President Donald Trump kicked off his morning with a bizarre warning for blue states.
“Rich people and Companies are pouring out of Dumocrat run Blue States at levels never seen before!” he wrote on Truth Social at about 8:30 a.m. local time. “If this trend continues, these States will become the ‘Ghettos’ of the Future — No people, no money, no hope.”
The post included one of the 80-year-old president’s preferred insults for Democrats and a word that he has used in the past to smear low-income Black neighborhoods.
In 2016, Trump promised on the campaign trail to “work on our ghettos” while trying to appeal to Black voters, though he had largely stopped using the offensive term—until now.
His Truth Social post also linked to an article from the MAGA website Just the News claiming Trump had been right about companies abandoning high-tax states.
Despite Republican efforts to paint New York and California as business losers thanks to some high-profile corporate exits over the past few years, the truth is more complicated than Trump claims.
Since 2019, Charles Schwab, Tesla, Chevron, SpaceX, and Oracle have abandoned California for Texas, while some hedge funds have relocated from New York to Florida and Texas during that same time period.
But California has continued to grow economically, and last year, the state overtook Japan as the world’s fourth-largest economy. New York, meanwhile, had the highest GDP per capita of any state in 2024, the New York Times reported.
On the population front, between 2020 and 2025, California, New York, and Illinois all lost between 76,000 and 172,500 residents, while the populations of Florida and Texas have grown, The New York Times reported in April.
Those numbers, however, reflect the fact that blue states like California saw relatively high net outflows during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic between 2020 and 2022, but that their populations then grew in 2023 and 2024 and flattened out in 2025, according to the Times.
Texas and Florida, meanwhile, had more international immigration during that period than any other state in the country—something the Trump administration has tried to curtail.
According to census data from 2022, the number one reason people moved was that they were looking for more affordable housing, not because of tax concerns, according to the Times.
Blue states with lower housing costs such as Minnesota have not seen nearly as much net migration.
But one person who is clearly very concerned about their taxes is Trump.
The president tried to strike a secret deal with his own Department of Justice that would bar the government from investigating his or his family’s unpaid taxes.
A federal judge issued a blistering ruling earlier this month nullifying the agreement, which she wrote was “the product of collusion” and a “fraud on the court.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment on the president’s Truth Social post.
