Trump Takes Aim at California Six Times in 24 Hours

In the annals of ill will between California and the Trump administration, Thursday may have been a record-breaker.

The U.S. Education Department announced early in the West Coast morning that it would challenge a major state law protecting transgender students. Two hours later came the revocation of federal waivers that had let California colleges include undocumented students in certain programs that receive federal aid.

The afternoon brought a flurry of investigations into suspected affirmative action in California higher education: The Justice Department said it would investigate whether Stanford University and three schools in the University of California system were violating a Supreme Court decision that banned the consideration of race in admissions. Then the Health and Human Services Department said it was looking into accusations of similar discrimination at “a major medical school in California.”

By sundown, the Agriculture Department had sent Gov. Gavin Newsom a letter saying it would review its education-related funding in California in connection with transgender protections. And the Justice Department announced that the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department was under investigation for allegedly taking too long to approve applications for concealed-carry permits.

Neither California nor President Trump has ever pretended there was much love lost between them. The state, which is dominated by Democrats, sued Mr. Trump’s administration more than 120 times during his first term in office. Californians voted against him by landslides in the 2020 and 2024 presidential elections — results that Mr. Trump claimed, baselessly, were tied to voter fraud.