GARDEN GROVE, CA — Orange County has traditionally voted in favor of Republican presidential candidates going back almost 90 years, which may help explain why things feel a little bit different here than most of deep-blue California. I’m standing in a hotel lobby in the eye of a MAGA hurricane, and while the world outside is severely unstable, reality is whatever you wish it to be at the state GOP convention.
Here, Republicans may be riding high after taking back the White House but elections are still rigged, vaccines are still poison, Democrats are communists, God and merch are both for sale, and “Trump 2028” is just a troll job. Or is it?
“I feel that the 2020 election was stolen, and they unfairly installed Biden,” said Larry Maloney, a San Jose resident who’s wearing a red hat that calls for President Donald Trump to run again in 2028. “You know, Trump deserves a third term, or at least two years. He could theoretically serve at least two years of another term.”
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Despite a third term for president being explicitly forbidden by the 22nd amendment to the US constitution, it’s striking how many of the 1,000 or so Republicans who attended this past weekend’s convention were advertising Trump as a candidate in 2028.
Throughout the convention, CA GOP attendees taunted liberals — who were not present, of course, but loomed as a necessary boogeyman — with Trump 2028 signs and merch. The prospect of Trump destroying American democracy by becoming a bonafide dictator seems to be their new favorite meme to spark liberal tears.
“I love when the liberals’ heads explode when they read it,” said Richard Ives, a party delegate from Riverside County who was also wearing a Trump 2028 hat. “They're raving lunatics. Actually, they're communists, and they're useful idiots.”
Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas), the keynote speaker for Saturday’s convention dinner in the Hyatt Regency’s grand ballroom, headlined what was essentially a three-day roast of Democrats, saying the libs have gotten crazier each day since last summer’s assassination attempt on Trump.
“It's the type of people that think that a 10-year-old can be on puberty blockers, and that qualifies as popular,” Crenshaw said. “It's the purple-haired lady with 72 face piercings from San Francisco that self-identifies as a non-binary dolphin on Thursdays.”
Spend enough time in the echo chamber of any convention and the senses begin to dull. Defenses come down because people are nice in a Midwestern way. But step back and the vulgarity on display at the GOP convention can be breathtaking.
A known Proud Boy stands at the urinal holding a red, white, and blue cross that he’s been unsuccessfully trying to hawk for $250. Women in shimmering gold jackets, mini skirts, and melting faces gawk at the lobby bar as if they’re trapped inside their bodies. A party youngster like Jairo-Nhel De Vera, a student at California State University, Fullerton, chats with people at a cigar social hour while holding a sign championing the legacy of Richard Nixon.
“In the broader perception of Nixon, they always see him as a Watergate guy — the guy that started all the ‘’gates,’” De Vera said. “It undermines all of his domestic achievements and his international achievements.”
When asked who’s more corrupt, Nixon or Trump, De Vera demurred.
“This might be a hot take for the crowd over here, but, actually, Trump at the moment,” he said. “Before becoming president, he did this crypto scam” – presumably a reference to Trump’s January 2025 memecoin debacle.
Such talk is blasphemy for the true believers. An informal survey of attendees found that the thing California Republicans like most about Trump is that he is breaking things — just like he promised. When pressed to find some fault with Trump, Bill Jackson, chair of the GOP in San Francisco, was able to come up with one example: “I don’t like him pardoning Jan. 6 people who were convicted of violent crimes.”
For what it’s worth, Jackson may have been the most liberal GOP party member in attendance. But Republicans — to their credit — understand that a minority party in a Democratic stronghold such as California needs to take a circus-size tent approach. All are welcome, even a shaking barefoot man in stars-and-stripes sweatpants who bangs the wall during a MAGA event to punctuate what he thinks are effective talking points.
Compared with the Democratic state convention, which happened back in June, there was notably more enthusiasm and strategy on display in Orange County. After a disastrous 2024 campaign, state Democrats were talking like the Humpty Dumpty party earlier this summer, trying to figure out how to put the national party back together. Meanwhile, Republicans are seizing momentum and identifying independents as gettable votes.
“It's easier to believe that all is lost here, that your efforts don't matter, but the truth is actually the opposite,” Crenshaw said of California conservatives. “In deep red states like mine, there's only so much more I can do to win. But here you have everything to gain. In fact, you are the ones that should feel not demoralized, but in fact empowered.”
Democrats in California and across the country have not been this vulnerable in decades, which is why Gov. Gavin Newsom’s push to redraw congressional maps in response to Texas gerrymandering several key districts seems to be galvanizing both sides. Chad Bianco, sheriff of Riverside County and a candidate for governor, told The Standard that he thinks that Proposition 50 — Newsom’s redistricting amendment, also known as the “Election Rigging Response Act,” which will appear on the ballot in November — is “going to be a major blow to the Democratic Party.”
And if voters embrace it, the Republicans here at the state convention have a built-in excuse ready.
“We have to admit that there's voter fraud,” Bianco said, offering no proof. “If you're going to say that there's no voter fraud, you have your head in the sand, or you're part of the voter fraud and you don't want to be exposed.”
When asked about Republicans thinking California elections are rigged, state GOP Chairwoman Corrin Rankin said party officials “try to dispel” that narrative with an election integrity program.
“We like to make sure that we have our volunteers with our election integrity program out monitoring every registrar of voters in every county, just to be watchful and to make sure that we don't see any discrepancies,” she said. “And then that allows us to go back to our delegates and our base and just reassure them that we're watching, so I think once they know we're watching, they feel better about the elections.”
Try fitting that on a hat.