President Trump has entered the belly of the progressive beast, where he attended events in Palo Alto and Beverly Hills, CA Tuesday and now moved on to L.A. and San Diego to raise money for his 2020 campaign!
Though the big cities in CA and Hollywood cry the loudest against trump and in support of the Democrat-run state, President Trump and his campaigners hope to rally up all those Californias sick of the liberal BS they have to put up with day-to-day.
And, while they may be quieter than, say Debra Messing who has already stirred up controversy prior to President Trump’s Beverly Hills fundraiser, there are a lot of Californians who want to send a pro-Trump message, quite a bit more than you might think.
CA Republican National Committee member Harmheet Dhillon said it well,
“By showing up to a fundraiser deep in the belly of the beast, one is saying: ‘I don’t care what the liberal politicians are saying and I want to show my support for him publicly,’ I sold $100,000 worth of [tickets], and I could have sold another $100,000 more.”
Check out the news of President Trump’s upcoming California trip that hit Twitter:
The Hill has more to say about President Trump's California visit:
President Trump on Tuesday will begin a two-day fundraising swing through California, a state that has made itself the heart of the resistance to his administration’s policies.
Trump is in the Golden State to collect money for his reelection bid.
He will hold fundraisers in Palo Alto and Los Angeles on Tuesday, with additional donor events scheduled for Wednesday in Los Angeles and San Diego.
The West Coast swing is unusual for the president, who is deeply unpopular in much of California. Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton defeated Trump in California by more than 4 million votes, while defeating him in the national popular vote by nearly 3 million.
The president’s visit is certain to trigger protests among residents, and talk about who might attend fundraisers for the president ticked off a mini-controversy earlier this month when actress Debra Messing said the list of those attending Trump’s events should be published.
Messing walked back the remarks after coming under criticism by others in Hollywood who suggested she was hinting at blacklisting Trump attendees.
Trump does not appear to hold California in high esteem and often holds it up as a bastion of crime, squalor and liberal policies to be feared.
Yet Trump’s allies and Republican strategists see a purpose for trekking out west that goes beyond the cash haul.
They think Trump’s visit can help Republicans win back House seats lost in 2018.
“There’s a benefit to contrast what Republican leadership looks like and what Democrat leadership looks like, but it’s also an opportunity for us to train and organize in key areas to help take back some of the seats we narrowly lost in 2018,” said Rick Gorka, a spokesman for the Republican National Committee (RNC).
Whether Trump can actually help his party in California remains to be seen. Republicans lost six House seats in the state to Democrats in 2018 in a midterm election driven by suburban voter displeasure with Trump.
In Orange County, where former Presidents Nixon and Reagan have roots, the number of registered Democrats exceeded the number of registered Republicans as of August.
The anger against the president fueling Democrats often seems most energized on the West Coast.
California has sued the Trump administration a total of 59 times as of Monday, bringing or joining lawsuits against the travel ban, the rollback of environmental standards and various immigration rules.
U.S. News & World Report also said:
President Donald Trump rarely passes up the chance to throw a sharp elbow at left-leaning California, but he showed Tuesday he's more than happy to cash in there with a lunch-dinner-breakfast-lunch fundraising blitz expected to scoop up $15 million from wealthy Republicans in two days.
"There's not been a president in living history that is as unpopular in the state of California as Trump," said Mike Madrid, a GOP political consultant who is an outspoken Trump critic. "But our money spends the same as everyone else's."
With protesters not far away, Trump kicked off his moneymaking Tuesday with a $3 million Bay Area luncheon, to be followed by a $5 million Beverly Hills dinner at the home of real estate developer Geoffrey Palmer. He'll bring in an additional $7 million on Wednesday with a breakfast in Los Angeles and luncheon in San Diego before he visits a section of the border wall.
About 100 protesters lined the road about a mile from Trump's luncheon site in Portola Valley, with demonstrators inflating giant Baby Trump and Trump Chicken balloons.
Republican National Committee member Harmeet Dhillon of California said about 400 guests attended the fundraiser at the home of Sun Microsystems co-founder Scott McNealy, where the president spoke for about 45 minutes then took questions from the crowd.
Trump tweeted a cheery message as he departed New Mexico on Tuesday to fly to the state: "Just departed New Mexico for California, where we are delivering results!" The tweet included statistics about the state's unemployment rate and job creation.
Talking to reporters aboard Air Force One, Trump got in some fresh digs about the state's problem with homelessness, saying, "We can't let Los Angeles, San Francisco and numerous other cities destroy themselves by allowing what's happening."
"The people of San Francisco are fed up, and the people of Los Angeles are fed up. And we're looking at it, and we'll be doing something about it," he added.
Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, a Democrat, said ahead of Trump's arrival that he hoped the president would work with the city to end homelessness. He said he had not been invited to meet with the president.
California was an incubator for the modern conservative movement that swept the state's former governor, Ronald Reagan, into the White House in 1980. But demographic changes and an influx of new residents have helped drastically rework the political contours of the country's most populated state, with the former GOP stronghold of Orange County now home to more registered Democrats than Republicans.
For Republicans, who have been resigned to political irrelevance at the state level, a donation to Trump can amount to its own form of protest.
"By showing up to a fundraiser deep in the belly of the beast, one is saying: 'I don't care what the liberal politicians are saying and I want to show my support for him publicly,'" said Dhillon, an ardent Trump supporter who said she lined up four tables of donors for the Silicon Valley event.
She said the president's stopover delivered a jolt of energy for California Republicans, who live in a state where Democrats dominate state politics.
"It's been amazing for morale. All the California Republicans ... left energized," Dhillon said.
California has long been a key fundraising hotbed for politicians of both parties, which have relied on the entertainment industry and wealthy industry heads to finance their political ambitions. But under Trump, the run-of-the-mill fundraising trip has taken on a complicating dimension because of his harsh criticism of the state's immigration laws and its forest management practices, which he blamed for fatal wildfires.
Join the conversation!
Please share your thoughts about this article below. We value your opinions, and would love to see you add to the discussion!