If you’re looking to get away from Donald Trump’s Twitter feed and spend a few days thinking about the direction of this country, you might consider a trip to Southern California, which I visited last week with my family. In many ways, the Golden State represents the American future that Trump—with his white nativism and economic protectionism—is trying to turn back, Canute style.

Once a bastion of Nixon-Reagan Republicanism, California is now among the most diverse states in the country, with Hispanics and Asians making up a majority of the population. The state—the world’s sixth-largest economy—is also increasingly integrated into the Pacific Rim. In Washington, the “pivot to Asia” foreign-policy doctrine is often ridiculed. In California, it is rapidly becoming a reality.

Trump lost California by a two-to-one margin in 2016, and, after taking office, he waited more than a year to visit the state. But the G.O.P.’s problems in California predate Trump: the Party has been in free fall since the nineteen-nineties, when Pete Wilson, then the governor, a Republican, endorsed Proposition 187, a proto-Trumpian ballot initiative that was designed to prevent non-citizens—Hispanic non-citizens, mainly—from using state-provided public services. (The initiative passed in 1994 but was ruled unconstitutional in 1998.) In alienating the fast-growing Latino vote, Wilson helped cast his party into the wilderness for a generation.

Wilson left office in 1999, and the last Republican to have won statewide office since then was former insurance commissioner Steve Poizner, in 2006. Given the nonpartisan primary system that California adopted, in 2010, in which the top two finishers, regardless of party, go on to contest the general election, it is likely that no Republican will make it onto the ballot in this November’s U.S. Senate race, in which the veteran Democrat Dianne Feinstein is seeking reëlection. The same thing could conceivably happen in the state’s gubernatorial race, in which several prominent Democrats have joined the race to replace Jerry Brown, who can’t run again because of term limits.

There are still fourteen Republicans from California in the House of Representatives, but, going into the midterms this November, at least seven of those seats are in serious jeopardy. Rather than facing hordes of angry and enthused Democrats, the longtime occupants of two of these seats, Darrell Issa and Ed Royce, have already announced their retirement. The other Republican incumbents are facing strong, well-financed challenges, and have the additional hurdle of the President’s deep unpopularity in the state. The Cook Political Report currently rates two of these seven G.O.P. seats as “lean Democratic.” It rates two other seats as “Republican toss-ups.”

If Trump keeps up his demonization of immigrants and talk of economic protectionism, things are likely to get even harder for California Republicans. Many of the state’s cities and counties are proud to call themselves sanctuary jurisdictions, and legal challenges to a number of Trump’s immigration policies have originated in the state. It was a lawsuit by the University of California that has kept the Administration from winding down the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.

Polls show that Trump’s immigration policies aren’t very popular even in some traditionally Republican areas of the state, such as southern Orange County. These policies have provided a highly effective rallying cry for local Democrats, who sense a historic victory in the offing. At a meeting of Republican activists in the city of Irvine last week, Shawn Steel, a former chairman of the California G.O.P. who now serves as the state’s representative on the Republican National Committee, said, “Orange County is undergoing the biggest political challenge we’ve ever had, probably since we became a county 150 years ago.”

Starting a trade war with China is another policy that seems unlikely to play well in places like Irvine, a city of roughly two hundred and fifty thousand people and where my family spent a day last week visiting friends. According to the Census Bureau, more than forty per cent of Irvine’s residents are Asian. The number of Chinese immigrants in the city is growing rapidly, including wealthy businesspeople, undergraduate and graduate students, and low-skilled workers who are employed in places such as restaurants and construction sites. Under some circumstances, this influx of Chinese financial capital, human capital, and labor could conceivably harm some locals, such as those looking for a low-skill job that pays a decent wage. But in a city where the unemployment rate is now three per cent, a shortage of jobs isn’t an immediate problem.

To be sure, California, like many other states, has lost some manufacturing jobs to China’s ascent and its mercantile trade policies, which the Trump Administration is challenging. With the Chinese government now explicitly targeting high-tech industries, such as semiconductors and artificial intelligence, for future growth, certain other California companies and workers could suffer. But, as Chinese incomes rise, the economic giant across the Pacific is also becoming a big market for many California industries, including the most iconic one: Hollywood.

In Los Angeles, I read a new report from the Motion Picture Association of America that points out that China is fast catching up to North America as the world’s biggest film market. Last year, Chinese box-office revenues were almost eight billion dollars—topping the combined totals of those in Japan, Britain, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy. And while in many Western countries the number of cinemagoers is falling in the face of competition from streaming services, China is still building theatres and multiplexes at a frantic rate. According to Charles Rivkin, the M.P.A.A.’s chairman, China is installing about twenty-five new screens a day.

Right now, the government in Beijing still limits the number of foreign films that can be shown in China and the share of box-office revenues that Hollywood studios can take. Recently, however, it has indicated a willingness to relax these constraints. Now that Trump has imposed tariffs on Chinese goods, it isn’t clear whether this liberalization will go ahead.

Despite its cultural prominence, the film-and-entertainment business represents only a small part of the California economy, of course. But China is also a growing source of revenue for many other California industries, such as information technology, aerospace, real estate, education, and tourism. According to the Department of Commerce, China is the state’s third-largest export destination, accounting for about sixteen billion dollars in exports last year. (The biggest categories were electronics, transportation equipment, and other forms of machinery.)

Other forms of commerce with China don’t show up in the figures for U.S. exports. The ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, which serve as the principal entrepôts for Chinese goods, employ about two hundred thousand people, directly and indirectly. And Los Angeles attracted more than a million Chinese tourists last year—a figure that could rise sharply in the coming years as more Chinese people get passports.

In addition, some Chinese companies are investing directly in California businesses. When Karma Automotive, an electric-car startup based in Irvine, got into financial trouble, China’s Wanxiang Group bought it out and invested enough capital to produce the luxury Karma Revero model, which went on sale last year. (During this week’s Masters golf tournament, the company ran an advertising spot that used the tagline “Born in Southern California” and didn’t mention the Chinese connection.)

A full-scale trade war with China would threaten some of these developments, but it wouldn’t alter the fact that California’s economic focus is steadily shifting toward Asia. In this area, as in many others, such as demographic transition and environmental regulation, California is fulfilling its traditional role of leading the United States into the future.

Trump, of course, has a very different idea of where the country should be heading. But when his efforts are viewed from the edge of the Pacific Ocean, they look even more quixotic and self-defeating than they do from Washington and New York.

A previous version of this post misidentified the last Republican to win statewide in California.