No truce: Trump keeps up feud with California during visit

SAN DIEGO (AP) — President Donald Trump remains on a war footing. With California.

Trump's primary mission during his two-day visit to the state was to raise millions from wealthy Republicans. But he also made a point of deriding the state's handling of its homeless crisis, and on Wednesday, he issued a long-expected challenge to California's authority to reduce car emissions.

Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, in turn, publicly called out the Trump White House for a lack of "moral authority" and lamented the state's "unfortunate relationship" with the president.

The president and many Republicans see little downside to him making the nation's most populous state a ready villain.

"The voters that he's targeting in rural America look at California as an out-of-touch liberal state," said Republican consultant Alex Conant. "There's no political cost to him bashing California."

Trump and the Democratic-led state have battled throughout his 2½ years in office, with state Attorney General Xavier Becerra filing more than 50 lawsuits against the Trump administration. They cover the president's initiatives on immigration, health care and the environment, and have slowed and occasionally stopped the administration altogether.

And it's not just the president's agenda that California has gone after; the sparring has gotten personal, too. The state passed a law that requires candidates for president and governor to release five years' worth of tax returns to appear on the state's primary ballot, a pointed slap at Trump, who veered from historical precedent by declining to release his tax returns.

Trump began his latest criticisms of the state before he had even landed on Tuesday, faulting the cities of Los Angeles and San Francisco for not doing enough on homelessness. On...