The Two Big Reasons Trump is Going After California With Such Intensity (and one is to distract from Epstein)

Here are 2 of the big reasons that Trump is going so hard after California.

His Secretary of Homeland Security announced, “We are staying here to liberate the city [of LA] from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into the city.” This just before California's Senator Alex Padilla was forcibly removed from the room, knocked to the ground and handcuffed for having the audacity to ask her a question. Trump wants to overturn the will of Californians because they make him look bad. (And one of the ways he dismisses this egregious act? Trump says of Padilla, "He looks like an illegal!" As with so many old guys, his racism becomes less shameless as he ages.)

Trump has decisively lost California in each of his 3 elections. In the 3 counties at the heart of Silicon Valley (San Jose, San Mateo and San Francisco), his opponent (Clinton, Biden, and Harris) has won 4 votes for every 1 he has won. 4 to 1 is a pretty big margin. And Silicon Valley has created more wealth than any place in the history of humanity, a place where median wages are nearly 3X what they are in the rest of the US. Silicon Valley - and California more broadly - is a reminder that one of the most prosperous and progressive places in the history of the world completely rejects his politics and policies.

California, of course, is everything Trump is fighting against. And yet it is arguably the most successful state in the Union. California makes a liar out of Trump when it comes to the xenophobic policies he advocates. If Californians are right, he's wrong. He can't have that.
And even more importantly, his sending troops to LA to deal with 100 protesters at a Home Depot and setting up the cosplay arrest of California's senator does something even more important: it distracts from the fact that just one week ago his billionaire buddy Elon Musk had reminded everyone that Trump is in the Epstein files.

Trump and Epstein were best friends for about 15 years. Trump biographer Michael Wolff describes their joint tactics of "hunting girls," has seen a picture of Donald and Jeffrey posing with what he thought were underage girls who were topless and another picture of Donald with a visible stain in the front of his pants and topless girls pointing at it and laughing.
Just one week later, no one is talking about Musk's reminder that Trump is in the Epstein files. (That alone is such a stunning tale, isn't it? 2 best friends. One dies of apparent suicide in prison and another now lives in the White House.)

Trump's attack on the Golden State comes from attempt to manufacture two results. One, he's desperately trying to make California look like a failed state when - in fact - it is the most successful place in history and mostly because it pursues policies that are 180 degrees off from Trump's policies. And because he needed a distraction from his own tawdry past that Elon Musk had the audacity to remind us of. And of course, given that attention is zero-sum and no one more brilliantly captures attention than Trump, you've already been distracted from the fact that Trump's economic policies are the opposite of what leads to prosperity and that Trump's morality is the opposite of what all but his most MAGA of supporters admire.

The master of distraction has managed to distract the country from the fact that his economic policies and morals are atrocious. And it doesn't matter to him that he has to do it by violating constitutional norms and common decency.