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.