Why is Trump avoiding California?
President Trump is about to become the first president in more than six decades to skip a visit to California during his first calendar year in office, the Los Angeles Times reports. The president described the Golden State as "out of control" to Fox News earlier this year, and since taking office he has preferred to visit red states east of the Mississippi River.
Even with multiple regions of California being ravaged by wildfires in 2017, Trump has pointedly avoided visiting the state despite stopping through other disaster zones like those in Texas and Puerto Rico. "California Republicans won't even stick up for their own state, and a Republican president offers nothing in response to an enormous natural disaster," the progressive magazine Mother Jones wrote in November. "Why? No reason was given, but Occam's Razor suggests that the best guess is the most obvious one: California is a Democratic state that didn't vote for Donald Trump."
As political communications professor Dan Schnur, a former Republican, confirmed to the Los Angeles Times: "It's hard to imagine an environment less alluring to [Trump] right now than deep-blue California." Read more about the snub — and what might be behind it — here.
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