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Do you remember what you were doing when the infamous L.A. City Hall racist audio leak scandal broke four years ago?

I always will: I was naked.

Sunday morning, Oct. 9, 2022, around 8 a.m., I was about to take a shower when I decided to check my cellphone one more time. Thank God I did: If I hadn’t, I would’ve been half an hour late on assisting in one of the most explosive stories ever to hit L.A. politics.

Via Slack, Times assistant managing editor Steve Clow asked if I could serve as a second set of ears on audio that my colleagues had unearthed involving four of the most powerful L.A. políticos at the time: City Council President Nury Martinez, Councilmembers Gil Cedillo and Kevin de León, and L.A. County Federation of Labor President Ron Herrera. I was still in my birthday suit (sorry for the visual, gentle readers, but I’m sworn to report the facts on this job) when I played the snippet Clow shared: Martinez describing the Black son of then-Councilmember Mike Bonin as “su negrito” — his darky.

I put on my shorts and told my wife I wouldn’t be helping at her restaurant that day.

Clow sent me more clips over the next hour, each crasser than the other — I remember gasping audibly at the part when the four were laughing as Martinez referred to Oaxacans as “ugly.” That morning, my colleagues Benjamin Oreskes, Dakota Smith, Julia Wick and David Zahniser published their first story on the fiasco, which turned out to be a secretly recorded conversation from a year earlier that someone had posted on Reddit just the day before.

The scandal quickly became a national sensation, with even then-President Joe Biden weighing in. L.A. wretched in collective disgust and demanded action, which definitely came: Martinez and Herrera quickly resigned, while Cedillo — who had already lost his reelection bid — would stay on until his bitter end, and De León wouldn’t leave until challenger Ysabel Jurado destroyed him in his 2024 reelection bid. The electoral repercussions of the audio leak can still be felt four years later in this election, as Nithya Raman stages a strong challenge against incumbent Karen Bass — a sentence no one would’ve believed in the fall of 2022, when Bass was on the cusp of winning her first term, and Raman was the lone democratic socialist on the council.

I would’ve figured the anniversary of something as titanic as all of the above would’ve sparked more commemorations than just my columna this week. Nope! L.A. has moved on to the point that Cedillo wasn’t booted from a group photo that included current District 9 council candidate Jose Ugarte, former Assemblymember Wendy Carrillo, former Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and current Assemblymember Mark Gonzalez — because even Chicanosauruses can survive a political asteroid, I guess?

Having political leaders spew racist, homophobic nonsense now seems like the good ol’ days in an era where infernos destroy or stink up swaths of L.A., immigration agents terrorize immigrants from Westwood to the Eastside, and a spokesperson for a sitting American president denies that the commander in chief suggested Iran bomb the City of Angels, even though he said it during a campaign rally.

I shouldn’t really be surprised, I guess: L.A. infamously loves to forget its own history. But I would urge all you readers to read the great, Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage my colleagues did in the aftermath of the audio leak scandal, because it captured the city at its worst — but also its finest as residents fought back and demanded politicians do better.

Four years later, we can only hope this upcoming election shows more of the same.

The week’s biggest stories

Domenic Hix looks back as a large wave crashes on the shoreline in Laguna Beach on Friday.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

Tropical Storm Rachel in SoCal

California real estate

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In memoriam

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(Illustrations by Lindsey Made This; photograph by Charles Phoenix)

Today’s recipe

(Rebecca Peloquin / For The Times)

This recipe makes apple butter that is less sweet than most; use more sugar if you like, but don’t use less or there won’t be enough to properly preserve the pureed apples.

Photo of the day

(Stephanie Breijo / Los Angeles Times)

Games

Here’s today’s mini crossword, plus our other free, daily crossword puzzle, sudoku, word search and jigsaw games.

Have a great day, from the Essential California team

Jack Dolan, investigative reporter
Hugo Martín, assistant editor, fast break desk
Kevinisha Walker, multiplatform editor
Andrew Campa, weekend writer
Karim Doumar, head of newsletters

How can we make this newsletter more useful? Send comments to essentialcalifornia@latimes.com. Check our top stories, topics and the latest articles on latimes.com.

WASHINGTON — President Trump told a crowd in Texas on Wednesday night that he would not allow Iran to attack San Diego or Los Angeles, a comment that came two days after he made off-the-cuff remarks suggesting the West Coast cities could be struck.

“You want to see a horror show? You want to see problems? Let them hit San Diego, let them hit Los Angeles,” Trump said at a rally. He then assured the crowd: “We are not going to let that happen. We protect our cities. We protect our country.”

The San Antonio crowd cheered the remarks.

Trump’s decision to return to the subject capped two days in which the White House had been on the defensive, and it appeared aimed at tamping down the fallout from remarks he made Monday night that quickly spread online.

Speaking to a crowd in Nebraska, Trump had said: “They can take out a city, let them take out Los Angeles, let them take out San Diego. This is a very small price to pay.”

The comments drew swift condemnation from California leaders, even as the White House communications director, Steven Cheung, insisted the president’s remarks had been taken out of context.

“The media freakout over President Trump’s comments is not rooted in reality,” Cheung wrote Tuesday. “He was clearly stating U.S. cities would have been threatened if a nuclear Iran hadn’t been stopped. America is safer because of the president. Iran has no nuclear, no navy, no air force, and no money.”

But the remarks were enough to rattle many in California and drew backlash from the state’s leaders, including Republican Jim Desmond, a Navy veteran running in a highly competitive U.S. House race.

“I vehemently disagree with President Trump’s comments,” Desmond wrote on social media. “America must stand up to Iran and defend our interests, but the first responsibility of our Commander in Chief is to protect the American people and our homeland.”

Gov. Gavin Newsom on Tuesday opened the state emergency operations center to assess potential threats following Trump’s remarks. San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass also condemned the president for potentially compromising the safety of their cities.

“San Diego is not collateral damage,” Gloria posted on social media. “We are not expendable. And we are never a ‘small price to pay.’ Keep our city out of your reckless war talk.”

I went to bed at a decent hour Monday night and got a pretty good sleep.

I woke up refreshed Tuesday morning, only to see the news that President Trump seemed to have told a crowd in Nebraska that it wouldn’t be such a bad thing if Iran attacked Southern California.

“Let ’em take out Los Angeles. Let ’em take out San Diego,” he said in a typically meandering speech, perhaps trying to justify a war he has repeatedly claimed is keeping the U.S. safe, even as gas prices have spiked. “This is a very small price to pay.”

The Nebraska crowd cheered.

California electeds scolded.

“San Diego is not collateral damage,” said San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria.

Such “dangerous” remarks could “potentially compromise our safety,” said L.A. Mayor Karen Bass.

“He is deranged and dangerous,” said Gov. Gavin Newsom.

President Trump throws a pen into the crowd after he signed an executive order during a campaign rally at Pinnacle Bank Expo Center in Grand Island, Neb., on Oct. 5, 2026.

(Kent Nishimura / AFP via Getty Images)

About 8 a.m., I took my dog Philly out for our morning walk. This is usually a lovely time for us. I clear my head. For Philly, a 3-year-old beagle, these are essentially business trips.

I got to thinking about the similarities in the daily routines of Philly and the president of the United States.

The thing is, I carry bags with me and clean up after Philly. The president to my knowledge has nobody on his staff doing this. We are at a point in American politics at which we must consider posting signs, everywhere Trump travels, that say, “Please Curb Your President.”

Not that it would be easy to clean Trump’s daily messes. You’d need the equivalent of those parade attendants in overalls who run along behind the horses with shovels.

The White House does not use poop bags. Instead, it uses denial and spin.

Critical reactions to Trump’s Nebraska comments were “not rooted in reality,” said White House Director of Communications Steven Cheung, who claimed Trump was misrepresented.

We’ve got to respect Cheung’s opinion. Does anyone in the world have more experience when it comes to analyzing comments not rooted in reality?

Some of you may know there are two topics I often revisit in my column. One is the effects, good and bad, of aging. The other is failure of leadership.

So I feel eminently qualified to psychoanalyze the president.

I don’t mean to generalize, but as people age, it’s not unusual for them to undergo behavioral changes. Some folks mellow, they abide, they lean into the ride. Others can become churlish, combative or grouchy.

Not only is Trump the poster boy for the latter group, but as things go wrong, he becomes more obstinate.

And things have definitely gone wrong.

The war in Iran is a disaster. The president is personally responsible for rising gas prices. He’s ruined the economy with his tariffs. He’s picked a fight with Canada. He may cost his party the House and the Senate because his almost daily outrages have pumped oxygen back into the blood of long-slumping Democrats.

A normal person would have the good sense to scale back or shrink away.

President Trump at the campaign rally at Pinnacle Bank Expo Center on the Nebraska State Fairgrounds on Oct. 5, 2026, in Grand Island, Neb.

(Win McNamee / Getty Images)

Trump keeps doubling down, wants to put his name on everything, and lashes out the way someone does when it’s not clear what’s bigger — their ego or their insecurity.

I’ve been to Nebraska, by the way. Nice place, met a lot of lovely people.

I enjoy corn, on or off the cob.

Popcorn. Caramel corn.

Not wild about “Children of the Corn,” the slasher movie based on Stephen King’s short story. But thank you very much, Nebraska, for Fred Astaire, Johnny Carson and Henry Fonda, who, by the way, was born in Grand Island, where Trump made his cracks Monday about California.

Did it occur to any of the shuckers who cheered Trump’s throwaway line about an attack on San Diego and L.A. that:

A: It wasn’t funny.

B: San Diego has one of the nation’s largest military installations, with thousands of personnel currently deployed to the Middle East because of the war in Iran.

C: Maybe we should expect more from someone serving as president and commander in chief.

In defending Trump, the White House said news outlets had misunderstood and misrepresented the president’s comments in what amounted to a “media freakout.” A White House media post singled out an L.A. Times post that said Trump suggested “letting Iran take out” L.A. and San Diego.

“No, he didn’t, you buffoons,” said the White House. “He was saying the U.S. is fighting to STOP Iran from having the ability to take out LA and San Diego with a nuclear weapon — which they would if they had the chance.”

Please.

This buffoon would like to point out that this is yet another case of Trump using California as a punching bag to prop up support for the war and nail down what’s left of his diminishing base. But even some of his longtime disciples know that he has said on dozens of occasions that the war had ended, was ending, or had been won, and not once were any of those words rooted in reality.

It’s not clear whether we’re any safer in the U.S. as a result of the war, although it is clear that we have paid with lives and higher costs.

So maybe a gratuitous and unfunny line about anyone taking out American cities is better left unsaid.

I’m fresh out of muzzles, but I do have extra poop bags.

steve.lopez@latimes.com

Every fall, I teach a Latino History of Orange County course at Chapman University — from the Portola expedition all the way to Huntington Beach’s MAGA Latina councilmember, Gracey Van Der Mark. The lecture last week focused on how anti-Mexican politics have always worked in Orange County and usually go on to be copied nationwide.

I usually, sadly, have to update this lecture every year because the lowlights just keep coming. That’s why this time around, one of my PowerPoint slides ended with “2026: Anaheim?”.

Haven’t you heard? A lawsuit accuses Anaheim mayor Ashleigh Aitken of calling her chief of staff a “dirty Mexican.”

Stay classy, O.C.!

TimesOC writer (and my fellow Anaheimer) Gabriel San Román first reported on the allegation last month. He revealed that a lawyer for Aitken’s chief of staff Berenice Ballinas was seeking mediation from the city after his client suffered a “sustained pattern of harassment, discriminatory treatment and, most recently, retaliation” while doing her job. A legal claim filed soon after offered pages of alleged incidents detailing what Ballinas claimed she had to deal with when her boss supposedly had too much to drink while on city business.

It’s an ugly read, with incidents at Disneyland’s Club 33, Angel Stadium and other Anaheim landmarks. Yet no passage is more damning — yet more Orange County — than when Ballinas claimed Aitken once called her a “dirty Mexican” in front of then-city attorney Jim Vanderpool and said another time that the mayor didn’t want “a Mexican” like Ballinas to drive her car while Aitken was supposedly what the British satirical magazine Private Eye would call “tired and emotional.”

The mayor, a Democrat who’s running for reelection, has denied the explosive charge in an official statement and during a recent council meeting. And yet the allegation against her now enters Orange County’s long, sad spectrum of anti-Mexican political history.

Just part of the list: Proposition 187. Poll guards. Trying to give local police immigration-enforcement powers. When then-Orange County supervisor Ronald Caspers called a group of Mexican American county employees who demanded promotions “bandidos” during a 1972 supervisors meeting, then suggested the supes move the county seat away from Santa Ana because the city “does not have a normal ethnic balance” — in other words, it was too Mexican.

Or how about when a Newport Beach council member, Dick Nichols, opined during a 2003 council meeting that he opposed expanding the grassy areas of Corona del Mar State Beach because Mexicans “claim it as theirs, and it becomes their personal, private ground all day”? (Asked to apologize, Nichols doubled down by saying, “Where the hell am I in any way discriminating or being a bigot by making a statement that is blatantly true?”)

My hometown is not exempt from this sad parade. Anaheim’s schools, parks and swimming pool were segregated until the 1950s. In 1999, the Anaheim Union High School District board of trustees voted to sue Mexico for $50 million for educating the children of undocumented immigrants (The Times’ write-up was the first time I appeared in the paper, although the writer misspelled my last name).

Why all the O.C. anti-Mexican hate? You’ll have to enroll in my Chapman class for the full explanation. But the main reason is that Mexicans have long functioned as O.C.’s demonized minority. When millions of O.C. residents have grown up believing the powers that be that all Mexicans do is work low-paying jobs and underachieve in life, no wonder politicians bash them again and again — and no wonder many Anaheim residents aren’t giving Aitken the benefit of the doubt.

On Friday, the Anaheim City Council announced after a closed session that it would launch an independent investigation into Ballinas’ allegations. Aitken had an eventful Friday of her own. She admitted on Instagram that she has an “unhealthy relationship” with alcohol and sighed to CBS Los Angeles that Ballinas was “somebody who I thought was my right-hand person.” And while local activists have demanded she resign, O.C.’s ascending liberal machine isn’t asking for her head the way they would’ve if it were a Republican official: Mayor Anaheim gave the opening remarks at the Orange County Labor Federation’s annual Solidarity Awards gala on Friday night to cheers.

Stay classy, O.C.!

The week’s biggest stories

Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton visits patrons at Victorio’s Ristorante in North Hollywood, where a watch party was held for the CNN governor’s race debate Wednesday night.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

California politics

• A sexually suggestive ad from Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton has drawn millions of views — and condemnation from allies on the right and Democrats.
• Latino voters have shifted away from Karen Bass in the L.A. mayor’s race, according to a new poll.
• The poll’s findings contrast the results of the June 2 primary, in which Bass carried 35 Latino-majority neighborhoods compared with Raman’s seven.

Helicopter tragedy

Paramount-Warner Bros. merger

• David Ellison said the merged Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery will be called Skydance — the moniker he picked nearly two decades ago when he began building his Hollywood empire.
• Although the name of the corporate parent will change, the two historic studios will continue to operate under their names.
• As Ellison names his new empire, the message is clear: He owns Hollywood, writes news and culture critic Mary McNamara.

More news

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Things to do

Retro candies, zombie-themed chips, ghost-branded coffee and large-scale movie characters can all be found at the Horror Boodega snack shop in Burbank.

(Stephanie Breijo / Los Angeles Times)

Today’s recipe

(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)

For culinary content producer Owen Han, his nonna’s recipe for meatballs is as classic as they come. She does not brown the meatballs but instead poaches them in the copious tomato sauce (she called it salsa di pomodoro, or sugo, but you might know it as marinara) so they are extra tender.

Photo of the day

(Nava Rawls / Los Angeles Times)

Games

Here’s today’s mini crossword, plus our other free, daily crossword puzzle, sudoku, word search and jigsaw games.

Have a great day, from the Essential California team

Jack Dolan, investigative reporter
Hugo Martín, assistant editor, fast break desk
Kevinisha Walker, multiplatform editor
Andrew Campa, weekend writer
Karim Doumar, head of newsletters

How can we make this newsletter more useful? Send comments to essentialcalifornia@latimes.com. Check our top stories, topics and the latest articles on latimes.com.

Conceived by owner Heidi Ledger as a showcase for small independent makers, including women in particular, Thread Spun is a sunny, inviting retail space offering fair trade apparel, home goods, accessories and gifts from around the world.

Inside, you’ll find plenty of great gifts for others — or yourself — including Los Angeles women-owned brands such as Amente clothing, Flowerhead Tea, hand-poured candles from Roen Candle Co. and Jessica Gonzalez’s playful asparagus-shaped candles for Happy Organics.

Grab a cold drink while you shop — visiting on a hot day, I appreciated that they offered refrigerated drinks for sale — while perusing a wide assortment of cards, books, apothecary gifts and jewelry.

The boutique also offers creative workshops for the local community on the back patio, including sewing, upcycling, journaling and, fittingly, the art of making sun catchers to brighten your home.

Around Encinitas: The boutique opened here in 2020, right next to 101 Piercing, Child of Wild jewelry and Leucadia Floral and Plant, known for its great selection of houseplants and fresh flowers. If you head farther down North Coast Highway 101, you’ll find plenty of restaurants, surf shops and coffee houses, including the longtime favorite, Pannikin Coffee and Tea.

It’s a day and night to celebrate women in sports.

MaxPreps is hosting an 18-team flag football tournament in San Diego. No. 1 JSerra is competing.

In the evening, Nike has flown in a custom-made outdoor volleyball court so Sherman Oaks Notre Dame can host Harvard-Westlake in a 7 p.m. girls’ volleyball match played on the Notre Dame baseball field. There will be food trucks, music and other surprises.

There’s also the Venice girls volleyball tournament taking place at Venice High and the Woodbridge Classic cross-country meet at the Great Park in Irvine.

This is a daily look at the positive happenings in high school sports. To submit any news, please email eric.sondheimer@latimes.com.