WASHINGTON – Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the majority leader, keeps a souvenir from a dinner the night before this year’s inauguration behind his desk: an embossed menu autographed by Donald Trump. The president-elect was at his table. McCarthy is not only the second-most powerful Republican in the House – he is also one of the earliest and most earnest supporters of the new president.

But this weekend, McCarthy – one of Trump’s closest allies on Capitol Hill – returns home to his district in Bakersfield, in a state that embodies the organized Democratic resistance to Trump’s presidency.

By now, McCarthy said, he is getting used to the protesters who have turned up outside his home and district office since Election Day, the newspaper editorials demanding that he protect his state from Trump’s policies and the state legislative hearings with testimony about the number of his constituents in danger of losing health coverage.

“I get demonstrations all the time,” McCarthy said Thursday, as he prepared to fly home for a week of events in his district. “I assume there will be some form of them again.”

One month into the Trump presidency, McCarthy is a man with a foot in two warring camps. He represents a 10,000-square-mile red rural stronghold in the farmland of central California, a state that Trump lost by 4 million votes. His seniority in the House leadership, and his ties to Trump, mean that he is indisputably the most powerful Californian in the nation’s capital.

And in an interview here, McCarthy left no doubt that his loyalties in this fight were east of the Mississippi River. He assailed California’s Democratic leaders for provoking the president, and warned that it could prove damaging to the state, particularly as the Trump administration created an infrastructure program to pay for public works projects across the nation.

“Look, I will represent my district, and I will represent my state,” McCarthy said in his first-floor suite of offices, between votes. “But what they are doing, they are playing with fire. Donald Trump is not going out in any way or form to attack California. They are the ones who are attacking California right now. They are the ones who are putting Californians at risk in every shape and form. And they are doing it to make a political point, which is wrong.”

It has been only 10 years since McCarthy, 52, arrived here as a freshman member of Congress, the latest stop in a career that began in the California Assembly, where he rose to become the minority leader. His family has lived in Bakersfield for generations, and he attended Bakersfield College and business school at California State University and owned a delicatessen in his hometown before he turned to politics full time.

McCarthy got his start in politics in college, where he was the head of the California Young Republicans. Soon after graduating, he sold his delicatessen and began working as the district director for Rep. Bill Thomas, before leaving to run for the Assembly. He represents Thomas’ former district today.

McCarthy, who is married and has two children, still sleeps weeknights on a couch in his office, awakening every morning for a 6 o’clock workout, and flying home most weekends.

His quick ascension to power is partly a result of circumstance. The job opened after the previous majority leader, Eric Cantor, was upset in a primary by a Tea Party candidate in 2014. And McCarthy was an early supporter of Trump when many other Republican leaders, including Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., held back.

But another part of his success is what seems, in this contentious time, the almost throwback style of glad-hand politicking that McCarthy embraces as he moves across the Capitol. A portrait of Ronald Reagan, a wide grin on his face, fills most of the west wall of his office.

“Everybody today wants to be a Reagan Republican, but how many walk around with that smile?” McCarthy said.

McCarthy acknowledges that his friend the president may not exactly be a graduate of the smiling Reagan school of politics. “I wouldn’t characterize them the same way,” he said.

Nevertheless, with a handful of exceptions – including the president’s call for a 35 percent border tariff – McCarthy has enthusiastically embraced Trump’s early agenda, including tax reform, the immigration crackdown and paring government regulations.

McCarthy is known more as a political strategist than an ideologue. Among his memorabilia is a framed picture of Cantor, Ryan and himself, taken when they released their book, “Young Guns: A New Generation of Conservative Leaders.”

“Eric was the leader; Paul was the thinker. I was the strategist,” he said. “I analyzed people’s districts. I know them backwards and forwards.”

McCarthy inevitably will bear much of the brunt of trying to mediate between the president and California. Trump has threatened to defund California, calling it “out of control,” and the Democratic-controlled Legislature has hired Eric Holder, a former U.S. attorney general, to lead the state’s legal challenge.

Farmers across central California who said they supported Trump have expressed concern that his crackdown on undocumented immigrants will leave them without needed workers.

“We’ve got to solve the immigration issue,” McCarthy said. “You have to have some form of guest workers program.”

And McCarthy has been a strong advocate of replacing the Affordable Care Act. There are 70,000 federal health insurance recipients in his district, the highest concentration in the state. California receives over $16 billion a year through the Affordable Care Act, equal to one-tenth of the annual state budget.

“He’s in a conundrum,” said Kevin de León, the Democratic leader of the state Senate and a leading critic of Trump. “Does he toe the Republican line? It’s my hope that Kevin will do the right thing and stand by the values and the people of California, irrespective of partisanship.”

Gov. Jerry Brown, who has mixed his attacks on Trump with efforts to find common ground on some issues, including a $100 billion high-speed rail line between San Francisco and Los Angeles, declined to comment on McCarthy.

Trump’s eye – and ire – have turned increasingly toward California. When the University of California, Berkeley, was roiled by protests over a scheduled appearance, ultimately canceled, by Milo Yiannopoulos, the right-wing writer, the president posted a tweet threatening to cut the university’s federal funding.

“That happens over Kevin McCarthy’s dead body,” Bill Whalen, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and a former senior adviser to Pete Wilson, a Republican governor, said in an email.

McCarthy’s own political position seems safe. He was elected to a sixth term in November with 70 percent of the vote, one of 14 Republicans in the state’s 55-seat congressional delegation.

De León and other Democrats said that given how integral California was to the nation’s economy, Trump, with McCarthy at his ear, would be reluctant to impose damage on the state.

“There’s no way of knowing how formidable a line of defense McCarthy will be,” said Dan Schnur, who teaches political communications at the University of Southern California and also worked as an adviser to Wilson. “But he’s the best shot they’ve got.”