‘He’s pulling the trigger on everything all at once.’

California Democrats have long battled Donald Trump. But they’ve never faced such a ferocious offensive as they did this week.

Between the deployment of federal agents to Los Angeles, the gutting of climate standards and the manhandling of the state’s senior U.S. senator, the state absorbed one show of force after another from the president. And in the balance of power between the Trump administration and the nation’s most populous state, California was on the losing end.

“We’re at DEFCON 1 in the conflict between California and the Trump administration,” said Democratic strategist Katie Merrill. “It’s orders of magnitude more than what we’ve seen, ever.”

Democrats in this deep-blue state have spent years working to shield California from a hostile White House, dating back to his first term. But for them, the week’s events registered a new low — a multifront assault that not only threatened the state’s liberal values, but exposed the limits of California’s ability to control its destiny when the federal government has other ideas.

“The moment we’ve feared,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said in a Tuesday night address, “has arrived.”

Trump’s focus on California is predictable. The state was a perennial first-term target term that Republicans and conservative media allies have relentlessly portrayed as dysfunctional and lawless. It has produced national Democratic figures, like Newsom and former Vice President Kamala Harris, who have eagerly hoisted the anti-Trump banner.

Elected officials spent months preparing for a second Trump administration. They studied Project 2025 and set aside money to contest Trump’s agenda in court.

But the scale and aggressiveness of the onslaught has still stunned them.

The harrowing stretch for California Democrats began with immigration raids across the Los Angeles area. Then, when protests sprang up, Trump deployed thousands of National Guard troops to the region over Newsom’s objections. He then moved to eliminate California’s vehicle emissions standards as his administration contemplated withholding education dollars over California’s policies on transgender athletes.

By Thursday, Democrats were watching with outrage a video clip of Padilla being forcibly removed from a Department of Homeland Security news conference, pulled to the ground and handcuffed. And that night, just hours after a federal judge ordered the president to end his unilateral deployment of the state’s National Guard, an…