December 18, 2025 12:22 PM UTC

Yes, President Trump is Directly Attacking Colorado

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• by: Colorado Pols

We’ve been taking note in this space of the various attacks on Colorado perpetuated by President Trump as part of his apparently never-ending retribution tour masquerading as a Presidency. There is no longer any pretense that actions focused on Colorado are not being dictated by the angry old orange guy because of some perceived slight — and there is a clear consensus forming.

As we wrote on Wednesday:

At this point, the justifications thrown out by the administration for these obvious acts of retaliations are more or less pro forma. Between the cancelled funds, investigations, lawsuits, mass layoffs, relocations, and overt threats by Donald Trump himself against the state of Colorado, there is no question that our state is being singled out for punishment for a litany of Trump’s personal grievances going all the way back to the Colorado Republican Party’s #NeverTrump snubbing in the 2016 presidential caucuses. We’re the state that took Trump’s qualifications to run as an insurrectionist to the Supreme Court. And in a Colorado state prison sits the last person still serving time over Trump’s refusal to accept defeat in the 2020 presidential elections.

Cordette Bordelon reports for Denver7 on a recent announcement that the Trump administration wants to gut the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) on Boulder:

Colorado Congressman Joe Neguse, a Democrat who represents Colorado’s 2nd Congressional District, also believes the NCAR dismantling is connected to Peters.

“It is part and parcel to a larger plan of retaliation and intimidation of our state by the Trump administration,” Neguse said. “It’s not how our democracy is supposed to function.”

Kyle Clark and Marshall Zelinger at 9News have caught on to the same pattern:

President Trump is delivering on his promise of retribution against Colorado for the state’s mail-in ballots and refusal to release his ally Tina Peters from prison.

The Trump team says it plans to close America’s foremost weather lab: NCAR. @marshallglasses.bsky.social reports.

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— Kyle Clark (@kylec.bsky.social) December 17, 2025 at 8:33 PM

Nationally, CBS News is noticing. As is Marianne Lavelle of Vox.com:

One of the world’s leading climate, weather, and wildfire science research institutions is being targeted for elimination in what many of those affected see as President Donald Trump’s political vendetta against Colorado Gov. Jared Polis.

Word that the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder would be broken up, with some of its functions moved elsewhere, came hours after the cancellation of $109 million in federal environmental and safety grants for Colorado, and one day after Trump took time during an Oval Office ceremony to excoriate Polis as a “weak and pathetic man.” Russell Vought, the director of the White House budget office, announced that the center would be eliminated in a post on the social media site X on Tuesday evening. His office did not respond to a request for further comment on Wednesday.

Trump’s beef with Polis stems from the jailing of a former county election official in Colorado, Tina Peters, who was convicted of giving Trump allies unauthorized access to a voting machine in the aftermath of the 2020 election. An anonymous White House official told the Washington Post: “The Colorado governor obviously isn’t willing to work with the president.” [Pols emphasis]

That last quote was reaffirmed in reporting from NOTUS:

“Maybe if Colorado had a governor who actually wanted to work with President Trump, his constituents would be better served,” a senior White House official told NOTUS in an email on Wednesday. 

A few months ago, Trump said he was moving Space Command HQ from Colorado Springs because he doesn’t like that Colorado has an effective voting system that relies on mail balloting. Colorado is in Trump’s crosshairs again because he is salty that Gov. Polis won’t just let a convicted felon out of prison merely because Trump makes the demand.

Trump’s attacks on Colorado also include some very silly proclamations — such as changing the name of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Golden. The White House is even acknowledging now that blue states are targets in general when it comes to renewable energy projects. From The Washington Post:

The Trump administration acknowledged in a court filing this week that a decision to cut energy grants during the government shutdown was influenced by whether the money would go to a state that tended to vote for Democrats statewide or nationally. [Pols emphasis]

Government lawyers also wrote in the filing that “consideration of partisan politics is constitutionally permissible, including because it can serve as a proxy for legitimate policy considerations.”

The remarkably candid admission echoes President Donald Trump’s frequent vows to punish cities and states that he sees as his enemies, from withholding disaster relief for Southern California to targeting blue cities with National Guard troops.

The Trump administration has been targeting blue states everywhere — including cutting funds for transportation projects in New York and New Jersey during the federal government shutdown.

White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles acknowledged in a recent interview that she thought Trump’s score-settling was going to be more of a side quest than the complete focus of his second term in office…not that she’s going to do anything about it.

From The Hill newspaper:

White House chief of staff Susie Wiles said in a new interview that she and President Trump had a “loose agreement” to move on from “score settling” after the first 90 days of his second term, but acknowledged his attacks against his opponents may “look like retribution” in some cases. [Pols emphasis]

Wiles’s comments came in a Vanity Fair article by author Chris Whipple, who spoke with Wiles throughout her first year as Trump’s chief of staff. Whipple wrote that he asked Wiles in March whether she ever approached Trump and said his presidency should not be a “retribution tour.”

“Yes, I do,” Wiles said in March. “We have a loose agreement that the score settling will end before the first 90 days are over.”

When Whipple brought up the subject again in August, Wiles disputed that Trump was on a retribution tour.

“A governing principle for him is, ‘I don’t want what happened to me to happen to somebody else.’ And so people that have done bad things need to get out of the government,” Wiles said. “In some cases, it may look like retribution. And there may be an element of that from time to time. Who would blame him? Not me.”

Trump’s key advisers, like Susie Wiles, are apparently not going to stop the old man from yelling at clouds, punishing his perceived enemies, and devoting a ridiculous amount of time to dumb shit like attacking former Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama.

If you live in a blue state like Colorado, Donald Trump is really not your President — even if you were part of the minority who cast a vote for him last November. The focus in 2026 should be on Republican politicians in blue states — such as Reps. Gabe Evans (R-Ft. Lupton) and Jeff Crank (R-Colorado Springs) who are either incapable or unwilling to stand up to Trump on behalf of the people they represent in Congress.