Politics
'Red-baiting' accusations fly between congressional campaigns in competitive Orange County race
The campaign fliers, written in Vietnamese, began landing in mailboxes in Little Saigon earlier this month.
One flier showed Democrat Derek Tran, who is running for Congress, smiling in front of the hammer-and-sickle emblem of the Chinese Communist Party. In another, Tran is shown next to Mao Zedong, with a caption that, translated to English, reads: “Don’t let Derek Tran take our country back to socialism.”
The mailers, sent by the congressional campaign of Rep. Michelle Steel (R-Seal Beach), have infuriated some voters in the 45th congressional district. The district is home to Little Saigon, as well as the most people of Vietnamese descent outside of Vietnam.
“Everybody knows campaigns can get really ugly,” said Cynthia Choi, a member of Chinese for Affirmative Action and Stop AAPI Hate. “And what’s been really troubling is the fact that this is an old playbook. Unfortunately, it can be really effective.”
She added: “It is very disappointing that an Asian American candidate is using red-baiting tactics.”
Steel, 69, is in a costly and acrimonious reelection fight against Tran, 44, as the Democratic Party pushes to capture the seat from the Republican Party.
Republicans have a razor-thin majority in the House of Representatives. The race is among a handful across the U.S., including half a dozen in California, that both parties see as pivotal in determining control of the next Congress.
Tran’s campaign has been focusing heavily on Vietnamese American voters, hoping that his story as the son of Vietnamese refugees will help flip the district from red to blue.
Steel, too, is pushing to bolster support among Vietnamese voters, particularly those who fled Vietnam after the fall of Saigon in 1975 and who have been loyal for decades to the Republican Party.
The Steel fliers describe Tran having support from “socialists like Bernie Sanders.” (Tran said Sanders hasn’t endorsed him.)
Two of the fliers include a translated quote from a story about the congressional race written by the co-chair of the Southern California Communist Party in People’s World, the Marxist-Leninist publication.
The quote reads: “Tran is a first-time candidate, but he exceeded all expectations by winning the primary against his opponent, who had the full support of the Democratic Party establishment.” In the March primary, Tran defeated Garden Grove City Councilmember Kim Nguyen-Penaloza by 367 votes, finishing second behind Steel.
Another mailer highlights Tran’s supposed ties to China, saying he owns “thousands of dollars of cryptocurrency linked to China,” and that he has an account on TikTok, the social media platform owned by the Chinese company ByteDance.
Tran said in an August financial disclosure that he holds between $33,005 and $145,000 in Bitcoin, Ethereium, and another cryptocurrency through the exchange platform Binance. (China banned cryptocurrency trading in 2021.)
“It’s such dirty, dirty tricks,” Tran said. “This is a desperate attempt by a losing campaign. She’s throwing everything at the wall, including the kitchen sink, to see what’s going to stick.”
The Steel campaign said their mailers followed months of attack ads, tweets and news releases from Tran that accused Steel’s husband, Shawn Steel — former chairman of the California Republican Party — of “selling access” to the Chinese Communist Party.
In one Tran campaign ad that ran on Facebook in September and October, a narrator says in Vietnamese that Steel’s husband “brought Chinese spies into American politics in exchange for money” as the Chinese flag waves in the background. The ad tells viewers that they “cannot trust Michelle Steel to stand up to China.”
The ad refers to a Wall Street Journal story from 2020, which said that Steel’s husband brought several Chinese citizens as guests, including “a man working for China’s central government,” to an “invitation-only gathering” for Republican leaders in San Diego in 2017.
Steel told the Journal at the time that he did not “collect money from, nor have received any funds from” his guests at the meeting.
Steel has loaned her campaign about $1.9 million, financial disclosures show. In July, Tran described her campaign as “buoyed by finances connected to her husband’s dealings with the Chinese Communist Party.”
“Since May, crybaby Derek Tran has leveled false and despicable attacks on Michelle Steel’s family, even putting a CCP flag in his own advertising, but now sobs when our campaign accurately highlights his connections to Communist China,” said Lance Trover, a Steel spokesman.
Tran spokesman Paul Iskajyan said that Tran’s ads are “dealing with facts” and cite published reporting, while Steel’s ads do not.
The imagery and language in the Steel mailer “really preys on the historical trauma that Vietnamese immigrants in this country have,” said Connie Chung Joe, the chief executive of Asian Americans Advancing Justice Southern California, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization.
Representatives of 16 Asian American nonprofit organizations, including Chung Joe and Choi, last week sent a letter to the Democratic Party and Republican Party of Orange County stressing that candidates should dial back rhetoric that “implies falsely” that Asian American candidates are “national security threats.”
“While it is certainly expected that political candidates address geopolitics, and while there are legitimate and serious criticisms of the Chinese Communist Party, imprecise and inflammatory rhetoric can create the false narrative that targets Asian Americans as untrustworthy, anti-American or ‘perpetual foreigners,’” the letter said.
Born to South Korean parents and raised in Japan, Steel broke barriers in 2020 when she became one of three Korean American women elected to the House.
Tran was born in the U.S. to Vietnamese refugee parents. He said his father fled Vietnam after the 1975 fall of Saigon, but his boat capsized, killing his wife and children. Tran’s father returned to Vietnam, where he met and married Tran’s mother, and the couple later immigrated to the U.S.
Tran’s campaign on Monday blasted a recent interview with Steel on the Vietnamese television station VietFace TV, in which interviewer Joe DoVinh told Steel that some people “think that you’re not Vietnamese enough, because you don’t have a Vietnamese last name, and they don’t understand everything that you do for them.”
“I think I am more Vietnamese than my opponent,” Steel responded.
Times deputy editor for culture and talent Anh Do contributed to this report.
U.S. military forces stopped and boarded a second sanctioned tanker carrying oil from Iran in the Indian Ocean, the Pentagon said on Thursday, ramping up pressure on Tehran as the Trump administration seeks to resume negotiations to end the war.
A naval boarding team roped down from hovering helicopters and fanned out on the vessel, the M/T Majestic X, according to a Pentagon statement that included a 17-second video of the operation.
The military said the boarding was part of a “global maritime enforcement to disrupt illicit networks and interdict vessels providing material support to Iran, wherever they operate.”
Earlier this week, Navy SEALS boarded another ship in the Indian Ocean, the M/T Tifani, after the Pentagon said it was carrying oil from Iran.
Navy destroyers are also shadowing several other Iranian vessels, including the Dorena and Sevin, which had left from the Iranian port of Chabahar before the U.S.-imposed blockade began on April 13, a U.S. military official said. The Navy is directing those ships to return to an Iranian port, the official said.
With the M/T Tifani and M/T Majestic X now at least temporarily in the custody of the military, a U.S. military official said it was up to the White House to decide what to do with the sanctioned vessels and their cargo. The administration previously seized several tankers carrying illicit oil from Venezuela after a U.S. commando raid there in January that seized Nicolás Maduro, the country’s president.
“International waters cannot be used as a shield by sanctioned actors,” the Pentagon said in its statement on Thursday, adding that the department would “continue to deny illicit actors and their vessels freedom of maneuver in the maritime domain.”
Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, hinted last week that the U.S. military would likely commence boarding operations like the ones this week. He said that U.S. military commanders elsewhere in the world, and especially in the Indo-Pacific region, would “actively pursue any Iranian-flagged vessel or any vessel attempting to provide material support to Iran.”
The U.S. Navy has turned back at least 31 ships trying to enter or exit Iranian ports since an American blockade outside the contested Strait of Hormuz began about a week ago, U.S. Central Command said late Wednesday.
Last Sunday, a Navy destroyer disabled and seized the Touska, an Iranian cargo ship, after it tried to evade the blockade. It was the first time a vessel was reported to have tried to evade the U.S.-imposed blockade on any ship entering or exiting Iranian ports since it took effect last week.
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White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt explained why President Donald Trump does not consider Iran’s seizure of two ships in the Strait of Hormuz a violation of the ceasefire agreement.
Leavitt made the statement during an interview with Fox News’ Martha McCallum on Wednesday just hours after Iran captured the Greek and Mediterranean-flagged vessels.
“Does the seizure of two ships — as we said, they were Greek and Mediterranean-owned ships with cargo on them, and the reports are that Iran basically seized them and then moved them into Iranian waters. We don’t know what’s going to happen to these crews. We’re not sure where all of this is going. Does the president view that as a violation of the ceasefire?” McCallum asked.
“No, because these were not U.S. ships. These were not Israeli ships. These were two international vessels,” Leavitt responded.
US FORCES ATTEMPTING TO BOARD SANCTIONED RUSSIAN-FLAGGED OIL TANKER IN NORTH ATLANTIC, SOURCES SAY
Karoline Leavitt, White House press secretary, conducts a press briefing. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
“And for the American media, who are sort of blowing this out of proportion to discredit the president’s facts that he has completely obliterated Iran’s conventional Navy, these two ships were taken by speedy gunboats. Iran has gone from having the most lethal Navy in the Middle East to now acting like a bunch of pirates. They don’t have control over the strait,” she continued.
“This is piracy that we are seeing on display. And the naval blockade that the United States has imposed continues to be incredibly effective. And, to be clear, the blockade is on ships going to and from Iranian ports. And the point of this is the economic leverage that we maintain over Iran now. While there’s a ceasefire with respect to the military and kinetic strikes, Operation Economic Fury continues, and the crux of that is this naval blockade,” she added.
The Iranian made ‘Seraj’ a high-speed missile-launching assault boat on display in Tehran on August 23, 2010, as Iran kicked off mass production of two high-speed missile-launching assault boats the ‘Seraj’ (Lamp) and ‘Zolfaqar’ (named after Shiite Imam Ali’s sword) speedboats which will be manufactured at the marine industries complex of the ministry of defense. (YALDA MOAIERY/AFP via Getty Images)
Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps said the vessels, identified as the MSC Francesca and the Epaminondas, were operating without proper authorization and had tampered with navigation systems, accusations that could not be independently verified. The ships had earlier reported coming under fire near the strait, underscoring the increasingly volatile conditions in one of the world’s most critical shipping lanes.
US ‘LOCKED AND LOADED’ TO DESTROY IRAN’S ‘CROWN JEWEL’ ‘IF WE WANT,’ TRUMP WARNS
The Guard attacked a third ship, identified as the Euphoria, which had become “stranded” on the Iranian coast, Iranian media reported. It did not seize that vessel.
Ships and tankers in the Strait of Hormuz off the coast of Musandam, Oman, April 18, 2026. (Reuters)
Both the U.S. and Iranian sides have targeted commercial and cargo vessels as part of a broader pressure campaign tied to stalled negotiations. U.S. forces have also moved to seize at least one Iranian-linked vessel in the region, with each side accusing the other of violating the terms of a fragile ceasefire.
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The Strait of Hormuz is a vital artery for global oil shipments, with roughly 20% of the world’s supply passing through it. Traffic has slowed dramatically as ships reroute or avoid the area amid gunfire, seizures and conflicting directives from both militaries.
Fox News’ Morgan Phillips contributed to this report.
WASHINGTON — Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and L.A. County Supervisor Kathryn Barger met privately with President Trump and administration officials Wednesday to press for federal support and yet-unpaid wildfire recovery funding as the region continues to rebuild from the 2025 fires.
“This afternoon we met with President Trump and Administration officials to advocate for families who lost everything,” Bass and Barger said in a statement. “We had a very positive discussion about FEMA and other rebuilding funds as well as the support of the President to continue joining us in pressuring the insurance companies to pay what they owe — and for the big banks to step up to ease the financial pressure on L.A. families.”
Barger said the two leaders had a “high-level discussion” with the president in the Oval Office, sharing stories about what fire survivors are experiencing day to day. She added that “we left details behind with the President,” but did not specify whether Trump made any funding or policy promises during the meeting.
“First and foremost, today’s meeting was to thank the President for his initial support of infusing federal resources to expedite debris removal, as well as his recent tweet about insurance companies, which have already proven fruitful,” she said in a statement provided to The Times.
Bass was similarly reserved about the discussions, telling reporters that “we will follow up with the details,” but signaled progress is being made on federal support.
“I think what’s important is that we certainly got the president’s support in terms of, you know, what is needed, and then the appropriate people were in the room for us to follow up. And that was Russ Vought, who is the head of the Office of Management and budget,” Bass told KNX on Wednesday.
The meeting comes on the heels of a yearlong standoff between California leaders and the Trump administration over wildfire recovery funding, disaster response and whether the federal government should have a say in local rebuilding permitting.
California leaders, led by Gov. Gavin Newsom, have accused the Trump administration of withholding billions in critical wildfire aid, prompting a lawsuit over stalled recovery funds. Officials allege political bias in the delay of billions of dollars from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Newsom visited Washington in December. When he made his rounds on Capitol Hill, he met with five lawmakers, including three who serve on the Senate and House appropriations committees, to renew calls for $33.9 billion in federal aid for Los Angeles County fire recovery.
But the governor said he was denied a meeting with FEMA and would not say whether he had attempted to meet with Trump to discuss the issue.
Bass, meanwhile, appears to have found a path to the president on a subject that has been paramount for her community.
The fruitful meeting comes after Trump lobbed insults at the mayor at a news conference earlier this year, where he called her “incompetent” for how she handled last year’s wildfire recovery efforts. He alleged that under Bass’ leadership, the city’s delay in issuing local building permits will take years when it should have taken “two or three days.”
California officials, including Newsom, have urged the Trump administration to send Congress a formal request for the $33.9 billion in recovery aid needed to rebuild homes, schools, utilities and other critical infrastructure destroyed or damaged when the fires tore through neighborhoods more than 15 months ago.
What Bass and Barger’s meeting with the president ultimately produces remains to be seen.
The billions in recovery aid have not yet materialized, but the meeting could potentially give those discussions new momentum.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request seeking comment about the meeting.
Earlier this month, Trump criticized insurance provider State Farm on Truth Social for its handling of the devastating Los Angeles County wildfires. He accused the insurance giant of abandoning its policyholders when tragedy struck.
“It was brought to my attention that the Insurance Companies, in particular, State Farm, have been absolutely horrible to people that have been paying them large Premiums for years, only to find that when tragedy struck, these horrendous Companies were not there to help!” Trump wrote.
But the rebuke didn’t come out of the blue. It stemmed from a controversial February visit to Los Angeles by Trump administration officials.
Trump tapped Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin in an effort to strip California state and local governments of their authority to permit the rebuilding of homes destroyed in the Eaton and Palisades fires.
Within the week, Zeldin was in Los Angeles, bashing Newsom and Los Angeles officials at a roundtable with fire victims and reporters, saying that residents were suffering from “bureaucratic, red tape delays and incompetency” and that leadership was “denying them … the ability to rebuild their lives”.
During the trip, officials heard direct complaints from local leaders and fire victims about insurers being slow, restrictive and insufficient with their claim payouts.
After these meetings, Trump directed Zeldin to investigate the insurers’ responses. State Farm, facing roughly $7 billion in fire-related claims, is also under formal investigation by California’s insurance commissioner over its handling of the crisis.
Despite tensions with the administration, Bass and Barger appeared confident that progress was being made on the insurance and funding issues.
“Our job is to fight for our communities,” their joint statement concluded. “When it comes to this recovery, our federal partners are essential, and we are grateful for the support of the President.”
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