Meet what might be President Trump’s newest enemy: the State of Colorado.
Miffed at Colorado’s votes against him in three successive elections and furious at its refusal to free Tina Peters, a convicted election denier and ardent Trump supporter, Mr. Trump has opened an assault against the Democratic-run state. His administration has cut off transportation money, relocated the military’s Space Command, vowed to dismantle a leading climate and weather research center and rejected disaster relief for rural counties hammered by floods and wildfires.
A major escalation to Mr. Trump’s attacks on the state came on Tuesday, when he used the first veto of his second term to kill a pipeline project to provide clean drinking water to the state’s eastern plains, a largely conservative area.
If there were any doubts about Mr. Trump’s sentiments toward the state’s leaders, he posted a New Year’s Eve message telling Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat, and the Republican district attorney in Mesa County who prosecuted Ms. Peters, Daniel P. Rubinstein, to “rot in Hell.”
“I wish them only the worst,” the president said.
Mr. Trump has never been shy about exacting retribution or using the levers of federal power to extract concessions — from state and local governments, universities, law firms or media companies. But the president’s actions in Colorado, a reliably Democratic state, are also affecting Western conservatives.
The most scorched-earth response to the president’s veto came from Representative Lauren Boebert, a Republican and onetime Trump die-hard who represents the area affected by the pipeline veto.
“Nothing says America First like denying clean drinking water to 50,000 people in southeast Colorado, many of whom voted for him in all three elections,” Ms. Boebert said in a blistering statement.
Many leaders in Colorado see the series of presidential moves as political payback for the state’s refusal to free Ms. Peters, a former county clerk in western Colorado who was convicted of tampering with voting machines in a failed effort to prove Mr. Trump’s false claims that Democrats stole the 2020 election from him.
Mr. Polis has rebuffed Mr. Trump’s repeated efforts to pardon Ms. Peters or transfer her to federal prison. In turn, the Trump administration has ramped up its attacks.
Some of Mr. Trump’s moves have aligned with his ideology. In September, the president announced he was moving the Space Command headquarters from Colorado Springs to Alabama, a blow to another conservative section of Colorado that is home to five major military installations. He had tried to make the move in his first term, but President Joseph R. Biden Jr. reversed it.
His administration has also threatened to scale back or potentially block a voter-approved program to reintroduce gray wolves, and told the state it could no longer release wolves from Canada. The White House’s move against the National Center for Atmospheric Research, a world-leading institution in Boulder, jibed with its broader assault on federal efforts to combat climate change.
The president’s anger has often seemed like personal pique. After Mr. Trump criticized a portrait of himself in the Colorado State Capitol as “purposefully distorted,” the Colorado General Assembly took it down.
Still, collectively, state leaders say the pattern is undeniable.
“I don’t think there’s any doubt he’s targeting Colorado,” Senator Michael Bennet, a Democrat, said in an interview.
And more might be coming. On the heels of canceled Department of Transportation grants to Colorado, career employees at the Interior Department were asked on Dec. 17 to compile a list of all Interior grants going to the state’s government, its counties and its universities for possible termination, according to internal agency documents. The unspent grant funding totaled about $140 million, earmarked to combat climate change, develop water management plans and improve parks and sanitation, among other efforts.
Two people with direct knowledge of the effort said the agency had not yet sent out the termination letters, and it was unclear if it would do so.
Neither the Interior Department nor the White House responded immediately to a request for comment.
Colorado officials say that Mr. Trump’s veto of the pipeline will primarily harm Ms. Boebert’s ruby-red House district.
Ms. Boebert put out a statement on Tuesday raising the possibility that the veto was retribution for her support of legislation that forced the release of documents related to the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
“I sincerely hope this veto has nothing to do with political retaliation for calling out corruption and demanding accountability,” she said.
Ms. Boebert parlayed her local fame as a Glock-toting restaurant owner and fervent Trump supporter into an upset congressional win in 2020. But in November, she angered Mr. Trump by joining Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene and a handful of House Republicans to ultimately force a vote to release the files.
Mr. Trump branded Ms. Greene a traitor and rescinded his endorsement, all but forcing her to announce she would quit Congress in January. The White House sought to pressure Ms. Boebert by calling her to the Situation Room to discuss her demands to release the files.
Ms. Boebert has not objected to the administration’s other attacks on Colorado, including dismantling the National Center for Atmospheric Research in the liberal college town of Boulder. She told 9News of Denver that “if he wants to go after Boulder and some climate activists with some of our weather systems there, sure.”
But she drew the line at the veto of her district’s water project, known as the Arkansas Valley Conduit.
“I must have missed the rally where he stood in Colorado and promised to personally derail critical water infrastructure projects,” she said in her statement.
The bill would have helped to fund a 130-mile pipeline to bring water from a reservoir near Pueblo, Colo., to small farming and ranching towns on the state’s eastern plains, where groundwater is contaminated with salt and even naturally occurring radioactive elements. The project has been in the works since the 1960s.
Chris Woodka, the senior policy and issues manager for the Southeastern Colorado Water Conservancy District, said the pipeline was crucial for small towns where residents have little choice but to buy bottled water or expensive filtration systems because their groundwater contains radium or uranium. He seemed blindsided by Mr. Trump’s veto.
“We’ve always seen bipartisan support for this,” he said. “We won’t give up on it.”
Governor Polis and other Colorado Democrats condemned the veto and urged Congress to override it. It is doubtful that Republicans who control Congress will provoke the direct confrontation of an override vote.
California may have emerged during Mr. Trump’s political resurgence as the state leading the resistance to his policies, but Colorado has turned into its Rocky Mountain wingman. The increasingly liberal state’s Supreme Court briefly booted Mr. Trump off the ballot in 2024, and Mr. Trump has raged against Colorado’s mail-in voting system and its embrace of migrants.
Some Colorado Republicans blame the state’s Democratic leaders for provoking Mr. Trump’s wrath. Attorney General Phil Weiser has filed 49 lawsuits against the administration, and Secretary of State Jena Griswold has rejected requests from the Justice Department to share sensitive voter information.
Sean Paige, a former Colorado Springs councilman and a spokesman for Republican state lawmakers, said that some conservatives in the state were so frustrated with one-party Democratic rule that they actually welcomed some of Mr. Trump’s actions. He recently joked on social media about starting Coloradans for a Federal Crackdown.
“There’s so much desperation on the part of people who are right of center to be free from this one-party tyranny,” he said in an interview on Wednesday. “They’re cheering on as Trump tries to punish the state.”
Still, Mr. Paige said Mr. Trump’s veto of the water pipeline seemed overly vindictive.
Officials in conservative corners of Colorado have tried to downplay the politics now threatening their federal funding.
Rio Blanco County, which voted 81 percent for Mr. Trump in 2024, had been banking on federal disaster money to help its rural electric association rebuild power lines that sustained more than $20 million in damage from wildfires over the summer. Then Mr. Trump denied Colorado’s request for a federal disaster declaration in late December.
Callie Scritchfield, a Rio Blanco commissioner, said that the county should have easily qualified for disaster relief money, and that local officials were working with Colorado to urge the federal government to reconsider. She did not want to discuss Tina Peters.
“We do not see any value in politicizing this,” she said.
Lisa Friedman contributed reporting from Washington, D.C.
Jack Healy is based in Colorado and covers the west and southwest.
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