Mr. Trump is flying into San Diego, where he will view prototypes of a border wall being built along the Mexican border, before speaking to troops at a nearby military base. From there, he is heading to Beverly Hills for a high-roller Republican fund-raiser before flying back to Washington on Wednesday morning. He is not planning to meet with any California leaders, or tour any part of the state outside that stretch along the border.

It is the first time the president has come to this state since he campaigned here during the Republican presidential primary nearly two years ago. His appearances at the time set off demonstrations and clashes with the police, including one in which his motorcade was blockaded by protesters as he turned up to speak at a state Republican Party convention outside San Francisco. (Mr. Trump was forced to leave his vehicle and trudge up a hill, climbing over a fence, to get into the venue).

Similar demonstrations are expected again. Protesters — and some supporters — are planning rallies in the San Diego area before the president’s visit on Tuesday. One group, Women’s March San Diego, is planning to erect a large sign in opposition to the border wall that the president would see from the air, should he fly in by helicopter. Another group, which calls itself San Diegans for Secure Borders, is planning a rally on Tuesday in support of the president’s immigration policies. Among those scheduled to attend, the group said, are “parents whose children were murdered by illegal aliens who crossed our unsecured border illegally to kill our citizens.”

Los Angeles is girding for protests as well, though demonstrators may be confused over where to go. The location of Mr. Trump’s fund-raiser, and where he is staying, has been kept secret. A spokeswoman for the Los Angeles Police Department, Officer Rosario Herrera, said no permits had been issued for major protests as of Monday morning, and that any road closings would be determined later in consultation with the Secret Service.

“We are prepared for anything that arises in the city of L.A.,” she said.

Indeed, California Democrats seem eager for Mr. Trump’s arrival: the state Democratic leader, Kevin de León, who is running for Senate, called for a demonstration even before Mr. Trump takes off from Washington, on Monday next to the Beverly Hills sign, with labor and civil rights groups.

The White House expressed no hesitation about Mr. Trump finally visiting the state that has been leading the opposition to him. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the press secretary, said that while Mr. Trump may not have won California, “there is certainly a lot of support for this president, not just there but across the country.”

Ms. Sanders also said that Mr. Trump had no second thoughts about pressing ahead with the border wall. “The president campaigned on this, he talked about it extensively and he’s the president,” she said, adding it was “something that he is not going to back away from.”

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Tensions between California and Washington have been high since Mr. Trump was elected, reflecting the decidedly different political philosophies between the president and many Democrats here. A poll by the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, in December found that only 30 percent of respondents approved of his job performance; his national job approval rating has hovered around 40 percent, depending on the poll.

And California now looms as prime territory for Democrats seeking to retake Congress next year. At least seven Republican congressional seats in California are viewed as vulnerable, many of them located right near where Mr. Trump will be touching down. Republican strategists have advised candidates for office here to distance themselves from the president; a key question on Tuesday will be which, if any, Republican members of Congress will appear in public with the president.

Neither side appears inclined to calm the waters in advance of Mr. Trump’s visit. Mr. Sessions, in addition to challenging the three California immigration laws, has also threatened to bring obstruction of justice charges against Libby Schaaf, the Democratic mayor of Oakland, for warning constituents this month of impending raids by federal immigration officers. Over the weekend, the president used his weekly address to criticize the state’s immigration policies.

“California’s leaders are in open defiance of federal law,” Mr. Trump said. “They don’t care about crime. They don’t care about death and killings. They don’t care about robberies. They don’t care about the kind of things that you and I care about.”

And again on Monday, on the eve of the president’s trip, the White House continued to go after California Democratic leaders, hosting a conference call attacking their positions on immigration. Thomas D. Homan, the acting director of the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, singled out three California Democrats by name — Mr. Brown, Senator Dianne Feinstein and Representative Nancy Pelosi. He quoted recent statements they made criticizing immigration enforcement and sought to rebut them one by one.

Democrats here showed no sign of backing down. Mayor Eric M. Garcetti of Los Angeles described Mr. Trump as being out of touch with the nation and the world. “Why would our president come all the way across the country to look at wall samples in a state where he’s taking away more people’s health care than anywhere else?” he said.

At a news conference Monday morning, Xavier Becerra, California’s attorney general, listed ways he sees his state as exceptional: “When President Trump comes to California, he’ll see a state that’s No.1 in manufacturing, agriculture, high-tech, in graduating young people from college,” he said.

“Our state is going to keep moving forward, keep welcoming people who want to work hard, no matter what happens in Washington,” he said.

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Mr. Brown, who is entering his final year in office, used his letter to urge Mr. Trump to lend his support to the high-speed train line Mr. Brown has been trying to build between San Francisco and Los Angeles. The plan has been put in jeopardy because of cost overruns and opposition from Republicans in Washington.

“In California we are focusing on bridges, not walls,” Mr. Brown said. He urged the president to visit the Central Valley where “more than a dozen bridges and viaducts are being built for the nation’s first and only High-Speed Rail line.”

“You have lamented that ‘we don’t have one fast train’ in our country.” Mr. Brown said. “Well, Mr. President, in California we are trying to fix that. We have a world-class train system under construction. We invite you to come aboard and truly ‘Make America Great Again.’”

As California has emerged as the seat of the resistance to the Trump administration — on issues from immigration to climate change, to offshore oil drilling and marijuana policy — there has been a growing sense of separateness between here and the rest of the country.

Joe Mathews, a columnist for Zócalo Public Square, a nonprofit news site, recently compared California’s tenuous ties with the rest of America to mainland China’s relationship with Taiwan, which has its own ambitions of independence. Calling California a “halfway country” just like Taiwan, Mr. Mathews wrote, “our state has the ambitions, economy and democracy of a leading nation.”

With the exception of the Civil War and the civil rights battles of the 1960s, there appears little historical precedent for the kind of clashes — in language and policy — that are now on view between California and Washington. “There’s just a sense that the Trump presidency is moving the nation in the exact opposite direction from where California wants it to go,” said Manuel Pastor, a professor of sociology and American studies and ethnicity at the University of Southern California. “So the estrangement is quite high.”

Professor Pastor argues in a forthcoming book, “State of Resistance,” that California’s own measures against undocumented immigrants in the 1990s prefigured Mr. Trump’s hard-line positions on immigration. California voters approved a 1994 ballot initiative that would have cut off state benefits to illegal immigrants, a move that was championed by the Republican governor at the time, Pete Wilson. The initiative was thrown out in court, but the Republican embrace of it contributed to the party’s long decline in political power as the state became more Democratic and Latino.

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Hillary Clinton has blamed her election loss to President Donald Trump on the “middle” of America, which she accused of “looking backwards.” Her remarks, which have been seized upon by conservative commentators as “dismissing America’s Heartland,” were made to an audience in Mumbai, India, on Saturday.

Describing election maps from November 2016, which showed most of the central United States, with the exception of big cities, voting for Mr. Trump, Clinton said: “All that red in the middle, where Trump won, what the map doesn’t show you is that I won the places that represent two-thirds of America’s gross domestic product. So I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward.”

She said Mr. Trump’s “Make America Great Again” campaign “was looking backwards,” playing on what she said were feelings in the non-urban United States of voters who “didn’t like black people getting rights,” or women getting jobs.

That rhetoric drew a harsh rebuke from the “GOP War Room” channel on YouTube, which labelled her comments as “Dismissing America’s Heartland to a foreign audience.”

Clinton won the popular vote by almost 3 million votes, but under the U.S. Electoral College system, each state gets one vote for each member of Congress representing the state. Clinton’s loss of key states in the electoral college, including Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, shocked both her own campaign and many political observers.

Clinton, who continues to tour the world promoting her book, “What Happened,” on her failed presidential bid, has previously blamed FBI Director James Comey and Russian intervention in the election for her shocking loss to Mr. Trump.

“I was on the way to winning until the combination of Jim Comey’s letter on October 28 and Russian WikiLeaks raised doubts in the minds of people who were inclined to vote for me, but got scared off,” she told an international women’s summit in New York in May of last year.

Clinton was on a private trip to India this week, which saw her give several speeches on both the U.S. election and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s policies in the Asian nation.

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As a candidate, Trump used to boast he could become the first Republican to win the state, and its 55 electoral votes, in nearly three decades. Instead, Hillary Clinton won California by 4.3 million votes, more than accounting for her nearly 3-million advantage in the popular vote nationwide. California’s result became the basis for Trump’s false claim that millions of illegal immigrants voted for Clinton.

It might be an awkward setting for Mr. Trump, though, who would be wary of not being seen as a supplicant. And North Korea might want to give Mr. Trump, who has expressed an interest in military parades, a display of its own.

When Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright visited Pyongyang in 2000 in an attempt to convince Kim Jong-il, Kim Jong-un’s father, to halt his ballistic missile program, she attended a mass propaganda performance that included an image of the very missile she was trying to get North Korea to curtail.

Jeju Island, South Korea

The governor of the South Korean island of Jeju has proposed holding the meeting there. The island, south of the Korean Peninsula, is a tourist destination, and its relatively small size and population could make security easier than in a large city like Seoul, the South’s capital.

Washington

Washington would also be a potential spot, although Mr. Kim would most likely be wary of making the American capital his first trip abroad as North Korea’s leader.

A meeting there would also be awkward for the White House, which would be wary of the propaganda value it could give the North. When Marshal Jo Myong-rok, a high-level North Korean military official, visited Washington in 2000 to invite Mr. Clinton to Pyongyang, he first met with Dr. Albright while wearing a business suit. He then changed into a medal-festooned military uniform and high-brimmed hat to meet with Mr. Clinton, creating an uncomfortable image for the White House.

Beijing

China is North Korea’s only significant ally, although their relationship has hardly been close in recent years. Still, China was one of the few countries Kim Jong-il traveled to as North Korea’s leader.

China has also played an active role in promoting negotiations among all sides and was a host to the so-called six-party talks a decade ago. Geng Shuang, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, said Friday that China welcomed the meeting and would “continue to make unremitting efforts” for a “peaceful settlement of the nuclear issue.” But he did not directly answer a question about whether Beijing would be host.

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Geneva

Geneva, the city in neutral Switzerland, has hosted high-level meetings between rivals, like between President Ronald Reagan and the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985. And Kim Jong-un would have more familiarity with the country, where he studied in the late 1990s, than most other places.

Moscow

Like China, Russia has been an occasional destination for North Korean leaders. Mr. Kim himself has not gone as leader, though. He canceled plans to travel to Moscow in 2015 for events to mark the 70th anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II. A visit to Moscow might not look good for Mr. Trump, either, given the charges that Russians tried to interfere in the 2016 election to help his campaign.

Stockholm

Sweden has long been a key intermediary between the United States and North Korea. The United States does not have an embassy in the North, and Sweden is the so-called protecting power that provides consular services for Americans, including meeting with citizens who are imprisoned there. Sweden has also been the site of talks between North Korean officials and experts from the United States, South Korea and elsewhere. And last week a Swedish newspaper, Dagens Nyheter, reported that Ri Yong-ho, the North Korean foreign minister, would visit Sweden soon, fueling speculation about a possible meeting location.

Ulan Bator, Mongolia

Mongolia, which shares borders with Russia and China, has pursued a policy of neutrality in recent years and has good relations with both the United States and North Korea. Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj, a former Mongolian president, tweeted in support of a meeting in Ulan Bator, saying: “Here is an offer: US President Trump and NK leader Kim meet in UB. Mongolia is the most suitable, neutral territory.”

Correction: March 12, 2018

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misstated the capital of Switzerland. It is Bern, not Geneva.

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Any chaos in the United States, Putin said, “is not the result of Russian interference, but your political system, the internal struggle, the disorder and division.” He added, “Russia has nothing to do with it whatsoever. Get your own affairs in order first.”

Authorities identified the victims as the home’s executive director, Christine Loeber, 48; therapist Jen Golick, 42; and Jennifer Gonzales, 29, a psychologist with the San Francisco Department of Veterans Affairs Healthcare System.

One police officer in Pomona, Calif., was shot and killed on Friday night and another was seriously injured by a gunman who barricaded himself inside an apartment for 15 hours before being taken into custody on Saturday, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said.

The officer who was killed was identified as Greggory Casillas, 30, by the Los Angeles County Department of Medical Examiner-Coroner. Chief Michael Olivieri of the Pomona Police Department said that Officer Casillas joined the department in September and was about to complete field training.

Officer Casillas, who is survived by his wife and two children, was “a hero, a man to be looked up to,” Chief Olivieri said during a news conference after the arrest. “He left his family at home to protect yours, and his ultimate sacrifice will never be forgotten.”

Late Saturday, the sheriff’s department identified the man they had arrested as Isaias De Jesus Valencia, 39, of Pomona. In a brief statement, the authorities said he would be charged with murder and attempted murder and was being held without bail.

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The shooting occurred shortly after 9 p.m. local time, the authorities said. The episode began after officers from Pomona, a city of about 150,000 people 30 miles outside Los Angeles, responded to a call of a person driving recklessly.

They tried to stop the driver, who led them on a pursuit before crashing into a parked vehicle.

“The suspect fled to a nearby apartment complex where he barricaded himself to a bedroom in one of the apartments,” a news release from the sheriff’s department said. “The officers attempted to contact the suspect when the suspect began to shoot through the door, striking two officers.”

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In those email communications, Clifford’s then-attorney, Keith Davidson, referred to Cohen as “Special Counsel to Donald J. Trump” and addressed correspondence to him in his capacity at the Trump Organization, a source familiar with the discussions told NBC News.

But Pentagon officials, citing the cost, logistical difficulties and rarity of large-scale military parades in the United States, have sought to shift the focus to celebrating American history and the contributions of veterans, and away from displaying military hardware and row after row of marching troops — a scene more associated with autocratic nations, from Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union to, in the present age, Russia and North Korea.