President Donald Trump spent his week skulking around a United Nations climate summit, teasing a teenage activist with Asperger’s syndrome, and preparing for an impeachment inquiry. His top environmental regulator, meanwhile, used the week to threaten California. The head of the Environmental Protection Agency publicly chastised the state’s governor over the “piles of human feces” befouling the streets and sidewalks of the state’s cultural capitals and suggested what The Washington Post called a “rarely used federal punishment” in response. The statements, made in public letters to top California officials, are a sign of things to come as the administration seeks to shore up its deregulatory advances and deliver talking points for an unpopular president ahead of the 2020 election. The climate crisis ― and Trump’s failure to address it ― are likely to be a top focus. So his administration is turning its sights elsewhere: California, a blue state and frequent Trump punching bag. EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler sent the California Air Resources Board a letter Monday accusing the state air regulator of failing “to carry out its most basic tasks under the Clean Air Act.” He also suggested the administration could take the unusual step of pulling California’s federal highway funding. On Thursday, Wheeler blamed California Gov. Gavin Newsom for stoking “a homelessness crisis that now threatens human health and the environment,” demanding the first-term Democrat produce a cleanup plan in the next 30 days. The pollution wasn’t new in California, but then again neither were the threats. Since historic wildfires scorched the state last year, Trump has repeatedly threatened to cut off federal aid. What’s changed, experts say, is the political context of the administration’s saber-rattling. Not My Voters “California gives Trump more gusto,” said Michael Gerrard, the director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University. “He’s rolling back environmental regulations across the board, but he’s especially enthusiastic about sticking it to California.” The Golden State has long served as a liberal straw man for conservatives to torch. For over a decade, Republicans have run ads routinely accusing Democratic opponents of espousing “San Francisco values.” But whereas that charge carried a more loaded meaning during the fight over same-sex marriage in the mid-2000s, today it’s a stand-in for “not Republican.”

Fred Prouser / Reuters Smog clouds the Los Angeles skyline in this photo from 2006.

The state that gave the nation Richard Nixon and the Reagan Revolution relegated Republicans to a third-party status last year as new registration data showed independents eclipsing the GOP by 73,000 voters, making it the second largest bloc behind the Democrats, Politico reported. Just 29% of likely California voters said they planned to vote for Trump in 2020, compared to 67% who said they didn’t, according to a University of California, Berkeley Institute of Government Studies poll published this month. That, The Los Angeles Times wrote, puts the president on track for the “poorest showing by a Republican presidential candidate in the state since the Civil War.” So for a president who rallies his base by bashing its perceived enemies, it’s a convenient reality that the road to gutting former President Barack Obama’s signature clean car rules runs through California. Road Rage It started in 2017, when the EPA started the process to unwind the Obama administration’s rule cutting tailpipe emissions. The regulation, which automakers endorsed in 2012, required passenger vehicles to average 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025 ― roughly double today’s standard. If fully implemented, the program would reduce oil consumption by 12 billion barrels, halve tailpipe pollution and double fuel efficiency, saving drivers $3,200 to $5,700 in gasoline costs over a vehicle’s lifetime. A year later, the EPA proposed reversing the rule, arguing that Americans’ taste for gas guzzlers meant new car sales would fall, as federal rules required manufacturers to sell more fuel-efficient models. Freezing emissions standards at current levels, the EPA said, would spur more consumers to buy newer, safer cars. California foiled those plans. The state’s geography makes its biggest metropolis uniquely susceptible to smog and ozone. To address this problem, Congress gave California the right under the Clean Air Act to set its own pollution standards. Citing the agency’s own 2009 finding that carbon dioxide qualified as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act because it caused health-harming climate change, California refused to loosen its tailpipe emissions standards. That put the Trump administration in a bind. After shredding nearly every other major Obama-era greenhouse gas rule, the auto emissions regulation marked a final obstacle. But the Obama administration had brokered the rule as a compromise between California regulators, who wanted an even more aggressive federal program, and automakers, who conceded on mileage in the spirit of gaining a strong national standard, averting the costly need to build vehicles to two separate standards.

Jonathan Ernst / Reuters The president finds little embrace on the Left Coast.