The president has threatened to impose “harsh measures” on Colorado unless the state frees a felon he likes. We now know what that means in practice.
Trump wants a blue state to free a convicted felon he likes. Since the state disagrees, the White House keeps punishing the state and its residents.
Let’s not lose sight of how utterly bonkers this is. www.ms.now/rachel-maddo...
— Steve Benen (@stevebenen.com) 2026-01-02T17:20:25.857Z
https://www.ms.now/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/trump-gives-away-the-game-on-his-motivations-for-the-first-vetoes-of-his-second-term
The pipeline project in Colorado, like the measure for the Miccosukee Tribe, cleared Capitol Hill with overwhelming bipartisan support. And if White House officials had any concerns about the effort, they kept those opinions to themselves.
With this in mind, when Trump vetoed the bill, observers were left with a limited number of possible explanations:
(1) Maybe the president was punishing Colorado as part of the Tina Peters case; (2) perhaps he was punishing Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado over her support for Epstein files transparency; or (3) both.
Trump helped shed light on his reasoning soon afterward. Politico reported:
President Donald Trump told POLITICO on Wednesday that he vetoed a bipartisan bill to fund a Colorado water project because he views it as a waste of taxpayer money, saying residents are leaving the state under Democratic Colorado Gov. Jared Polis.
‘They’re wasting a lot of money and people are leaving the state. They’re leaving the state in droves. Bad governor,’ Trump said in an exclusive phone interview with POLITICO.
Around the same time,
the president published an item to his social media platform in which he called Colorado’s Democratic governor a “scumbag,” before concluding, in reference to Polis and other state officials:
“I wish them only the worst. May they rot in Hell.”
In other words, Colorado hasn’t freed a prisoner convicted of a felony whom Trump likes, and so the White House appears to be taking steps to punish the state.
Indeed, the veto of the pipeline bill, known as the Finish the Arkansas Valley Conduit Act, was the latest in a series of anti-Colorado moves from the Republican administration. As The New York Times summarized,
“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.”....
In August, Trump threatened to impose “harsh measures” on the Rocky Mountain State unless it agreed to release Peters from prison several years before her sentence runs its course. We’re now getting a better sense of what that means in practice.
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Accurate but deadly! whoa!