including Republican “Sheriff Chad Bianco’s seizure of ballots in Riverside County,” and the election monitors sent by the U.S. Justice Department to polling sites in five counties during a 2025 special election on redistricting.
Such moves “have given rise to unprecedented concerns about law enforcement interference” in elections and “[demonstrate] that these threats are not merely hypothetical,” the bill by Sen. Tom Umberg (D-Santa Ana) reads.
The law, Senate Bill 884, which takes effect immediately, requires counties to open ballot drop-off locations 30 days before an election — two days earlier than usual — and allows counties to ban electioneering, or trying to influence voters’ decisions, within up to 200 feet of polling sites. It also bans police from making arrests near voting locations except for crimes against people, property, or disrupting the voting process.
Bianco, a GOP candidate for governor who placed fourth in the primary, drew swift condemnation and legal challenges this spring after he ordered deputies to seize more than 650,000 ballots from the Riverside County elections office. Voting rights groups and Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta challenged the move, which is being decided by the California Supreme Court.
Bianco carted off truckloads of ballots from the Riverside County Registrar of Voters in February after securing a warrant based on claims that the office allowed fraudulent votes in the special election to redraw California’s congressional districts under Proposition 50 in 2025.
Earlier this year, Newsom signed a bill preventing local and federal law enforcement agencies from taking ballots without a warrant.
On Saturday the Democratic governor signed a bill making it a felony to seize or order the seizure of ballots, election records or voting machines. Future seizures could be punishable by up to four years in prison.
“The federal administration and those seeking to spread lies about our democracy continue to call for interference in elections in ways we have never seen before in this country,” Assemblymember Gail Pellerin (D-Santa Cruz), the bill’s author and a former longtime county elections chief, said last month. “AB 282 helps ensure that every lawfully cast vote can be counted, and that the will of the voters of every political party will be respected.”
Republican lawmakers argued in previous hearings that the bill is unnecessary because it is already a crime to steal ballots.
Another bill, Senate Bill 259, makes it a crime to interfere with a mail ballot on the way to or from a voter or order the seizure of ballots that are in transit to a local elections office.
Newsom signed Assembly Bill 1664, which requires elections officials to immediately notify the attorney general and secretary of state immediately upon learning of any warrants, subpoenas or law enforcement investigations involving election records or voting equipment.
Newsom also signed bills to boost protections under the California Voting Rights Act, including an explicit ban on voter suppression and expanded access to election materials in languages other than English.
The governor also signed legislation to require more transparency from social media influencers who are paid by political campaigns. The measure, Assembly Bill 1130, came in the wake of a controversy in the June primary election when social media influencers took on a more visible role in the campaigns.
Candidates including Democratic billionaire Tom Steyer paid thousands of dollars to influencers who posted videos endorsing Steyer or talking about him in a positive light. These videos did not always disclose that influencers were paid by a candidate’s campaign.
NEW YORK — Journalists from three major news organizations — CNN, MS NOW and Politico — were denied access to the White House on Saturday morning, with reporters from the two cable networks both going live to report they’d been barred following a ban imposed by President Trump.
The actions escalated Trump’s long-running efforts to restrict news coverage by journalists he finds objectionable, and is the latest test of 1st Amendment protections in the United States. Trump said Friday he would ban all three organizations because of their coverage — which he called “fake news.”
Politico said its White House reporter Cheyenne Haslett was denied entry to the White House and had her badge confiscated Saturday. The announcement came shortly after the turning away of MS NOW and CNN journalists.
Editor in chief Jonathan Greenberger said in a statement to the Politico newsroom: “We stand by her and all reporters here covering the White House. … We will vigorously defend our First Amendment rights.”
CNN and MS NOW have issued similar statements.
“We will not be deflected from our duty to hold the government and other public bodies to account,” CNN said. The statement was shown on the air before senior White House reporter Betsy Klein began to report on her ban.
Journalists from three major news organizations — MS NOW, CNN and Politico — were denied access to the White House on Saturday morning.
(Graeme Sloan / Getty Images)
MS NOW said in a statement that it stands behind its journalists. “The White House belongs to the American people and the decisions made inside are funded by our tax dollars,” the network said in a statement Saturday. “MS NOW intends to take any and all steps necessary to defend our First Amendment rights and the essential role of independent journalism in our democracy.”
In his second term, Trump and his administration have upped the ante and punished certain media outlets, both in the courtroom and through regulatory action. Trump has also lashed out at individual reporters in person or over social media, sometimes in strikingly personal terms.
Turned away, badges confiscated
Both CNN White House reporter Betsy Klein and MS NOW reporter Akayla Gardner went on the air to report they’d been banned from entering the White House.
Network correspondents are usually present on the weekends when the president is in Washington or at nearby Camp David. Trump is at the presidential retreat in Maryland this weekend.
Gardner was turned away and her entry badge confiscated, she said. She noted she had walked through two gates successfully, but once she got to where her badge needed to be scanned, an officer told her it was disabled and asked her to hand it over. He said the decision “was above him,” she reported. An MS NOW producer was able to get in, but a photographer’s badge was also disabled, Gardner said.
CNN Senior White House Reporter Betsy Klein, left, walks to the White House, Saturday.
(Jose Luis Magana / Associated Press)
Klein, senior White House reporter at CNN, also said her badge had been deactivated.
CNN media analyst Brian Stelter called the move “a direct threat to press freedom in the United States.”
“It’s so much bigger than CNN,” Stelter said. “This is a free speech test in America.”
Continued attacks on press freedom
The president wrote on his social media site Friday that effective immediately, “I am banning” CNN, MS NOW and Politico “from the White House as a result of their constant ‘reporting’ FAKE NEWS!” Minutes later, speaking at an event in the Oval Office, Trump was asked to explain his statement.
“Because they’re fake news,” he said. “You get so tired of reading and seeing fake news. When you look at CNN, it’s just fake. That’s why their ratings are no good. When you look at MS NOW … , it’s fake news.”
President Donald Trump arrives at the Ellipse before departing the White House on Friday. Trump hosting a MAGA fundraiser at his private club in Sterling, Virginia, before spending the weekend at Camp David.
(Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images)
“And when you look at Politico … the stories they wrote are fake. So there’s a lot of news and there may be others to join them, and maybe they can get better,” he said. “But our country has to have honest news.”
The move follows the president’s decision last year to bar Associated Press reporters from the Oval Office, Air Force One and other events in retaliation for the news outlet’s decision not to follow his lead in changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico, which lies partially in Mexican and other waters. The AP said that it would note when appropriate that Trump had ordered it renamed the “Gulf of America.”
The AP filed suit and the case is ongoing. Since returning to office, Trump has pursued other legal action against a variety of outlets, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the BBC. His administration is also involved in a long-simmering confrontation involving ABC over renewal of its broadcast licenses.
The advertising blitzkrieg of L.A.’s mayoral campaign is here.
Mayor Karen Bass and her opponent, City Councilmember Nithya Raman, dropped new campaign commercials over the last week, buying time on television, streaming channels and other platforms. Supporters of both candidates released ads as well.
The two candidates relied heavily on free media for most of the summer, putting videos on Instagram and inviting the news media to cover their appearances.
The dam effectively burst on Monday, with Raman touting her new Hollywood-themed ad “For Your Consideration,” timed to coincide with the Emmy Awards.
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The 30-second spot starts with Raman stepping out on the town, then shifts to some standard L.A. imagery: freeways, palm trees, Echo Park Lake and, of course, the Hollywood sign.
“L.A. shows the world what it means to be a star,” declares the ad’s narrator, actor and screenwriter Bob Odenkirk. “And every Angeleno deserves the chance to reach for their own.”
After Raman has stopped off at a taco stand and hugged a dog, Odenkirk delivers the ad’s final message: “Change. Affordability. An L.A. that loves you back.”
That ad ran on television a few times before being cycled onto social media, per the Raman campaign.
Three days later, Bass went up with a 30-second spot — on digital platforms for now — centered on President Trump’s immigration raids.
The ad offers footage from the day in July 2025 when Bass confronted federal immigration agents in MacArthur Park. The video features images of gun-toting federal agents in military uniforms and Bass hopping out of a car in an aquamarine pant suit to face them.
“When someone comes after your family, you don’t hesitate,” Bass says. “You stand up. You fight.”
One of Bass’ most formidable allies — the Los Angeles Police Protective League — went hard negative with its first ad of the runoff campaign, offering the message that Raman “Doesn’t Get It.”
The commercial, released Friday, follows a young girl as she walks past a homeless encampment, juxtaposed against video of Raman talking about her opposition to a law that prohibits encampments near schools.
“I don’t think a kid’s gonna be safer because a tent is 500 feet away from a school,” Raman said in the clip, which was taken from a 2024 candidate forum in Sherman Oaks.
The backpack-wearing child speaks to the camera and says: “Walking to school shouldn’t be scary.”
“I’m just a kid,” she says. “But even I know I’d be safer if this was 500 feet away.”
The police union says the ad will start running on television this weekend and already is on social media platforms.
Meanwhile, Raman’s backers have an assortment of attack ads running on Facebook and Instagram.
Streets For All, a group that wants to expand the city’s bus and bike lane network, pulled video footage from a different Sherman Oaks candidate forum — this one featuring Bass and Raman last month.
At that event, Bass told the audience that Raman is unresponsive to her constituents, forcing many in Sherman Oaks to contact the mayor’s office directly.
“Many of you have my cellphone, you have called me,” Bass says in the ad. “You called on me specifically for help.”
Streets For All contends those remarks show that Bass gives wealthy homeowners her number while “regular Angelenos get ignored.”
“L.A. deserves a mayor who doesn’t just listen to the rich and powerful,” the ad says.
By Friday, Streets For All had nearly two dozen different video spots opposing Bass over such issues as homelessness, transparency and the Palisades fire, according to Ethics Commission filings.
The biggest backer of the group’s political action committee is hedge fund manager Aaron Sosnick. Of the $1.2 million that the group plans to spend in the mayor’s race, Sosnick has provided $1 million, said Michael Schneider, who heads the group.
Schneider said the committee also has financial support from retired real estate developer Yuval Bar-Zemer — known for his work in the Arts District — and Todd Wexman, chief principal of 4SITE Real Estate, a real estate development company.
Raman pollster says she’s in the lead
The Raman campaign shared the results of a new internal poll that showed their candidate with a five-point lead over Bass.
Of the 600 likely voters who were surveyed, 44% supported Raman and 39% backed Bass, with 17% undecided, according to a memo provided to the campaign and viewed by The Times. The survey, conducted by Hart Research Associates in early September, had a margin of error of 4 percentage points.
“In the initial trial heat for Los Angeles mayor, Councilmember Nithya Raman is in the rare position for a challenger of already LEADING the incumbent,” the polling firm wrote.
Another poll, commissioned by an independent expenditure group supporting Raman, portrayed the race as a statistical tie, at least initially. Estamos con Nithya for Mayor of LA 2026, sponsored by the Western States Regional Council of Carpenters, said its poll showed Bass with 38% and Raman at 37%.
However, when voters received more information on the candidates, Raman took a 7-percentage-point lead, with 41% supporting her and 34% supporting Bass, according to a memo prepared by the group’s pollster.
The margin of error was 3.7 percentage points.
The Bass campaign declined to share its internal polling when contacted by The Times.
However, Neighborhoods for a Better L.A., an independent expenditure group supporting the mayor, said a survey it commissioned in early August showed the mayor with an edge over Raman of 41% to 35%, with 24% of the electorate undecided.
That poll, conducted by Tulchin Research, surveyed 1,200 likely Los Angeles voters and has a 2.8-percentage-point margin of error, the group said.
The poll also found that when given “balanced biographies” about both candidates, Bass’ support grew to 45% while Raman went down to 33%.
“Communications focused on Raman’s record can both reduce her support and consolidate voters behind Bass,” the pollsters wrote.
Giving back El Grito cash
Los Angeles City Councilmember Imelda Padilla locked down sponsorships for the city’s celebration of El Grito, which marks Mexico’s independence.
Tuesday’s event, which featured an evening of musical performances, was sponsored by an assortment of city contractors and government agencies, including waste hauler Athens Services and the Department of Water and Power.
Still, Padilla decided she didn’t want to partner with one particular business, announcing at the last minute that organizers no longer would accept a $5,000 sponsorship from Home Depot.
On the day of the celebration, Padilla issued an apology on Instagram, saying she had heard from community members upset over the event’s affiliation with Home Depot, whose parking lots have been the site of many federal immigration raids.
“We have rescinded their partnership for this event,” Padilla said in her post. “The spirit of El Grito is rooted in celebrating our Latino heritage and creating a space where our families feel welcomed, safe, and celebrated.”
In an email, a Home Depot spokesperson said the company is not involved in immigration enforcement activities and doesn’t coordinate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement or U.S. Border Patrol. The company also doesn’t receive advance warning about enforcement actions, the representative said.
“We cannot legally interfere with federal enforcement agencies, including preventing them from coming into our stores and parking lots,” Home Depot spokesperson Evelyn Fornes said.
State of play
— COZY WITH CARUSO: Billionaire developer Rick Caruso, who was defeated by Bass in 2022, appeared alongside the mayor at a groundbreaking for the Palisades Recreation Center. Caruso praised her for her work on the project but stopped short of endorsing, saying he intends to meet with Raman in the coming weeks.
— LIFE AFTER PRATT: The voters who picked reality TV personality Spencer Pratt in the June 2 primary election are now up for grabs. But will they stay home instead of picking a mayoral candidate?
— BASS BAILS: The mayor skipped a congressional hearing on waste and fraud in homeless spending this week, calling the session politically motivated. Rep. Tim Burchett, the Republican who chaired the subcommittee meeting, accused her of dodging accountability.
— FINDING FRAUD: Federal authorities arrested three people who were working in Los Angeles-area homeless nonprofits this week, accusing one of them of misappropriating more than $7.5 million in taxpayer funds. Scott Turner, secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, said the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, which provided the funding, had allowed fraud to “run rampant.”
— WE’RE IN THE MONEY: The 2028 Summer Olympic Games in Los Angeles will generate up to $40.6 billion in increased economic output and add as many as 224,000 jobs, according to an upbeat economic forecast released this week. Another, more tempered estimate put the increase at $20.5 billion to $25.4 billion.
— SEETHING OVER SKID ROW: Some activists want dogs taken away from homeless residents living in Skid Row, saying those animals are living in an unsafe environment. A Bass aide responded by cautioning that it is “neither humane nor legal to remove animals from their human companions without appropriate cause.”
QUICK HITS
Where is Inside Safe? The mayor’s signature program to combat homelessness went to Avalon Boulevard and 64th Street in South L.A., an area represented by Councilmember Curren Price.
On the docket next week: The council’s Public Works Committee meets Tuesday to discuss ways of cleaning, safeguarding or demolishing nuisance properties.
Stay in touch
That’s it for this week! Send your questions, comments and gossip to LAontheRecord@latimes.com. Did a friend forward you this email? Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Saturday morning.
In La Palma Park Stadium in Anaheim, a month before the Bay of Pigs invasion, 7,500 students and parents skipped school or work and gathered to learn about communist plans to take over the United States.
“Right now, we have a 50-50 chance of defeating the communist threat,” Herbert Philbrick, a former FBI agent, told the crowd on March 8, 1961. “Each day our chances grow less.”
Walter Knott, of berry-farm fame, sponsored the five-day “Christian Anti-Communist School” to help Orange County see the world that he saw, one where big government and liberalism led to Soviet domination.
The message stuck. Within the decade, Orange County would have 38 chapters of the conspiracy-minded, ultra-right-wing John Birch Society, which called Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower a “communist tool.” Knott and actor John Wayne were members, as was the county’s congressman.
The rightward mobilization during the suburban explosion of the 1960s gave Orange County a national reputation for hard-line conservatism with a crackpot edge — “nut country,” in the words of Fortune magazine.
The county’s deep pockets funded right-wing candidates and movements throughout the nation. At home it spawned popular but ultimately doomed measures such as the Briggs Initiative in 1978 to ban gays and lesbians from working in public schools, and Proposition 187 in 1994, which would have denied public services to immigrants in the country illegally.
The Republican Party reached its peak in the Reagan era and has been slowly losing its membership edge since 1990, as the diversity of Los Angeles and the world at large started to bleed through the so-called Orange Curtain.
Source: California Secretary of State
(Priya Krishnakumar / Los Angeles Times)
Registered Republicans today outnumber Democrats by only 2 percentage points, down from 22% at the peak, with a large contingent of self-declared independents positioned to swing elections either way. The GOP has a chance of losing four congressional seats in the county in Tuesday’s midterm election. If so, it would be the first time since the 1930s that Orange County would be without Republican representation in the House.
A GOP loss of even one or two seats would be significant, not as a turning point so much as a powerful sign of change — hastened by dislike for President Trump — in this one-time heart of American conservatism.
Source: Political Data, Inc.
(Priya Krishnakumar / Los Angeles Times)
::
Orange County seceded from its northwestern neighbor, Los Angeles, in 1889, led by fiercely independent ranchers, sheepherders, beekeepers, citrus growers and crop farmers who had bristled under the control of a rich city 30 miles up the rail line.
The county then was a constellation of small farm and dairy towns in the north and scattered resort towns along the coast. In the south, the basin tapered off into a narrowing valley between the Santa Ana Mountains and the coastal San Joaquin Hills, where sheep and cattle ranches had thrived since California was part of Spain and Mexico.
Americans had taken over the ranchos in the late 19th century after a devastating drought left many old landowners of Spanish ancestry, the Californios, broke.
Lewis Moulton was one of the Yankee migrants. He came from Boston in 1874 and grazed sheep on the open range from Oceanside to Long Beach. Family lore has it that natural gas seeps were so rich in some spots that, as he camped, he would light them to cook his breakfast.
After two decades of renting land, he and a Basque shepherd, John Pierre Daguerre, had enough money to buy Rancho Niguel, which they eventually expanded to 22,000 acres. It was rugged, isolated country, good mostly for grazing. The cheapest land was the steep part near the coast, between what would become Laguna Beach and Dana Point — about $15 an acre. Today, small fractions of an acre go for double-digit millions.
In the second half of the 20th century, these backwater ranchers and farmers, the Moulton family, the O’Neills, Floods, Irvines, Segerstroms, would physically and culturally shape Orange County into the suburban giant it is today.
But there was always an underclass that made their dreams work.
Tenant farmers — often with roots in Mexico, the Basque country or in California before the American conquest — rented spots on these ranches to graze and grow barley. Others toiled as hands for the landowners.
In the north, they lived in segregated barrios in Santa Ana, Westminster, Anaheim and Garden Grove — where their children attended separate “Mexican schools” until a federal appeals court ruled them unconstitutional in 1947. In the south, they made up smaller communities in El Toro and San Juan Capistrano.
Stephen Rios stands in the doorway of the adobe house in San Juan Capistrano built by his family in 1794.
(Mark Boster / For The Times)
“My tata got killed right there by the train when he was 93 years old,” Stephen Rios said of his grandfather, an American Indian named Mochanai, as he sat in his front garden across from the Mission San Juan Capistrano. “He was a vaquero, a well-known horse trainer.”
Rios’ family worked for the Moultons and O’Neills and lived in the adobe house built in 1794 for their ancestor Feliciano Rios, who came to California as a Spanish soldier and married an American Indian woman.
Rios, an attorney, inherited the home from his father and lives there today. His son’s bedroom has the ceiling boards that the famed bandito Joaquin Murrieta, a family friend known as the Robin Hood of El Dorado, would lift to hide in the attic in the 1850s. A flat-screen TV sits below them now.
The American Indian, Californio and Mexican residents of their dirt street — the oldest neighborhood in California — were conservative. “They loved their families, their church,” he said. “They loved their pieces of land. They were strong, religious independent people.”
Republicans reigned during the rural era. The land barons did not want labor organizers anywhere near their field hands.
When orange pickers walked out of the orchards in 1936, the strikers were arrested and beaten by police and mobs. The Times reported “old vigilante days were revived in the orchards of Orange County yesterday as one man lay near death and scores nursed injuries.”
Changes in Orange County’s 948 square miles — physical, demographic and political — have always rolled from north to south. While the Rios family was still living in the cowboy era, World War II brought rapid transformation to the northern part of the county.
The military needed more West Coast bases to fight the Japanese, and the open space between Long Beach and San Diego was perfect. The government built bases in Seal Beach, Los Alamitos, Santa Ana and El Toro.
Defense contractors and other big manufacturers followed: Hughes Aircraft, Rockwell, Ford Aeronutronic, Boeing, American Electronics, Beckman Instruments.
The farmers and ranchers became developers, or sold their land to other builders, creating vast tracts of homes across the northern end of the county from Huntington Beach to Fullerton. In this era of big cars and backyard barbecues, houses turned inward. Garages replaced porches and picture windows; neighborhoods were quiet.
The newcomers, many from the South and Midwest or white-flighters from Los Angeles, converged at church.
::
At its core, Orange County held a tension between Midwestern traditionalism and California’s drive for reinvention.
The midcentury suburbs in the north were libertarian-leaning enclaves, yet living on Washington defense spending, and listening to a sunny California-bred gospel of self-empowerment and prosperity.
An Iowan named Robert Schuller put out a newspaper ad in 1955, “Come as you are … In the family car!”
He preached from the roof of the snack bar at the Orange Drive-in theater, not about fire and brimstone, but about “possibility thinking” with catchphrases like “Turn your scars into stars.”
Robert Schuller, who delivered a new type of self-healing Gospel to the country, at the new Crystal Cathedral in 1980.
(Tony Barnard / Los Angeles Times)
Schuller’s congregation boomed, becoming one of the nation’s first megachurches. His “Hour of Power” television sermon beamed across the country. In 1980, he built a glass church longer than a football field, the Crystal Cathedral.
Orange County birthed hugely influential ministries that mixed God with conservative politics: Chuck Smith’s Calvary Chapel, Greg Laurie’s Harvest Crusade, Paul and Jan Crouch’s Trinity Broadcasting Network and Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church.
“The megachurches reinforced and marinated the conservatism coming out of the defense plants,” said Fred Smoller, associate professor of political science at Chapman University.
Orange County’s open space and space-age technology, coupled with fervent entrepreneurship and an-edge-of-the-continent mentality, let tinkerers and visionaries experiment with minimal regulation.
This was a suburban county that, like no other, reached deep into popular culture.
Knott’s Berry Farm was the nation’s first theme park. Disneyland became one of the world’s biggest destinations. The ministries reached millions. South Coast Plaza shopping mall would draw more people from around the world than Disneyland. The Irvine ranch grew into the largest planned city in America. Leisure World became the first retirement community.
Leisure World resident Jerry Wyss enjoys the pool in 1999.
(Mark Boster / Los Angeles Times)
In new coastal towns such as Dana Point and San Clemente, Hobie Alter, Gordon “Grubby” Clark and John Severson (living next door to Orange County native Richard Nixon in his “Western White House”) helped create a whole new culture around an ancient Polynesian sport that would become a multibillion-dollar surf industry.
In Laguna Beach, Tom Morey, a Douglas Aircraft composites engineer, invented the bodyboard. In Anaheim, the Van Doren brothers opened the first Vans store.
And the likes of Knott and Anaheim’s Carl Karcher, the founder of Carl’s Jr., would help give America a new brand of conservatism, with their friend John Wayne in Newport Beach to embody it.
With the Cold War at its peak in the 1960s, families in Orange County, so many of them in the military or defense industry, heeded their call.
“At living room bridge clubs, at backyard barbecues, and at kitchen coffee klatches, the middle-class men and women of Orange County ‘awakened’ to what they perceived as the threats of communism and liberalism,” wrote Lisa McGirr, a professor of history at Harvard, in “Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right.” “They became the cutting edge of the conservative movement in the 1960s.”
“The lack of a large organized working class and the near absence of racial minorities made it likely that Orange County’s political rainbow would consist of relatively few colors.”
The quiet homogeneity of the walled and gated communities allowed politicians to exploit fears of the outsider — whether they be African Americans from Los Angeles, immigrants from Mexico, or gays, Muslims and Koreans.
“The anti-minority stuff accelerated political careers here,” said Smoller, the political scientist. “We have a history of sending some real oddballs to Congress.”
An early one was Rep. James Utt, who in 1963 warned about the United Nations training “a large contingent of barefooted Africans” in Georgia to take over the country.
Cementing this conservatism: its daily newspaper, the Register, and its libertarian owner Raymond C. Hoiles. He had once waged war against a measure to improve mental health care in Alaska because he said it was a communist plot to brainwash Americans in concentration camps.
In 1964, Pat Donnelly, a young aerospace engineer working at McDonnell Douglas, bought a small home in Buena Park for $18,500. His neighbor’s first admonition to him: They must help ensure no blacks, Mexicans or Catholics moved in.
Donnelly was a Catholic, and even worse, a union-card-carrying Democrat who once played guitar and banjo in a touring folk band. He and his wife had two girls and joined the St. Pius V Church on Orangethorpe Avenue and started a choir. With his own slice of suburbia, he became more concerned about taxes and grew more conservative.
“I didn’t like some of the stuff I was seeing in the cities, the drugs and crime. It seemed like people were abusing welfare. I was paying for that.”
He switched parties and never looked back.
After Orange County’s favorite candidate Barry Goldwater lost to President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964, Republican rainmakers turned their attention to Reagan’s run for governor. His first political fundraiser was at a home in Anaheim, and the county would nurture his ambitions the rest of his career.
By the 1970s, developers had reached deep into south Orange County. The Irvine Co. had wound down its cattle operations and was parceling out its 185 square miles of land. Some 1,500 acres near Newport Beach would become UC Irvine. The company developed a master plan for a city to grow around the university, which would incorporate in 1971.
The Moultons sold their land soon after to developers who would build Laguna Hills, Laguna Woods, Laguna Niguel and Aliso Viejo. In their yards, homeowners would find rattlesnakes that wandered out of the wild canyons and steep hillsides between subdivisions.
To the east and south, the O’Neills’ vast scrubby land would give way to even newer, posher cities such as Rancho Santa Margarita, Ladera Ranch and the community of Coto de Caza — the setting for the “Real Housewives of Orange County.”
With all this construction, Stephen Rios’ 225-year-old adobe home is hemmed in by suburbia.
The “Los Rios District” is now on the National Register of Historic Places and is highly sought-after real estate for its quaint atmosphere.
Most of the old Californio families sold and moved on.
“Everyone else wants to live here now,” Rios said.
Jared Mathis, left, and Scott T. Barnes stand off the trail in the Aliso and Wood Canyon Wilderness looking over the 22,000 acres that their great-grandparents bought in the 1890s.
(Mark Boster / For The Times)
Lewis Moulton’s great-grandson, Jared Mathis, came back from a job back east to Laguna Hills to manage the family’s remaining holdings. A few years ago, he took his dad — who moved away in the 1970s — for a drive to look at the old ranch where he grew up.
But his father couldn’t get his bearings. All the landmarks were gone, the hills terraced, new trees and houses blocked once wide views. “They say they moved more dirt building Aliso Viejo than they did digging the Panama Canal,” Mathis said.
Mathis drove his father to the ridgeline of Laguna Beach. From there, you could see the whole ranch area, smell the laurel sumac in Aliso Canyon, glimpse some old corrals in the distance, get a grip of the topography. The white striations of terraced neighborhoods faded in the haze. The twin peaks of Modjeska and Santiago, called Old Saddleback, framed the view, as they did in most of the county, one thing that never changed.
“He could see where they had the old roundups,” he said. “That was a powerful image for him.”
As development moved south, the older, northern parts of the county lost some of their luster. The affluent white Republicans drifted to the shinier places depicted in shows such as “The O.C.”
The explosion in South County home construction created thousands of jobs. “The people building all of those houses were Latino,” said Smoller, the political science professor. Like the old tenant farmers, they helped families such as the Irvines realize their dreams.
Thousands of other Latinos would follow to work in service jobs in these wealthy new areas.
The humming economy overall and good schools also lured professional and middle-class Latinos to the northern neighborhoods that Anglos were leaving in their migration south.
In Santa Ana in the 1970s, the population of Latinos went from 40,000 to 90,000. Today, Latinos account for 78% of Santa Ana’s population. Northwest Orange County looks a lot like Southeast L.A. County. La Habra is 57% Latino; Anaheim, 52%; Buena Park, 40%; Garden Grove, 37%.
The other big factor that brought demographic change was seeded 53 years ago, when the federal government removed racist quotas on immigrants from Asia, and Greater Los Angeles became a major destination for Koreans and Chinese.
In 1975, after Saigon fell, 50,000 South Vietnamese landed in nearby Camp Pendleton, and conservative Orange County stepped up to take the anti-communist refugees.
The Register called on churches and citizens to sponsor these newcomers. They were put up in apartments in neglected parts of Westminster and Garden Grove still surrounded by bean fields.
Soon the fields and dilapidated commercial strips gave way to bustling places such as Saigon Market and Hoa Binh Market, ushering in a wave of new Vietnamese businesses that would revitalize the area.
Frank Jao started off in America selling Kirby vacuum cleaners in Whittier. Within a year, he moved to Garden Grove, became a real estate agent, then developer, first building a shopping mall in Westminster with the help of Chinese investors.
So many Vietnamese storefronts were opening in Westminster, changing its look so rapidly, that more than 100 residents signed a petition calling for the city to stop issuing business licenses. It was an ugly time.
“Anyone driving on Bolsa would more than occasionally be confronted by drivers who rolled down their windows and asked us to roll down ours, and they’d give us the middle finger,” recalled Jao, now 70. “When we’d go to work in the morning, we’d find the windows shot out by BB guns.”
His buildings became the core of Little Saigon, notably its landmark Asian Garden Mall. His company built $400 million worth of shopping centers and apartment buildings throughout Orange County and beyond.
Upscale Chinese families took to Irvine. Many had left China because of the lack of opportunities for their children to attend college, and this master-planned community, built around UC Irvine, was a huge draw, as it was to moderately affluent Koreans, Iranians and Latinos. Irvine is nearly 40% Asian now.
Koreans had begun trickling in from Los Angeles during the 1980s, seeking better schools. The 1992 Los Angeles riots, in which many Korean store owners lost their businesses, sped up the flow. They often stuck close together, moving into specific neighborhoods in Garden Grove, Fullerton and Buena Park.
The Asian influx has also contributed to the reordering of politics in once reliably Republican Orange County.
As a whole, Asian Americans are more likely to register as “no party preference” and vote based on specific issues, not party, said Karthick Ramakrishnan, a professor of political science and public policy at UC Riverside. They leaned Republican during the Reagan era and well into the 1990s while subsequent generations moved to the left.
“About one-third of Asian Americans voted for Clinton in 1992,” Ramakrishnan said, “but two-thirds voted for Obama in 2008.”
He said in the last five years strong GOP outreach to the community in Orange County — and encouragement of Asian Americans to run for office — has brought many back to the party. But Ramakrishnan said too many factors are at play to say how they will vote on Tuesday. An example: They don’t like Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric, but Vietnamese, Taiwanese and Koreans like his confrontational stance toward China.
In Buena Park, Pat Donnelly, still a Republican, met a Korean American estate attorney named Sunny Park — a Democrat — at his Lion’s Club. He came to realize she had values he admired: honesty, a family focus, strong work ethic. Now he’s campaigning for her as she runs for City Council.
Park had followed her aging Korean clients from Los Angeles, moving into the affluent and increasingly Korean Bellehurst neighborhood. When she knocks on doors, many white people have offered support. But some have grumbled “No Koreans” and shut the door in her face.
A couple weeks ago, she started seeing campaign signs that said “No Sunny Park, Carpetbagger.”
She says the message that sends the Korean community is that she — and by extension they — are not from here and they shouldn’t try to take part in politics.
The political dynamic in Orange County is not so much a rising blue tide, but an ebbing red one. Since 1999, registered Democrats rose by less than 2 percentage points to 33.6%, while Republicans have fallen 14 points to 35.6% of voters. The wave is of independent voters who increased in numbers nearly as much as the Republicans fell.
A majority of Latinos vote Democrat, and growth in their community has buoyed the party. While they tend to be more socially conservative, they favor more lenient immigration policies, social programs that help the poor, strong unions and high minimum wages.
Historically, turnout has not matched their share of the population, but some Republican strategists fear Trump’s derogatory comments about Mexican and Central American immigrants might motivate them this year.
In 1996, the anti-immigrant rhetoric surrounding Proposition 187 helped end the ultra-right Orange County Republican Bob Dornan’s political career, and put Democrat Loretta Sanchez in Congress.
Just like the development, the diversity and Democratic edge are pushing south in this county of 3.2 million people.
In 2002, Democrats outnumbered Republicans only in Santa Ana, Buena Park and Stanton. Now they do in 11 cities reaching down to Irvine.
In Laguna Niguel, Candy Antone, 47, said Democrats such as her essentially lived in the closet until recently. She would go quiet when a Republican friend or neighbor would go on a political rant. “You just had to bite your lip,” she said.
But Trump is repelling even many Republicans here. “Democrats are coming out of the woodwork,” Antone said. “People we’ve known for years, we’re just finding out they’re Democrats.”
We’re living under a dark cloud, with a steady downpour of graft, thuggery and baloney.
There’s the raffling of presidential pardons and the attacks on reporters for doing their jobs, the clownish trade war with Canada, the bungled disaster in Iran, the petty obsessions with the ballroom and the Kennedy Center, the hogwash about a stolen election, the attacks on immigrants and the shameless presidential profiteering while working people suffer the cost of Trump’s countless broken promises.
I could go on, and I will. But rest assured, I have not forgotten about the boost I promised.
For all the affronts, nothing strikes me as more sinister than the Trump administration’s ambitious assault on the planet. Despite nearly daily headlines about the global calamity of overheated oceans, melting glaciers, stark weather transformations and species extinction, Trump keeps shoveling more coal onto a fire that will rage long after he’s dead and gone.
He’s gutted environmental protections and scientific research and dismantled clean energy initiatives. Now his administration is rolling back limits on power plant emissions, attempting to open the California coast to more oil drilling and sabotaging the state’s ambitious goals on emission controls and electric vehicle conversion.
We don’t need AI to threaten the future of humanity. We’ve got Trump.
It’s tempting to duck under the covers and wait for the nightmare to end, but the good news is that a lot of people are standing up rather than rolling over, rebelling against the ignorance and callous disregard that threatens our most precious and fragile shared inheritance.
In August, hundreds showed up to defend California’s authority to govern its own coast at a Santa Monica hearing of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency, and 18,000 more people filed comments online.
The rollback of environmental safeguards is, for many, a call to arms.
“Yes, I am discouraged. … But I am not despairing,” said Bill McKibben, an author and environmental activist who is organizing a worldwide event called Sun Day for next year to promote clean energy. “We’re reacting to multiple crises, and we’re led by a pack of fools, so why would anybody not stand up?”
McKibben launched a national movement five years ago called Third Act, and tens of thousands of people 60 and older have signed on to advocate for climate action, voting rights and civic participation. Third Act now operates in about 30 states, with a robust chapter in Southern California.
Former Times reporter Zan Dubin has worked as both a volunteer and a paid communications consultant for Third Act, and I asked her what someone could expect to do if they became a member of Third Act/SoCal.
Environmentalist and author Bill McKibben is organizing a worldwide event called Sun Day next year to promote clean energy.
(Amanda Swinhart / Associated Press)
“We do it all,” Dubin said, from promoting climate-friendly candidates to running phone banks and testifying at public meetings. She said Third Act co-sponsors protests at Dodger Stadium, and she and others planned to meet at Vin Scully Avenue and Stadium Way for Sunday’s game against the San Francisco Giants. They want the Dodgers to stop doing business with Big Oil and bench their sponsorship deal with Phillips 66.
She also called out Disneyland for its exhaust-spewing Autopia attraction, along with former Times climate columnist Sammy Roth, and Disneyland responded by announcing in 2024 that it was switching to electric cars beginning in 2027.
Dubin, co-founder of National Drive Electric Week, said 170 volunteer-led events were being held nationwide over the next month to promote EVs, and she was leading one Friday in Irvine.
“Action is absolutely the antidote to despair,” Dubin said. “I find that despite the onslaught of these horrifying headlines … taking action invigorates me.”
Claremont resident Margaret Davis knows that feeling. She emailed me in 2023, prior to participating in a Third Act event, and said many retirees have time on their hands, which puts them in a powerful position.
“The climate crisis is the greatest existential threat humans have ever faced, hence we live in a time when we can make the greatest change for the better,” Davis wrote at the time.
When I called her a few days ago, Davis told me she’s now a member of Senior Stewards Acting for the Environment. She lives at Pilgrim Place — a senior community with a focus on justice, peace and environment — where residents meet regularly to study, discuss and advocate for sustainability, biodiversity and environmental causes.
“When I was in college in 1970, we had the antiwar movement and that was the first year of Earth Day,” Davis said. “At the time, I thought Earth Day was just a distraction from what was going on in the world.”
Later, she said, “I came to realize it was the biggest issue of all time.”
Climate activist Sim Bilal stands next to pumps at an oil field in Los Angeles in 2024.
(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)
Like Davis, I went to college in the ‘70s, and there’s no denying that our aggressively consumptive generation played a key role in manufacturing a crisis for our children and grandchildren. We’ve got matches in our hands and smoke on the horizon, and if we’re honest with ourselves, we’d see atonement not as a hobby, but as a duty.
As for the next generation, climate activist Sim Bilal, 24, said he too shares the sense that this is both a wickedly frightening time and a moment of opportunity.
“In the last month, we’ve gotten more young people involved,” said Bilal, executive director of Youth Climate Stewards 4 Local Action. “We usually have to reach out to them, but so many people have been wanting to get involved, and they’re so eager, and that’s been affirming for me. The policies are depressing, but the fact that people are reenergized and want to fight back is really exciting.”
Bilal said faith in politics, government and corporations is not high among his peers, but he’s trying to grow a network of young people to cultivate and support future leaders.
“A mentor told me there are two kinds of power — organized people, and organized money,” said Bilal, whose activism began when his grandmother died and he began wondering if her cancer, and global warming, were connected to the oil drilling in his South L.A. neighborhood. “We don’t have the money, but a lot of the work we do is political and civic education, demystifying power, and making people understand they have agency.”
