Trek

Donald Trump says he can be the first Republican presidential nominee to win California since 1988, but his rhetoric on immigration, the environment and guns risks pushing the strongly Democratic state even further out of his reach.

In recent travels across the state, Trump has shown no inclination to modulate his language the way nominees normally do as they turn from their party’s primary toward a wider general-election audience.

Instead, he has emphasized positions that are not only out of step with independents and Democrats whose support he would need to carry California, but also with many fellow Republicans in the state.

“He’s reinforcing all of the negative stereotypes of the Republican brand that have been hurting us for 20 years, which is a peculiar approach to putting California back in play,” said Mike Madrid, a Republican campaign consultant in Sacramento.

At rallies in Anaheim, San Diego, Sacramento, San Jose and Redding over the last week, Trump has riled up overwhelmingly white crowds with his call to build a wall along the southern border and force Mexico to pay for it.

“It’s going to be a big, fat, beautiful wall!” Trump shouted to cheering supporters Thursday night in San Jose.

More than 7 in 10 Californians oppose building a border wall, according to a poll last month by the Public Policy Institute of California.

Though Republicans favored the proposal, they are a sharply diminished force in California elections, thanks largely to a GOP hard line on illegal immigration that has turned away the state’s growing Latino and Asian population. The party’s share of California voters has slid to 27%.

In San Diego last week, Trump deepened his trouble with Latinos as he attacked the judge overseeing a fraud lawsuit against Trump University, his defunct real estate program, calling the judge a Mexican and saying, “I think that’s fine.”

He went further Thursday and Friday, saying the ethnic heritage of U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel, who was born in Indiana to Mexican immigrants, made it a conflict of interest for him to handle the case. “He’s a Mexican,” Trump told CNN. “We’re building a wall between here and Mexico.”

Bill Carrick, a veteran California strategist running the U.S. Senate campaign of Democrat Loretta Sanchez, called the initial remark “blatantly racist” and “blatantly stupid.”

“It just makes it harder for him to have any appeal to Latino voters at all – and a lot of other voters,” Carrick said.

Republican leaders have voiced similar concerns on a national scale. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said Thursday that he worries Trump might drive Latinos from the Republican Party the way GOP nominee Barry Goldwater did with blacks after opposing the Civil Rights Act during the 1964 presidential race.

McConnell, who has endorsed Trump, told CNN that Trump made a “big mistake” last week by attacking Republican Gov. Susana Martinez of New Mexico, the nation’s first Latina governor.

Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks did not respond to a request for comment.

Trump can be deft about calibrating his rhetoric at times, routinely muting some of his more controversial positions.

Apart from answering reporters’ questions, Trump rarely discusses his support for barring Muslims from entering the U.S., punishing doctors who perform abortions, overturning the Supreme Court ruling that legalized same-sex marriage, and deporting millions of immigrants in the country illegally.

Trump also refuses to answer questions about his demand in 2011 that President Obama release his birth certificate to prove he was born in the U.S.

And he rarely talks about his belief that climate change is a hoax, a topic he often raised on Twitter in the years before his run for president – and one that could cause him trouble in California.

On the eve of his California visit last week, Trump told a petroleum conference in North Dakota that he would withdraw the United States from the landmark Paris treaty to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

“In a Trump administration, political activists with extreme agendas will no longer write the rules,” he said.

But 8 in 10 Californians, including half of Republicans, viewed global warming as a serious threat to the state’s economy and quality of life, a Public Policy Institute survey found last year. And nearly two-thirds of Californians supported the state making its own policies separate from the federal government to address global warming.

At his California rallies, Trump has steered clear of climate change. But in Fresno, he mocked environmentalists, saying their misguided efforts “to protect a certain kind of 3-inch fish” were depriving farmers of sorely needed water.

It was a sharp break with the custom of California Republicans to use support for environmental protections to appeal to Democrats and the independents who side with them in most statewide elections.

The state’s last Republican governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, made efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions a cornerstone of his 2006 reelection campaign. Schwarzenegger also broke with conservatives in his party on immigration, supporting a path to citizenship for many of those in the country illegally.

When he was first elected in the 2003 recall election, Schwarzenegger also had advantages Trump will not: Most Californians thought the state was moving in the wrong direction, and they strongly disapproved of its Democratic leadership.

“That’s not the mood in California now,” said pollster Mark Baldassare, president of the Public Policy Institute of California.

Trump’s staunch opposition to gun control could also pose problems in the state, where polls have found most voters believe in stronger restrictions on access to firearms. At all of his campaign stops here, Trump has touted his endorsement by the National Rifle Assn. and accused his presumed Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, of trying to abolish the 2nd Amendment.

“We’re going to keep our guns — don’t worry about it,” Trump told the crowd in Sacramento. “You need them.”

Beth Miller, a Republican campaign consultant in Sacramento, frets that Trump could cause long-term harm to GOP candidates in California who embrace his candidacy.

“It could potentially backfire for years to come,” she said. “I think there are going to be a lot of Republican candidates who are going to have to very delicately distance themselves from Donald Trump’s rhetoric.”

As for Trump himself, his prospects in California are grim, according to the latest USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times poll. It found that 71% of California voters had an unfavorable impression of him, and Clinton would beat him in a hypothetical November match up by 26 points.

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Twitter: @finneganLAT

UPDATES:

June 3, 5:41 p.m.: This article was updated with additional remarks by Trump.

June 2, 8:09 p.m.: This article was updated with a quote from Trump in San Jose.

Tech scion David Ellison and his leadership team at Paramount sent a message to Hollywood: A new era is underway.

Nearly a week after taking the keys to the battered media company, Ellison and his top executives met with reporters at the Paramount Pictures lot Wednesday to show that they mean business.

Ellison and his team will be based in Hollywood — not New York — and they plan to view the entertainment industry through a California lens by making big investments, leaning into technology and building on popular franchises, including “Top Gun,” “Star Trek” and “Yellowstone.”

Last week, Ellison’s Skydance Media and its backer RedBird Capital Partners closed their $8-billion takeover of the firm that includes CBS, Comedy Central, MTV Networks, Showtime and the Melrose Avenue movie studio.

“One of our biggest priorities is actually restoring Paramount as the No. 1 destination for the most talented artists and filmmakers in the world,” Ellison said. “Very simply, great filmmakers make great movies.”

Such a Paramount comeback would be long overdue.

The film studio has suffered from decades of under-investment, and was often bypassed by many of Hollywood’s biggest filmmakers. The studio plans to release eight films next year, but that’s too small an output to sustain a theatrical film business, Paramount executives said.

The plan is to nearly double the number of feature films to 15 and, and eventually, 20 movies a year.

Ellison, the 42-year-old chairman and chief executive, was eager to bury his days of being a political target, following the lengthy regulatory review of the deal and President Trump’s lawsuit against CBS for its edits of a “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris last fall. Paramount settled the lawsuit last month, agreeing to pay $16 million.

Days later, CBS notified Stephen Colbert that it was ending his late-night talk show in May — prompting howls among some fans and raising speculation the show was sacrificed to appease Trump. CBS has said the decision was “purely” based on economics; the show has been losing money.

Programming will be created with broad audiences in mind, Ellison and his lieutenants said. Ellison said his goal is to move the company away from political divisions in an effort to reach a wider audience.

“One of the things I think is important is I don’t want to politicize this company,” Ellison said. “We’re an entertainment company first, and I genuinely believe if you’re breathing, you’re our audience. We want to be in the business of speaking to everybody.”

For Ellison, movies have been a lifelong interest. He recounted his days growing up when he, his mother and sister would go to the cinema or pick from their extensive home library of video cassette tapes.

He intends to “significantly scale” the amount of content the studio produces and has entrusted his longtime deputy Dana Goldberg and Josh Greenstein, a former Sony executive, as co-chairs of Paramount Pictures. The studio plans to concentrate on key intellectual property such as “Star Trek,” “World War Z” and “Transformers,” with Goldberg saying that “Star Trek” is a priority across the company.

Paramount executives are also interested in filmmaker-driven original films. Late last week, Paramount said it landed an original project called “High Side,” helmed by “A Complete Unknown” director James Mangold, which reunites him with actor Timothée Chalamet.

In addition, Paramount Pictures plans to greenlight family films, with classic movies like “The Goonies,” “Gremlins” and “Night at the Museum” as touchstones, Goldberg said. There’s also interest in R-rated comedies, horror and stories that appeal to Middle America.

Paramount has no plans to crank out low-cost films for its Paramount+ streaming platform, said Cindy Holland, the new head of streaming for Paramount.

“The movies that we make will be made for theatrical,” Ellison said, adding that there is cultural significance to making films for the big screen.

Ellison also praised actor Tom Cruise, whom he met when he founded his Skydance Media company in 2010. Skydance co-produced “Top Gun: Maverick” and recent “Mission: Impossible” installments. Goldberg recounted how she and Greenstein called Cruise after Paramount unveiled its new leadership structure.

“It was to thank him for, frankly, the huge piece he’s been in Paramount’s history, Paramount’s present and how important he is for Paramount’s future,” Goldberg said. “‘Top Gun 3’ is a massive priority for us.”

The new corporate ownership structure gives the family of Larry Ellison (David’s billionaire father) and RedBird the ability to build the company for the future, rather than manage for quarter-by-quarter earnings.

The Ellison family now owns 50% of the company, and RedBird holds 20% — a dominant position. Regular shareholders have 30% of the stock in the new company. Shares soared more than 36% on Wednesday to $15.

The event included Ellison’s co-investor, RedBird founder Gerry Cardinale, who stressed his confidence in Paramount’s prospects.

Cardinale noted that he dispatched two of his top executives to join the company — Andy Gordon, a former Goldman Sachs banker is now Paramount’s chief operating officer and chief strategy officer, and Jeff Shell, the former NBCUniversal executive who’s now Paramount‘s president — to signify the importance of rebuilding.

“I’m betting my firm and my career on this deal,” Cardinale said.

On Wednesday, longtime Paramount shareholder Mario Gabelli sued Redstone and Paramount, alleging the deal structure disadvantaged shareholders other than Redstone, who received a premium for her stock.

As part of the deal, the Redstone family was paid $2.4 billion for their National Amusements Inc. firm, which held the controlling shares. After their considerable debts are paid, the family should come away with $1.75 billion. Paramount’s B-class shareholders received $15 a share.

Skydance and RedBird have promised investors that it will find $2 billion in cost savings, which means further belt-tightening and layoffs. Shell said he didn’t want Paramount to become a company that had perpetual layoffs, saying the plan was to have one restructuring and “then be done with it.”

The executives also showed no interest in cleaving off the cable channels, unlike Comcast or Warner Bros. Discovery, which are preparing for spinoffs. Shell said the diminished status of the channels gives the company opportunities to rebuild those brands.

In their first week, Ellison and RedBird have made big bets. On Monday, the company said it would spend $7.7 billion over seven years to lock up U.S. streaming and television rights to UFC mixed-martial arts fights for the Paramount+ streaming service and CBS.

In addition, Paramount in July agreed to pay $1.25 billion over five years to the creators of Comedy Central’s “South Park.” A separate deal with Trey Parker and Matt Stone allows the cartoon to run exclusively on Paramount+.

When asked what Paramount assets were underappreciated, Ellison talked about the broad reach of CBS, which just ended the regular television season in first place in prime-time among broadcast networks for the 17th consecutive year. He also mentioned CBS’ relationship with the NFL, Masters golf tournament and NCAA March Madness.

Gordon added, “I actually think every asset is underappreciated here.”