President Trump had harsh words for one of his most fervent opponents during the pre-Super Bowl interview with Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly that aired Sunday. Not President Vladimir Putin, mind you, whose alleged unpleasant habit of murdering journalists met with a shrug from the president. No, Trump lashed out at the nation’s largest state, California.
“I just spent the week in California,” O’Reilly said. “As you know, they are now voting on whether they should become a sanctuary state. So California and the U.S.A. are on a collision course. How do you see it?”
“Well, I think it’s ridiculous,” Trump replied. “Sanctuary cities, as you know I’m very much opposed to sanctuary cities. They breed crime, there’s a lot of problems. We have to well defund, we give tremendous amounts of money to California . . . California in many ways is out of control, as you know. Obviously the voters agree or otherwise they wouldn’t have voted for me.”
“So defunding is your weapon of choice?” O’Reilly asked.
“A weapon. I don’t want to defund the state,” Trump said. “I don’t want to defund anybody. I want to give them the money they need to properly operate as a city or a state. If they’re going to have sanctuary cities, we may have to do that. Certainly that would be a weapon.”
We’ll note first of all that sanctuary cities do not “breed crime.” Analysis of FBI data shows that crime in sanctuary cities is generally lower than in non-sanctuary cities. But that’s beside the point.
More importantly, Trump says two things. First, that California is “out of control.” Second, that he doesn’t want to yank federal funding from the state, but he will if he has to.
California is one of the few states where federal funding isn’t that great a point of leverage. In 2015, California generated $405 billion in tax revenue, more than $100 billion more than the next-closest state. It consumes a lot of federal funding, too, mind you. But data from Pew Research for 2014 compared to 2014 IRS data shows that California gives the federal government more than it takes.
It’s not clear why Trump says that California is “out of control.” If he’s talking about the state’s finances, California is in a much stronger position than it was five years ago. After massive deficits in the 2011-2012 fiscal year, the state has consistently operated in the black. Gov. Jerry Brown (D) recently warned that the state might operate at a deficit in 2017-2018, but relative to past deficits, the projection is fairly small. If, however, Trump is saying California is out of control in regards to his go-to metric, crime, the state is very much in control.
We need to step back from this, though, and recognize the broader context.
Trump is mad about California because voters there overwhelmingly rejected Trump in November. Trump supporters have repeatedly tried to affix an “except California” asterisk to the popular vote result since, were it not for California, Trump would have prevailed on that metric. Saying “except California” has the tricky flaw of equaling “except for 12 percent of the American population,” but, hey, it’s politics.
Trump hasn’t said “except California,” except to suggest repeatedly that perhaps the 4 million-plus margin by which he lost the state includes perhaps millions of fraudulent votes. There’s no evidence of this whatsoever. He’s also claimed that he intentionally didn’t campaign in California because only the electoral vote mattered. Hillary Clinton didn’t campaign there, either, but it doesn’t seem to have hurt her much.
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