Surely California won’t leave. 

California seceding from the Union would be as unlikely as the United States annexing Canada. Or invading Greenland.

Right?

While on the campaign trail, President Donald Trump informed voters in Southern California that, if he was elected, he would withhold wildfire aid from Californians. This led several people, myself included, to wonder how serious he was about this new plank in his platform.

As wildfires killed dozens and inflicted tens of billions of dollars in damages around Los Angeles while Trump waited to be inaugurated, our nation’s newest president removed any doubt. Trump accused California Gov. Gavin Newsom of intentionally refusing to provide the water needed to put the fires out. Then he encouraged Republican congressional leadership to demand concessions in exchange for any disaster relief sent California’s way — a posture that many lawmakers in disaster-prone states, such as Florida and North Carolina, worry may produce a tit for tat response.

Trump’s spite, and the willingness of his congressional allies to enable it, demonstrates a lack of gratitude. In 2023, according to IRS data, California paid more than $568.9 billion in taxes to the federal government. In return, California received only $423.9 billion in federal spending, a gap made even more astonishing by the federal government’s continued insistence on spending far more than it taxes. Even if Los Angeles required $100 billion in federal aid to rebuild — actual figures may reach half of that — California would still contribute more to the federal budget than it brings in.

Additionally, Trump has promised to deploy the military to California to deport roughly 1.8 million undocumented residents — with or without the state’s cooperation. In response, California has set aside $50 million to fight the federal government in court and defend immigrants against deportation.

If someone demands your money, refuses to give any of it back while your house is on fire and sends uninvited men with guns into your living room, how would you react?

To be clear, I don’t seriously expect California to secede in response to Trump’s behavior. As the 18th century economist Adam Smith once wrote, “There is a great deal of ruin in a nation.” Similarly, there’s a great deal of history and American identity to exhaust before Californians will begin to see themselves more as Californians than Americans and act accordingly. The last time someone attempted to organize a secession movement in 2017, it polled miserably before the leader of the campaign moved back to Russia and suspended the signature drive.

An intemperate president who relentlessly uses California as an enemy for his supporters to rally against, however, can burn through that goodwill in surprisingly short order — which puts Nevada in a rather awkward position. 

On the one hand, Nevada has always had a strained relationship with our vastly more populous western neighbor. Prior to Nevada’s statehood, border skirmishes were bloody — the boundary between our two states wasn’t fully settled until 1980, nearly 116 years after Nevada received statehood. San Francisco’s financiers provided the capital needed to build many of Nevada’s historic mining boomtowns — then promptly took the capital raised by those mines back to San Francisco while the mines, and the towns built around them, petered out.

Even now, many of Nevada’s residents, such as myself, are ex-Californians by choice — a choice many of us will simply not shut up about when given an opening. The raw, naked contempt many ex-Californians have for their former home sometimes leads them to tell their new neighbors in Idaho, Texas and Nevada to stop turning the state they just moved to six months ago “into California” whenever one of their new neighbors asks them to help keep the local library or elementary school open.

California’s secession, I suspect, would likely poll quite well among Nevadans — especially if Nevadans were allowed to yell “And stay out!” to every Californian driver we presently dodge during our commutes.

On the other hand, were California to secede, most of Nevada’s 3.2 million residents live within 50 miles — roughly the distance between Gettysburg and Virginia — of the California state line. The legislative building in Carson City, where the governor just gave his State of the State address, is fewer than 15 miles from California. The largest city that’s greater than 50 miles from our western border is Elko — population 20,785.

In other words, millions of Nevadans live within a 15 minute drone flight of the California border. That’s not a comfortable margin of safety should California’s relationship with the rest of the United States become, shall we say, kinetically tense.

Nevada’s economy is also extremely dependent on our close ties to our western neighbor.

Clark County residents were reminded that most of the region’s fuel supplies come from refineries in Los Angeles when the wildfires briefly knocked the pipelines responsible for delivering 90 percent of the county’s fuel out of service. All of Northern Nevada’s fuel pipeline capacity, meanwhile, is delivered through the North Line of Kinder Morgan Inc.’s SFPP system, which connects Reno and the Fallon Naval Air Station with oil refineries in the Bay Area. 

Californians also make up a substantial number of the tourists who visit Nevada’s casinos and resorts. According to visitor statistics released by the Division of Tourism, more than half of the tourists who visited the Reno-Tahoe region came from California, while 22 percent of Clark County’s visitors come from Los Angeles.

According to the Department of Transportation’s Nevada Freight Plan update, meanwhile, California is also the largest originator and destination of goods shipped into and out of Nevada by value — many of the batteries built at the Gigafactory east of Sparks, for example, are shipped to Tesla’s production plant in Fremont, California. Owing to Nevada’s lack of an inventory tax on warehoused goods, lower labor costs and less congested transportation networks, Nevada also serves as a common warehousing site for businesses serving California.

In short, Nevada’s economic interconnectedness and proximity to California effectively force us to remain in a union with California, no matter how much we like to pretend otherwise. Separating ourselves from the Golden State — or vice versa — would cause mass unemployment, empty gas stations and economic immiseration.

Just because we have to do something, though, that doesn’t mean we can’t want to. Nevada, after all, also has its own grievances against the federal government. 

Like California, Nevada is also a net contributor to the federal budget. In 2023, the IRS collected more than $34.7 million from the state, of which the federal government spent only $29.2 billion in return.

Additionally, Nevada has had to contend with the federal government viewing the state as a dumping ground for the better part of a century. Chris Wright, Trump’s nominee to be energy secretary, refused to rule out the possibility of restarting the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste project. The first Trump administration also openly discussed the possibility of restarting nuclear weapons testing in Nevada’s desert, as did several of his allies during Trump’s re-election campaign last year.

Finally, every Nevada governor has had to contend with the challenges of governing a state that is largely owned by the federal government — a federal government that is as likely to blow our desert up as it is to protect it. Though Trump has generally spoken favorably of selling public land to private developers in the state, members of his own party stalled the most recent attempts to do exactly that.

During his latest State of the State address, Gov. Joe Lombardo praised Trump’s willingness to work with him on land issues — but why would Newsom want to assume responsibility for Nevada’s lands on the potential eve of a civil war? Why not instead offer a “Nixon goes to China” deal and cede all of Nevada’s federal lands to the state in exchange for Nevada shifting the New California Republic’s borders east a few hundred miles?

This is, of course, all idle speculation. California is surely no closer to seceding than it was the last time Trump was elected, just as Trump is no closer to annexing Canada or Greenland than he was during his last administration.

Surely.

Right?

David Colborne ran for public office twice. He is now an IT manager, the father of two sons, and a recurring opinion columnist for The Nevada Independent. You can follow him on Mastodon @[email protected], on Bluesky @davidcolborne.bsky.social, on Threads @davidcolbornenv or email him at [email protected].