Steve Hilton got good news and bad news this week: President Donald Trump endorsed him to be California’s next governor.<\/p>\n
The potential bad news for Hilton, a Republican, is that two-thirds of California voters loathe Trump. And in an interview with the Chronicle Tuesday, Hilton declined to identify a single policy or action of Trump’s with which he disagreed.<\/p>\n
The nod should help Hilton coalesce enough of the Republican vote to advance past his top rival, Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, to be one of the top two candidates to advance to the general election in November “and make a [Republican vs. Republican] outcome less likely<\/a>,” data expert Paul Mitchell posted<\/a> on X.<\/p>\n Hilton led a March Berkeley IGS Poll with 17%, fol\u00adlowed by Bianco with 16%, and Rep. Eric\u00a0 Swal\u00adwell and former Rep. Katie Porter with 13% each. The sur\u00advey found 16% of the voters were unde\u00adcided.<\/p>\n Hilton deferred Tuesday when asked to name a specific policy where he disagreed with Trump, and said the state’s problems weren’t caused by the president.<\/p>\n “I’m really not going to get into the business of just constantly commenting on somebody and an administration that it really is\u00a0– when you when you look at the problems that Californians want us to fix\u00a0– (lower) the cost of living, housing, homelessness\u00a0– (have) nothing to do with President Trump,” Hilton said Tuesday.<\/p>\n It’s a long way from how Hilton described his politics in his 2015 book, “More Human: Designing a World Where People Come First.” There, he said he was a combination of democratic socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders, libertarian-leaning Sen. Rand Paul and Republican Ohio Gov. John Kasich.<\/p>\n He declined to express his opposition to the war in Iran, which has sent gas prices soaring 30% nationally. Instead, as Hilton often does, he blamed rising prices on 16 years of Democratic Party dominance in California and the higher cost of refining fuel here.<\/p>\n “So you’re seeing gas prices across the country, which Democrats are complaining about, that for us would be nirvana,” Hilton said. “But Democrats say, \u2018Oh my goodness, it’s terrible\u00a0– $4 (a gallon) gas.’ We’ve had $5 gas.”<\/p>\n Hilton also aligns with Trump on his extreme position\u00a0 on climate change, which the president has said “was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.” California has been an international leader in taking on climate change, would be reversed if HIlton won. Hilton said California’s “climate agenda” is one of the roots of the state’s problems and one he would seek to dismantle.<\/p>\n “I think that the climate agenda has been taken way to the extreme, to a point where it’s completely counterproductive,” Hilton said. “What California does on Co2 emissions will have no impact on global temperatures, has not had and will not have any impact on global temperatures at all, and so imposing massive costs on California families”<\/p>\n Hilton framed Trump’s erratic implementation of tariffs as “evening things out for American producers and exporters.” The Supreme Court determined their implementation to be\u00a0 unconstitutional and the\u00a0 Yale Budget Lab estimated they will cost the average California household $1,495 this year<\/a>.<\/p>\n “We’ve had a massive shift of investment and opportunity out of America, particularly working-class jobs, blue-collar jobs, to other countries as a result of an imbalance in the trading system,” he said.<\/p>\n As governor, Hilton would be president of the UC Board of Regents and responsible for appointing most of the board, but he had little to say about the 500 National Institutes of Health grants to UCLA that the Trump administration suspended last July. They have since been reinstated by a federal judge.<\/p>\n “I haven’t looked at the anatomy of that,” Hilton said, adding that “I absolutely take it seriously (but) \u2026 I’d want to look at what’s the impact, what led to that? Why isn’t that happening in other places? And isn’t there a cooperative solution to that? Let’s just have a grown-up conversation, rather than this confrontation.”<\/p>\n Grown-up conversations have been rare between Trump and California leaders in his second term. Mostly, Trump has issued harsh edicts toward the home state of his 2024 rival, Kamala Harris, and likely 2028 presidential candidate, Gov. Gavin Newsom, including sending the military to patrol Los Angeles in the name of immigration enforcement.<\/p>\n Hilton said the first two years of his administration\u00a0– which would coincide with the final two years of Trump’s as president\u00a0– would be calmer because he has good relationships with the president and “half the Cabinet” are his friends.<\/p>\n “I’d be very confident we would have a calm and cooperative relationship, where we know each other, we trust each other, and things will be handled in a calm, reasonable manner,” Hilton said.<\/p>\n