Republicans Love to Hate on California at GOP Convention

When presidential candidates travel to places like Iowa and New Hampshire, they usually spend time praising the state they’re in.

But Republicans making the pilgrimage to California for the state party convention in Anaheim took a very different tack.

Former President Donald Trump spent much of his Friday speech trashing California, painting it as a dystopian hellscape full of “roving bands of looters, criminals and thugs.”

The crowd of Californians ate it up.

“Together we will reverse the decline of America and we will end the desecration of your once great state, California,” he said to roaring cheers. “This is not a great state anymore. This is a dumping ground. You’re a dumping ground. The world is being dumped into California: Prisoners, terrorists, mental patients.”

Later that evening in a ballroom across the hallway, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis continued the California castigation, calling the state a Petri dish for American liberalism.

“Our country’s in a state of decline, economic decline, cultural decline, military decline,” he said. “The California model represents more American decline. The Florida model represents a way for us to reverse American decline. It represents a way to have an American revival.”

But California Republicans didn’t seem offended — rather, many of them agreed with the presidential candidates’ assessments, saying it’s what they’ve been arguing for years.

“We’ve had a lot of problems in California, and California leads the nation,” said Board of Equalization Member Ted Gaines. “If we’re setting policy in place that in many cases is not working and that’s spreading across the country, we’ve got a problem… I don’t think there’s anything wrong with citing what those problems are.”

Denice Gary-Pandol, who is running for U.S. Senate, rejected the notion altogether. “I didn’t hear the president speak about California in dark terms,” she said. “What I heard him say was, we need water infrastructure.”

“That shows to me a love and a concern for the people of our state and our country,” added Gary-Pandol.

Trump did talk about water but spent most of his time railing against what he called a “man-made drought,” claiming that rich people in Beverly Hills smell bad because they have to take short showers and saying that if California leaders simply “dampen” forest floors there won’t be wildfires anymore.

He also spent much of his speech talking about crime, joking at one point, to laughter, about Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul, who was attacked in their San Francisco home last year by an intruder. He pledged to shoot robbers as they leave stores if he becomes president.

“The word that ‘they shoot you’ will get out within minutes and our nation in one day will be an entirely different place. There must be retribution for theft and destruction and the ruination of our country,” he said.

Reflecting the loyalty of Trump’s base here, Gary-Pandol said she wasn’t offended by the former president’s blunt and sometimes violent rhetoric — though she did acknowledge she disagrees with Trump that robbers should be shot immediately.

“I don’t want to say that I agree with that, but I do agree that crime needs to be illegal again and we need to enforce our laws. And I don’t want to shoot somebody in the back for stealing a purse from a store, but I immediately want them to be held accountable for robbing from somebody else,” she said.

The only candidate who didn’t frame California as an apocalyptic disaster was entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy. When pressed about his view of the state after the speech, Ramaswamy said he disagrees with how state Democratic leaders have governed but didn’t want to focus on the past.

“I think California’s policies have been a disaster, just as I think the Biden administration has been a disaster,” he said. “But I mentioned neither Biden nor California in that speech because, as I said, I am leading us to something.”

Politically, though, Trump’s message is the one that seems to resonate with his base. Recent polls show him lapping his political opponents, leading the field by 40 points.

But the general election will likely be another story: Trump lost to President Joe Biden in 2020 by more than 30 points, and Republicans remain a minority, accounting for less than one-quarter of registered voters in California.