L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti: Resisting Trump isn’t enough. Why California has to work with him too.
If the “resistance” to President Trump has a headquarters, a nerve center, a ground zero, then California is it — or so the state’s top politicians like to tell us.
Pretty much every day since Nov. 8 there’s been yet another news story about yet another left-coast official insisting that he or she won’t let Trump undercut California’s progressive policies or mess with California’s progressive values — or else his or her name isn’t [insert name here].
“California is becoming to Mr. Trump what Texas — which is as Republican as California is Democratic — was to President Obama,” the New York Times recently wrote: “a sea of defiance and a potential source of unending legal and legislative challenges.”
The political journalist John Myers of the Los Angeles Times, meanwhile, put it in more colorful terms, comparing California to District 13, the heart of the anti-Capitol rebellion in “The Hunger Games.”
And so you have freshman California Sen. Kamala Harris declaring that “when we have been attacked and when our ideals and fundamental ideals are being attacked, do we retreat or do we fight? I say we fight!”
You have long-serving California Gov. Jerry Brown saying, in Tuesday’s State of the State address, that “California is not turning back — not now, not ever.”
You have current Lt. Gov. and 2018 gubernatorial candidate Gavin Newsom announcing that “we are going to have to do our best not to coordinate and collaborate. You can’t just sit back and take it from these guys.”
And you have newly minted California Attorney General Xavier Becerra warning Trump that if he wants to “take on a forward-leaning state that is prepared to defend its rights and interests, then come at us.”
On Nov. 9, Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon and Senate President pro Tempore Kevin de León released a letter vowing that California “will lead the resistance to any effort that would shred our social fabric or our Constitution”; on Jan. 4, they revealed that they had hired former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to represent them in any legal fights against the new Republican White House.
Yet throughout the transition, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti — who once called Trump “the walking embodiment of the worst of our values” — has been more muted than most.
Where Newsom, the former mayor of San Francisco, is proud to say he was the “poster-child for sanctuary policy when Bill O’Reilly and Lou Dobbs were attacking me, almost literally, on a weekly basis,” Garcetti avoids the term “sanctuary city” altogether, saying it’s “ill-defined” — even though, for all intents and purposes, that’s exactly what Los Angeles is.
Garcetti is no less ambitious than his fellow California pols; like Newsom, Becerra, Rendon, de León and others, he is often mentioned as a contender for governor or for Dianne Feinstein’s Senate seat, should she choose to retire in 2018.
He isn’t opposed to pushing back against Trump’s agenda, either; in December, the mayor unveiled a $10 million fund to provide legal services to immigrants who could be in danger of deportation under Trump, and when Trump on Wednesday threatened to withhold funds from cities such as Los Angeles that limit cooperation with immigration officials, Garcetti didn’t hesitate to speak out.
“Splitting up families and cutting funding to any city — especially Los Angeles, where 40% of the nation’s goods enter the U.S. at our port, and more than 80 million passengers traveled through our airport last year — puts the personal safety and economic health of our entire nation at risk,” the mayor said in a statement. “It is not the way forward for the United States.”
Yet in his first in-depth interview about Trump, Garcetti recently revealed to Yahoo News that he tends to view his city’s — and his state’s — relationship with the new president in more nuanced terms than many of his progressive peers. In November, for instance, Garcetti reached out to the then-president-elect, and the two spoke briefly by phone about immigration and infrastructure — and L.A.’s 2024 Olympic bid.
“He’s been great [on the Olympics],” Garcetti said. “I have to admit, he brought it up with me when we talked the first time. He asked some questions about it and said, ‘Let me know who I can reach out to.’ He has already contacted the president of the International Olympic Committee, Thomas Bach, and invited him to the White House.”
And that’s not the only area where Garcetti thinks he and the president can cooperate. At a moment when California seems intent on using its considerable clout as the world’s sixth-largest economy to defy Trump at every turn, Garcetti is betting that he can get more done for his constituents — and perhaps do more to boost his own political fortunes — by seeking common ground.
That divide raises some intriguing and important questions: How much of the resistance, particularly in California, is pointless political posturing? How much is productive? How much is counterproductive? How do you tell the difference?
Edited excerpts from our conversation:
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Yahoo News: Democrats have been decimated on Capitol Hill, in statehouses and in governors’ mansions. Cities are the party’s last stronghold. How do you foresee your role as a Democrat and a mayor changing now that Donald Trump is in charge?
L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti: For Democrats especially, cities are where the action is. And even where Republicans are in charge, all of us who are mayors and city officials have to actually produce. Most of the innovation that’s happening in this country is happening in cities.
And so, yes, the importance I feel as a mayor has only grown since the election. This is our time to step up, to speak up, and to also embody the values of progress that America stands for. To not sit by the sidelines, to not just be meek and quiet or scared, but to be big and bold.
But that doesn’t always mean lobbing insults back.
So what is Los Angeles’ role — and the role of progressive states like California — in the so-called resistance to Trump?
My biggest single worry is immigration. Here in the city of Los Angeles, working with the Obama administration, we’ve helped tens of thousands of people legalize their status and/or become citizens just in the last few years. And the amount of fear, and the depth of that fear — that a son, a parent, a husband is going to be deported — that, I think, is real.
What can we do? The courts move slowly enough on immigration cases as it is. If we’re able to provide legal representation to people who are in deportation hearings, we can slow that down almost to a halt — unless the Trump administration is going to hire three or four times as many judges.
I want to be clear: The goal isn’t just to grind the courts to a halt. It’s to provide due process. The difference between whether or not someone is deported when they have a lawyer is, like, eightfold. So that’s tangible. We’re helping the most vulnerable immigrants — people who are here legally today but may not be under a Trump administration.
What else?
Second is trade. Trade is very important to us in California. We also don’t want to see a trade war. One out of 8 jobs in the L.A. region depends on the Ports of L.A. and Long Beach. To see that even dip a little bit after a year of record job growth — the most since 1992 — could really be a blow to our local economy.
And then there’s climate change. Trump could withdraw from the Paris Climate Accords. If that were to happen, I am prepared to say that we’ll just adopt those standards here in L.A.
That said, I think it’s our responsibility to engage — and engaging doesn’t just mean resisting. It was Martin Luther King Jr. Day recently, and one of the lessons of the civil rights movement is that you don’t demonize individuals. Instead, when people said outrageous, racist, hostile things, activists like Martin Luther King went after ideas. I think that’s where we in Los Angeles and California are going to win the hearts and minds of America.
It sounds like you think the rhetoric of resistance has gotten out of hand.
I think it’s important for us to continue to state and restate our values. I think we need to stand up so that people will know that no threats will go unanswered and we are not afraid. But I also think if that’s the end of the sentence you might leave money on the table, or miss the chance to quietly move somebody in the right direction.
During the George W. Bush administration there was a lot we had to fight against. I led the resolution against the Iraq War on the City Council, and I was opposed to so much of what he did. But we also engaged with members of the administration on things that if we were just marching on the streets and yelling, we never would have been able to deliver for the people that he and we represented together.
Many on the left would say Trump is different. That he shouldn’t be normalized.
It’s not an either/or. I do believe in being loud. I wrote the climate change letter to him that I got 49 other mayors to sign on to. I co-wrote the immigration letter that Rahm Emmanuel delivered to him at Trump Tower. When we talked about Olympics and infrastructure, I brought up immigration and made the case very strongly as to why our police wouldn’t be immigration agents.
There is a role for the street. There’s a role for resistance. And there’s a role for elected officials, if illegal and hostile things start happening to our people. In the meantime, we’ve got to move an agenda on a lot of fronts, and I plan to continue to engage to achieve those things.
Let’s talk about some of those things. Where can L.A. and Trump work together?
We’ve put in a lot of hard, hard work over the last 3 ½ years — all the political capital we spent and the coalition we’ve built — to pass the largest infrastructure initiative at the local level, times two, in U.S. history. [Ed.: Garcetti was referring to recent investments in the Metro system, the port, LAX and the Los Angeles River, among other things].
Now this can be a template for the Trump administration if it really wants to see infrastructure investments throughout the country. We’re their ideal partner. Trump has said he wants to accelerate and expand those sorts of infrastructure investments, both through the private sector and through federal commitment. So when I spoke to the then-president-elect, I was like, “Leverage us and we will leverage you.”
But progressives say that Trump’s infrastructure plan is simply a giveaway to wealthy investors. Is there really hope for collaboration and cooperation?
Absolutely. It’s easy for liberals to dismiss public-private partnerships, but during the Obama administration we’ve been greatly growing them here in L.A. They’re not corporate giveaways; they are ways to accelerate these projects. For instance, the Denver train that goes from downtown to the airport: they cut seven years and 25 percent of the cost out by engaging in a public-private partnership. More socialist countries like Canada and Western Europe use them all the time.
On the left, I think we really have to resist the temptation to caricature things before they even happen. Let the president earn that — if that’s what his infrastructure plan becomes. But my experience so far is that there are a lot of overlaps, just as there were during the Obama administration. And you should — if you’re effective — find ways to get to that common ground. It’s difficult to imagine any administration that will be against all of your interests 100 percent of the time.
You certainly sound less combative than some of your fellow Californians.
Look, if anything crosses the line and feels either un-American, illegal or hostile to our people, we will be prepared to either privately engage or publicly fight. Or legally resist.
But when Paul Ryan is telling a young immigrant that she and her family are not going to face a deportation force under this Congress; when you have people in my own office engaged with Trump’s transition team on transportation and infrastructure; when the president-elect has helped us greatly already with our 2024 Olympic bid — you embrace and praise their cooperation.
We’re not naïve. It’s not quite hope for the best and prepare for the worst. It’s engage where you can and differ — and act upon it — where you must.
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