California Speaker Rejects National Unity: ‘We Need to Fight’ Trump

Anthony Rendon, the Speaker of the California State Assembly, used the swearing-in ceremony of the California legislature on Monday to issue a call to arms against the federal government and President-elect Donald Trump.

“Californians should be wary of the national calls for unity and healing,” Rendon (D-Paramount) said, according to the text of his remarks as prepared for delivery. “Unity must be separated from complicity. And we must be defiant whenever justice, fairness, and righteousness require.

“Californians do not need healing. We need to fight,” he declared.

Rendon called the Trump administration a “major existential threat” on a par with the Second World War. He also repeated false charges against Stephen K. Bannon, the Executive Chair of Breitbart News (on leave) who was appointed CEO of the Trump campaign in August and has been named incoming White House Chief Strategist and Senior Counselor.

“White nationalists and anti-Semites have no business working in the White House,” Rendon said of Bannon.

Citing a wartime speech by Winston Churchill, Rendon declared that Californians would defy the federal government’s efforts to enforce immigration law, and would protect the state’s “interests.”

“It is increasingly apparent that those interests will not be a concern for the next President — for the bullies, bigots, and billionaires he has chosen for his cabinet — or for the majority in Congress that is already salivating at the prospect of ending Medicare,” Rendon said.

The Speaker — who is theoretically meant to represent the Assembly, and the state, as a whole — pointedly excluded the state’s  4.5 million Trump voters from Californians as a whole:

“Whether you actively worked to oppose the next President, or stayed silent hoping he would go away, it is now up to all of us to preserve California and protect its people.”

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. His new book, See No Evil: 19 Hard Truths the Left Can’t Handle, is available from Regnery through Amazon. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.