Trump ally McCarthy warns California to make nice

WASHINGTON — Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the majority leader, keeps a souvenir from a dinner the night before this year’s inauguration behind his desk: an embossed menu autographed by Donald Trump. The president-elect was at his table. McCarthy is not only the second-most powerful Republican in the House, he is also one of the earliest and most earnest supporters of the new president.

But this weekend, McCarthy — one of Trump’s closest allies on Capitol Hill — returned home to his district in Bakersfield, California, a state that embodies the organized Democratic resistance to Trump’s presidency.

By now, McCarthy said, he is getting used to the protesters who have turned up outside his home and district office since Election Day, the newspaper editorials demanding that he protect his state from Trump’s policies and the state legislative hearings into the number of his constituents in danger of losing health coverage.

“I get demonstrations all the time,” McCarthy said Thursday, as he prepared to fly home for a week of events in his district.

McCarthy represents a 10,000-square-mile red rural stronghold in the farmland of central California, a state that Trump lost by 4 million votes. He is indisputably the most powerful Californian in the nation’s capital.

In an interview, McCarthy left no doubt that his loyalties in this fight were east of the Mississippi River. He assailed California’s Democratic leaders for provoking the president, and warned that it could prove damaging to the state.

“What they are doing, they are playing with fire,” McCarthy said. “Donald Trump is not going out in any way or form to attack California. They are the ones who are attacking California right now. They are the ones who are putting Californians at risk in every shape and form. And they are doing it to make a political point, which is wrong.”

McCarthy inevitably will bear much of the brunt of trying to mediate between the president and California. Trump has threatened to defund California, calling it “out of control,” and the Democratic-controlled Legislature has hired Eric Holder, the former U.S. attorney general, to lead the state’s legal challenge.