At the start of the conservative Project 2025 strategy for a second Trump presidency, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts took aim at leaders he says wield power to “serve themselves first and everyone else a distant second.”
He mentioned North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un ruling comfortably over an impoverished nation, “billionaire climate activists” flying around on private jets while criticizing carbon-emitting cars and two “COVID-19 lockdown politicians” in California who were seen on the street, at a hair salon and at a fancy restaurant as they urged their constituents to stay home.
Mentioning the names of Rep. Nancy Pelosi and Gov. Gavin Newsom in the right-wing conservative's plan for the White House was a way for Roberts to link them, and California, to the idea that out-of-touch coastal elites are ruining the country.
That notion — much used in American politics — appears throughout Project 2025, an unconventional 900-page manifesto published last year by conservative opinion leaders and Trump acolytes.
The idea is also evoked more subtly in the much more streamlined 16-page Republican Party platform spearheaded by Trump and adopted by party officials last week, which criticizes American politicians who “insulated themselves from criticism and the consequences of their own wrongdoing” while average Americans suffered.
Roberts and other Heritage Foundation officials were not available for comment. A Heritage Foundation spokesperson said Project 2025 is a product of more than 100 conservative organizations and “does not speak on behalf of any candidate or campaign.”
According to political experts, the conservative strategy of criticizing “woke” liberal ideas — many of which gained traction in California — has become particularly useful in the current election cycle, as Trump’s base has proven especially receptive to conservative virtue signaling on issues like abortion, climate change, guns, immigration and LGBTQ+ rights.
That strategy will only grow, experts said, if President Biden leaves the Democratic ticket and is replaced by a California politician like Newsom or Vice President Kamala Harris, a former senator.
“It’s a vital angle to address,” said Jon Michaels, a constitutional law professor at UCLA and the author of a forthcoming book on right-wing authoritarianism. “California becomes a convenient counterpoint, and California’s excesses are what Republicans can push back against.”
Issues at stake
Conservatives have long cast California — sometimes rightly, sometimes not — as a failed state crumbling under the weight of out-of-control regulation, crime and homelessness, and the 2024 race has intensified those lines of attack.
“There are cases where California is actually going in a different direction than the Republican Party wants. [Project 2025] Report: Everything from diversity, equity and inclusion to connections to China and high tech. [companies] “The goal is to show a state in disarray, an undemocratic and condescending state controlled by high-tech elites completely disconnected from the situation in the rest of the United States,” said Bruce Cain, a political science professor at Stanford University.
Both Project 2025 and the GOP platform envision a second Trump presidency in which federal bureaucrats use executive branch powers to roll back a range of California policies, including protections for undocumented immigrants, the environment, unionized workers, those seeking abortions and transgender youth.
In its wording, the GOP platform is at times bombastic (much like Trump, who helped write it) and lays out a relatively clear framework for how it intends to govern, in stark contrast to California’s leaders.
“California becomes a convenient rival, and California’s excesses are what Republicans can fight against.”
— Jon Michaels, professor of constitutional law at UCLA
For example, Los Angeles and other large California cities refuse to use their police forces or municipal staff to enforce immigration laws. Trump’s platform promises to “cut federal funding” to those jurisdictions.
California is in the process of halting oil drilling in the state, and leaders are concerned about the environmental and health impacts. The platform calls on the nation to “DRILL, BABY, DRILL.”
California requires LGBTQ+-inclusive curricula in schools, and the Democratic-controlled state legislature just passed a law prohibiting school officials from informing parents of children who identify as transgender at school if the children do not want that information shared. The platform says Republicans support “parents’ rights” and will “defund schools that engage in inappropriate political indoctrination of our children” or promote “radical gender ideology.”
The Project 2025 plan is even more scathing in its criticism of California's policies.
Roberts, in his foreword to Project 2025, talks a lot about American liberty, but he defines it clearly within a Christian nationalist framework, saying that the Constitution gives every American the freedom “to live as our Creator ordained” – to “do not what we will, but what we ought.”
The plan calls on Trump, if elected, to “make American civil society institutions hard targets for progressive culture warriors,” a process that, it says, should begin with removing all references to queer identities, “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” abortion or “reproductive health” from federal law and regulations.
The plan, which calls California and other liberal states “sanctuaries for abortion tourism,” says the Trump administration should “do everything possible to protect the unborn in every jurisdiction in the United States,” work with Congress to enact anti-abortion laws and require states to report abortion data to the federal government, including patients’ state of residence and “reason” for receiving the procedure.
Critics say such moves would empower conservative states that ban abortions to target and punish women who go to liberal states like California for such procedures.
The party’s platform does not call for a national ban on abortion, which has rankled some on the right, but it does back state policies that restrict it and says Republicans “proudly stand for families and life.”
Both plans criticize the country’s shift toward electric vehicles, and Project 2025 says the federal government should rescind a waiver that allows California to set its own clean air standards around fuel economy, supporting the state’s goal of switching exclusively to zero-emission vehicles by 2035.
The fight ahead
Although Project 2025 was largely written by top Trump advisers and former officials, Trump has recently attempted to distance himself from the plan.
In an online post on July 5, Trump wrote that he knew “nothing about it” but also that “some of the things they are saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.” Still, he wished “luck” to those behind the plan.
“This is not Alabama or Mississippi. They are facing a very powerful state with a lot of resources and the will to resist.”
— Bruce Cain, professor of political science at Stanford University
The Trump campaign referred questions about Project 2025 and the Republican Party platform, as they relate to California policies, to the Republican National Committee.
Committee spokeswoman Anna Kelly said the party's platform “contains common-sense policies like cutting taxes, securing the border, ending absurd policies.” [electric vehicle] mandates, secure our elections, defend our constitutional rights and keep men out of women's sports,” the latter being an apparent reference to transgender women.
“If journalists find these principles inconsistent with the values espoused by California’s leaders,” Kelly wrote, “perhaps it is time for Democrats to rethink how their state is governed.”
Democrats, including Biden, have repeatedly linked Trump to Project 2025, saying his claims of distancing himself from it are absurd given the number of people in his orbit who lead it. On Tuesday, Harris criticized Project 2025 at a campaign event in Las Vegas, noting that it calls for disbanding the U.S. Department of Education, cuts to Social Security and a nationwide abortion ban.
“If implemented, this plan would be the latest strike in Donald Trump’s frontal assault on reproductive freedom,” she said.
Experts said that if Biden is replaced by Harris or Newsom, who are considered front-runners amid swirling doubts about Biden’s age and ability to defeat Trump, conservative ridicule about California and its liberal policies will escalate and find a receptive audience in many parts of the country.
A Times poll earlier this year found that 50 percent of American adults believe California is in decline and 48 percent of Republicans say it is “not really American.”
If Trump wins, experts say California is expected to lead the liberal resistance to Trump’s agenda, just as it did during his first term. Those efforts will be hampered by California’s budget woes and conservative-leaning Supreme Court, but they won’t be completely derailed.
“California will fight back and it has the means to do so,” Cain said. “This isn’t Alabama or Mississippi. They’re up against a very powerful state with a lot of resources and the will to fight back.”
