I still don’t understand how he’s anyone’s candidate with statements like this.

I also don’t understand why every media outlet isn’t, and hasn’t in the past, just headlined all this blatant self-interest in earnest.

I get his campaign propaganda in my mailbox every single day. It’s always the same garbage message, super pinky-swearing that he’s not a fascist authoritarian dickhead.

California contributes the most to federal tax revenue but also receives the most federal funding (in total). California receives one of the lowest amounts of federal funding per capita ($5,155, ranking 42 of 50). California's ratio of federal funding to income taxes paid is 0.43, which means that California received $0.43 in funding from the federal government for every $1 in tax revenue that it provided.

Overall, California is a donor state to the union.

In fact, of the 18 states which received more federal funding than they paid in federal taxes in 2021, 5 were Democrat-leaning while the other 13 were Republican (How Red or Blue is Your State?) - which is to say that welfare states are more likely to vote Republican. Four of the top 5 most Republican states take more than they give (Wyoming, North Dakota, Oklahoma and West Virginia), while 4 of the top 5 most Democratic states give more than they take (Massachusetts, Hawaii, Maryland, and California).

Ah yes, the "you're not invited to my birthday party anymore!!!" method of fund distribution among elementary schoolers.

This isn't the instance I was thinking of, but apparently trump broke the law, according to the GAO when his administration withheld aid to Ukraine. https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/16/politics/gao-report-administration-violated-law-withholding-aid/index.html

Can some clever historian recall for us the time, if there was one, when trump withheld aid from a US state? I'm a terrible historian, personally.

“And Gavin Newscum is gonna sign those papers, and if he doesn’t sign those papers, we won’t give him money to put all his fires,” Trump said, deliberately mispronouncing the governor's name, as he's often done in the past.

“And if we don’t give him money to put out his fires, he’s got problems,” Trump threatened. “He’s a lousy governor.

Saved you a click

He [Gavin Newsom] said that Trump "just admitted he will block emergency disaster funds to settle political vendettas. Today it’s California’s wildfires. Tomorrow it could be hurricane funding for North Carolina or flooding assistance for homeowners in Pennsylvania. Donald Trump doesn’t care about America — he only cares about himself."

Way to tie it back to swing states.

I will now self-promote an op-ed that I wrote in 2020. It started as a furious email that I sent to friends and family. Someone told me, "you know if you took out the swearing, a local paper would probably run this." And so:

Opinion: Oakland is a fantastic community, no matter what Trump says

Because it's paywalled and they're my words, I'm pasting the screed below:

i always thought it telling that when he first assumed office.

It had to be explained to him.... That he DID NOT actually own the country. This was apparently something he was not aware of.

And he continued to argue that he DID own the entire nation. While he eventually stopped insisting he did

He never seemed to actually believe it.

This has been reported by several ex WH employees

Every day he sinks lower and lower.

Gavin Newsom. #SavedYouAClick

I'm a Republican who LOVES the Founders and Constitution after a school full of Kindergartners gets MASSACRED by a Gunman and I FULLY SUPPORT TRUMP on this!

Internationally, there's a huge correlation between the parties influenced by money and special interests and the ones quite willing to let society burn if it makes their opponents look bad, and it's such a shame that society always seems to have these at the other end because of an influentially gullible voter base.