President Trump is carrying his America-first agenda straight into Gavin Newsom's California — the same state now among 25 suing to block the tariffs at the center of his economic policy, setting up a fight over whether the courts or the voters get to decide the nation's trade direction.
The stakes for working Americans are direct: Trump's tariffs are designed to force trading partners to stop undercutting U.S. workers with forced-labor imports, but 25 Democrat-led states want the courts to strike them down as illegal. Meanwhile, Trump is heading west to argue that his policies are already delivering results — falling crime, a sealed border, and protected jobs — in a state that has become the progressive experiment in terminal decline.
Trump visits Los Angeles on Tuesday for an RNC dinner at Trump National Golf Club, his first California trip in 18 months, before heading to Las Vegas for remarks on the economy. White House spokeswoman Olivia Wales said Trump will "draw a sharp contrast between his commonsense agenda and the radical policies of Democrats like Gavin Newsom, who keep raising taxes, inviting rampant fraud in taxpayer-funded programs, and protecting illegal immigrant drug dealers, rapists, and murderers."
Newsom's office fired back, saying Trump is visiting "not to deliver the federal disaster aid Los Angeles wildfire survivors have been waiting for, but to raise money for himself and attack California with the same tired falsehoods."
Both sides are claiming credit for falling crime. The White House said California crime likely reached a record low last year, falling 7%. Newsom's office cited a 20% drop in homicide, 31% drop in robbery, and 24% drop in property crime since he became governor in 2019. The White House connected Trump's crackdown on illegal migrant criminals to the falling murder rate in Los Angeles and said net international migration to California fell nearly 70% between July 2024 and July 2025.
The administration has also made fraud a priority, launching a DOJ West Coast Strike Force targeting health care fraud and deferring $1.3 billion in federal Medicaid reimbursements to California over fraud concerns in hospice and home health agencies.
But while Trump makes his case on the ground, the legal fight over his trade agenda is escalating. New York Attorney General Letitia James is leading a coalition of 25 states — including California, Nevada, and Colorado — in suing over Trump's latest tariffs on 59 countries and the EU. The tariffs use Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, arguing those nations aren't cracking down on forced-labor imports. James called it "a thinly-veiled attempt to circumvent the Supreme Court's ruling against Trump's earlier import tariffs." White House spokesman Kush Desai defended the move: "A foreign country's failure to impose and effectively enforce a prohibition on the importation of goods produced with forced labor is unreasonable and burdens U.S. commerce."
Trump himself lashed out at the Supreme Court over its rulings on tariffs and birthright citizenship, writing on Truth Social: "Does anybody have any idea how much Money and Prestige the United States Supreme Court has cost our Nation with their negative Rulings?" The answer, he wrote: "TRILLIONS AND TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS!"
The question now is whether the courts will let a president use the trade tools Congress already gave him — or whether the same Democratic states bleeding residents and businesses will succeed in blocking the policies aimed at bringing jobs back.
