Much has been made recently of how Trump’s populism and economic nationalism have tapped into this previously obscure strain of intellectual conservatism that arose in California. But a bigger, and perhaps stranger, surprise is how deeply Trump’s view of America as a nation in need of saving is shaped by California itself. Trump’s candidacy is usually seen as a shotgun marriage of East Coast money and heartland rhetoric, a slick Manhattan salesman retailing a muscular vision of “America” to voters in the Midwest and South—about the least Californian form of politics imaginable. And since the election, California, which voted overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton, has emerged as the diverse, globalist anchor of the “Resistance.”

But under the hood, the state has been the ideological engine of the more heterodox strain of Trumpism now driving much of the president’s policy. Bannon, though raised in Virginia, honed his political identity in Los Angeles, where he spent more than a decade pumping out right-wing documentaries before taking over Breitbart News. White House policy adviser Stephen Miller, an immigration hard-liner who may be the next-most influential thinker in Trumpland, is a product of the decidedly liberal enclave of Santa Monica. Michael Anton, an erudite high-level National Security Council aide, was raised in Northern California, including ultra-liberal Santa Cruz. Julia Hahn, Bannon’s bomb-throwing fellow Breitbart alum who is now an aide in the West Wing, grew up in Los Angeles, where she attended the prestigious Harvard-Westlake School—also the alma mater of Alex Marlow, the editor of Breitbart, the website that has become the primary media vehicle for Trump’s nationalist agenda.

As the administration settles in, these hard-liners, led by Bannon, have clashed with Trump’s New York advisers—especially the president’s daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kusher. The internal power struggle that recently cost Bannon his seat on the National Security Council, and may still cost him his job, is not just about personalities. It is a clash between two competing visions for the Trump presidency. And although Trump himself is a New Yorker, ironically, the most ideologically self-confident version of Trumpism is a California phenomenon.

The California exiles in the White House might not think of themselves as a coherent club. “If they are having meetings, they’re doing it without me,” Anton joked in a recent interview. But from their writings, statements and personal stories, it’s clear they share a common worldview born out of opposition to the liberal, Democratic hegemony in their home state and their discomfort with its demographic conversion. For people who think of California as a buffer against “America first-ism” and see Trump’s movement as purely an expression of unreconstructed nativists like Jeff Sessions of Alabama, it might come as a surprise. But to understand Trumpism as a response to what’s happening in America, it helps to understand what’s happened in California—where the conservative reaction to its political and cultural transformation has been honed to a sharp point.

The most interesting policy argument in America right now is the debate between conservatives’ real position on health care and their fake position.

The fake, but popular, position goes something like this: Conservatives think everyone deserves affordable health insurance, but they disagree with Democrats about how to get everyone covered at the best price. This was the language that surrounded Paul Ryan and Donald Trump’s Obamacare alternative — an alternative that crashed and burned when it came clear that it would lead to more people with worse (or no) health insurance and higher medical bills.

Conservatives’ real, but unpopular, position on health care is quite different, and it explains their behavior much better. Their real position is that universal coverage is a philosophically unsound goal, and that blocking Democrats from creating a universal health care system is of overriding importance. To many conservatives, it is not the government’s role to make sure everyone who wants health insurance can get it, and it would be a massive step toward socialism if that changed.

This view provided the actual justification for Ryan and Trump’s Obamacare alternative — it’s why they designed a bill that led to more people with worse (or no) health insurance and higher medical bills, but that cut taxes for the rich and shrank the government’s role in providing health care.


There was, for decades, a logic to the GOP’s dual positions: the fake but popular position was used to pursue the ends of the real but unpopular position. But in the post-Obamacare world, the chasm that has opened between conservatives’ fake and real positions has become unmanageable, and how — or whether — conservatives resolve it has become perhaps the most interesting public policy question going today.

Do you think it is fair to say that Trump and his cadre are traitors and that they should be held accountable based on those criteria?

If we use the rhetorical definition of treason, the common vernacular definition of treason, and it turns out that anyone at any time in this campaign was aware of Russia’s operations, decided to use Russia’s operations and coordinate with Russia’s operations, that right there would be treason. That would be betraying the trust of your nation.