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Last week, Trump’s war with California took the form of attacking its public college system. After violent protests erupted on the campus of U.C. Berkeley, Trump suggested that he would pull funding from the school, which a) punishes the wrong party, since it wasn’t as though the school asked people to riot and b) can’t be done by executive order anyway.
For its part, there’s a movement in California to secede from the United States. Supporters of the idea are collecting petitions to get it on the ballot in the state in 2018, which, if passed, would have the effect of doing basically nothing. (We’ve been through this attempt-to-secede thing before; it ended poorly.) When Barack Obama won reelection in 2012, there was a briefly a similar effort by the biggest red state, Texas. It didn’t get anywhere, either.
On Monday, The Washington Post reported that the most visible manifestation of the California economy — the tech industry — had broadly united to file a joint amicus brief in opposition to Trump’s executive order on immigration. The tech industry employs a lot of immigrants to the United States, so there’s clearly a business motivation to take such a stand.The story contains the following graphic:
So this is the Cold Civil War that’s erupted. Trump threatens California’s funding; California threatens to pack up and go. Neither is likely to happen. But still — if you predicted that a president’s relationship with the Golden State would be rockier than his relationship with Russia, I’d like to ask your help with some lottery numbers.
